A quiet night, in which I rejected the call to keep working after hours (on my "official" daytime work, anyway) and instead finally got around to updating the blogroll here. Any blog is a work in progress, but by this point it was verging on obscene that I hadn't yet provided handy links to such engrossing regular points of call as Sounds & Fury, Iron Tongue, The Standing Room, Think Denk, Ionarts and especially Sequenza 21. Those sites, and a few more, are now proudly tattooed on my virtual right bicep.
While I'm making amends, I'd like to point out that way back on December 29, Amsterdam-based American composer Vanessa Lann provided some very useful information in a comment tacked to my blog entry on violinist Janine Jansen. In that post, I claimed that Jansen had been responsible for commissioning and recording 24 new caprices for solo violin by living Dutch composers. Turns out I overstated Jansen's role: The project was actually headed by the Rotterdamse Kunststichting in 1998. The oldest composer commissioned, Marius Flothuis (better known for his role in the artistic administration of the Concertgebouw Orchestra), was born in 1914 and passed away in 2001; the youngest, Joey Roukens, was born in 1982. Lann, whose composition The Key to the Fourteenth Vision was one of those caprices, gently led me to discover that while Jansen plays a number of the pieces in that set, she shares duties with two other fiddlers, Joris van Rijn and Benjamin Schmid (the latter of whom plays Lann's piece).
The entire opus was issued by Dutch label NM Classics. Lann's page includes links to a pair of sites at which the 2-CD recording can be purchased, here and here. (Still, when I bought a copy tonight, I cut corners and snagged it here.)
Playlist:
Värtinnä - Miero (Real World)
Julius Eastman - Unjust Malaise (New World)
Burst - Origo (Relapse)
Nicholas Maw - Violin Concerto - Joshua Bell; London Philharmonic Orchestra/Roger Norrington (Sony Classical)
Johann Strauss, Jr. - Waltzes - Vienna Philharmonic/Willi Boskovsky (Eloquence)
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