Blogging will have to go on brief hiatus until next week...I'm in Frankfurt, Germany for a few days recording a CD for the British label ASV with the violist Helen Callus. Recording is my favorite activity as a professional musician...I'll have to explain why I feel that way at some later time, when I have more time to blog. For now, my computer access is limited, so adieu until the middle of next week. In the meantime, on to the completion of our three days in the studio, or rather, in the Frankfurt church that was actually constructed for the dual purpose of being a church and a recording studio, with acoustic considerations and a glassed-in control room that looks onto the sanctuary. Only in Germany, where after all classical music is treated as a more or less sacred enterprise. Notwithstanding the wider respect for the classical repertoire here, it has been interesting talking on lunch breaks to our fine Tonmeister, Markus Heiland from Tritonus Sound, who has been tipping us off to signs that the German classical scene is beginning to face some of the same challenges as those faced by classical musicians in America.

Two piano concertos, one a familiar warhorse and the other a concert rarity, highlight the concert scene in Columbia in the week ahead. The unusual offering comes at Tuesday night's (March 20) USC Symphony Orchestra concert, when Benedetto Lupo joins the orchestra for Nino Rota's Piano Concerto. [update 3-19: The sources I'm looking at refer to the existence of two Rota piano concertos, but the publicity for this Tuesday's concert is strangely silent on which one Lupo is playing. I was intrigued to read of the earlier of the two concertos, written in 1959 and dedicated to the great Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, but evidently not premiered until 1987, by Aldo Ciccolini. What's the story behind that, I wonder?] In the classical music industry's efforts to build audiences by finding points of intersection with a wider popular culture, one of the more frequently tapped sources is the work of film composers. Not only is film music itself being talked, written about, and performed more frequently in a classical context, but the concert works of some of the great film composers are showing up more and more on programs by orchestras and chamber groups. This latter group would include the works of Miklos Rozsa, Erich Korngold, and Rota himself, who is best known for his work on many of Federico Fellini's films.

Returning to very familiar ground, Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto is the highlight of the South Carolina Philharmonic's concert on Saturday night, March 24. Yes, it's a piece everybody's heard a million times, but this is not a piece you want deconstructed, radically re-interpreted, and offered up in a sterile and analytical fashion, merely for the sake of "making it new." This is a work that demands an artist with passion, virtuosity, someone who lives and breathes the musical and stylistic language from which it springs. Nobody fits that bill better than the charismatic Marina Lomazov, so get thee hence to the Koger Center. Incidentally, it's not too early to recommend that you check out the website for the 2007 Southeastern Piano Festival(coming up this June), organized each year by Dr. Lomazov, and this year centered around an exploration of the legacy of Vladimir Horowitz.

All the leaves are brown
And the sky is gray
I've been for a walk
On a winter's day
I'd be safe and warm
If I was in L.A.
California dreaming
On such a winter's day

John and Michelle Phillips, 1966

Perceptive readers of this blog will notice that something new is at the top of my "Favorite Links" list on the right side of this page: a link to the Columbia Festival of the Arts, scheduled for late April and early May. I'll blog in greater detail soon about the Festival, the brainchild of Columbia advertising executive and longtime arts patron Marvin Chernoff. Chernoff's idea is to spark a long-term upswing in local and regional support and attendance for Columbia's arts entities by pulling together a big advertising/PR effort to focus attention on the diversity and quality of arts programming that already exists here. In other words, the Festival will not bring in outside performers in the way that most arts festivals (Spoleto, for example) do. It's just taking about two weeks' worth of things that (mostly) would be happening anyway, and trying to grab people's attention across about a 100-mile radius of Columbia, trying to get more people to know about and to sample what's going on in Columbia.

Fundamentally, I think Chernoff has the right idea. (More on why, too, later). There have, however, been some rumblings about the extent and manner of the city's financial involvement.. But, as one of the purposes of this blog all along has been to further some of the same aims Chernoff seeks to accomplish with this Festival, I really have to applaud his efforts. Meanwhile, check out the CFA link at the top of the links list to the right. I think you'll agree that the Festival has an impressively diverse lineup of events (music, visual art, theatre).

Whether the Columbia Festival will really attract arts patrons from as far afield as Augusta, Greenville, or Charlotte is, I'm afraid, somewhat questionable. Fans of the arts from those cities are, at that time of year, probably saving their travel-for-art's-sake for a mere three to four weeks later, when the Spoleto Festival kicks off in Charleston. Truth is, with the exception of pianist Marina Lomazov (who is playing at the Columbia Festival on May 2), the highest-performance-level music events that happen in Columbia (the Charles Wadsworth Chamber Series at the art museum and the Southern Exposure new music series at USC) will not be part of the Columbia Festival of the Arts. But Chernoff is an ad guy, after all, so I'm hopeful that his promotional campaign is well-conceived and will bring some positive, even long-term, dividends. If he focuses most of his promotional efforts in the Midlands, the return on the Festival's investment will be greater.