Sunday, May 22, 2005
Practice, Man. Practice.
Had coffee yesterday with a couple of great kids from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Violinist Christina Fong, who blogs for us here and makes�along her husband, percussionist Glenn Freeman-- extraordinary recordings of obscure works by neglected composers on their own label�fiddles with the Grand Rapids Symphony which celebrated its 75th anniversary by renting Carnegie Hall last night.
Glenn, who is originally from Florida, and Christina, a Chicagoan, hooked up at the music school at Northwestern and moved to Grand Rapids after college. Both love new music and in 1998 they launched OgreOgress Productions to provide a showcase for their musical talents and record works that otherwise might not be available on disk. Since then they have turned out a series of outstanding new music recordings by Morton Feldman, Maria de Alvear, Alan Hovhaness, as well as five extraordinary CDs dedicated to John Cage's late period "Number Pieces� and three more Cage recordings scheduled over the next two years.
Their next release will be a 2-CD recording of Morton Feldman's complete works for violin, viola and piano which should be out by July. Send Glenn an e-mail and he�ll let you know. Long term, the kids (I�ll just call them, the kids) are planning to record three major and neglected violin pieces by Hovhaness with the Czech Philharmonic or the Czech something or other. (I�m old, leave me alone.) Glenn will leave us a note with details.
And speaking of leaving notes. There�s a terrific conversation between Alex Ross and Kyle Gann going on in the comments section of the next post down. Who knew we could afford these guys?
UPDATE: Glenn Freeman advises me that the "Czech something or other" is the Slovak Radio Symphony and the Hovhaness works they're recording are:
Op. 81: Janabar for violin, trumpet, piano & strings
Op. 93A: Talin (concerto) for viola & strings
Op. 228: Shambala (concerto)for violin, sitar & orchestra
posted by Jerry Bowles
5/22/2005
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