Oliver Schroer: Santiago Street Sounds, In Memory of Friends Past, Cowbarn Bells, and Forest Walkby from Camino (Big Dog)
Canadian violinist Oliver Schroer said his music consists of "prayers, incantations, whimsies, melismas, mysteriosos, fractal reels, forest blues, blessings." There is a lot of celtic influence in his music, but it is really quite uncategorizable. He took a
recording studio in his backpack when he walked the El Camino pilgrimage trail in Spain and recorded himself playing solo violin in churches along the way. He also recorded church bells, people walking and talking, sheep and goats, and other sounds. In the last years of his life Oliver Schroer lived in Smithers, B.C. He died of leukemia in 2008.You can watch him playing beautifully at his farewell concert.
Lang Lang: Piano Sonata in C Major (Mozart) from Memory (Deutsche Grammophon)
The classical music blogger Alex Ross writes: "In the classical-music world of ten or fifteen years ago, you heard intermittent murmurs of unease about the number of Asian performers who were showing up on the rolls of conservatories, in the ranks of orchestras, and on concert stages. The oft-repeated criticism was that these players showed great technical dexterity but lacked the mysteries of “depth” and “soul.” Such talk had an unsavory taste; Wagner used to say the same thing about musical Jews. In any case, the muttering has died down. When Yo-Yo Ma entrances audiences through the force of his personality, when Mitsuko Uchida delves deeper into Mozart and Schubert than almost any pianist alive, and when the virtuosos Lang Lang and Yundi Li conquer crowds with youthful bravado, notions of an “Asian type” can be filed away in the archive of dumb generalizations. The huge popularity of classical music in the Far East, and particularly in China, has created a talent pool a billion deep, from which a disarmingly varied group of musicians is emerging.
"Listening to Lang Lang, I think of the absurdist pundit Stephen Colbert, who promises not to read the news to his viewers but to feel the news at them. Lang Lang feels the music at you, in ways both good and bad. He advertises his love of per
forming simply by the way he charges onstage, and he creates a giddy atmosphere as he negotiates hairpin turns at high speed...."Wendy Sutter: Tissues 1, 2, 3, and 4 from Philip Glass: Poems and Songs for Solo Cello (Orange Mountain Music)
See previous post. I had to play more of this.
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