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You can’t go home again
I just spent a week in my hometown of Honolulu helping my mom start the long and complicate process of downsizing. She currently lives in a house where I spent the majority of my childhood, a large property that’s becoming more than she can manage. This road is about a mile up the hill from said house, a street I’m utterly familiar with, every turn, every bump, every tree, every view. It’s a road I have run thousands of time since my early teens, and one that makes me feel like I’m truly home. It’s also unbelievably beautiful, and it’s not lost on me what a tremendous privilege it was…
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Daily Smile #2
I came across this last week and cringe-laughed for a good few minutes. I’ll let you watch before I comment: Oh, where do I begin. I mean, I’ve certainly heard my share of horn clams and mistakes of all kinds and “wtf-are-you-even-playing-the-same-piece?” moments on the podium, but one of the fundamental things a conductor should do is to NOT REACT LIKE THIS. In this instance I’m sure the horn player was mortified enough with his blipped entrance without having to face that look of death (he even stops conducting! During a concert!). You don’t need to magnify a moment like this with pouting or histrionics on the podium. It doesn’t…
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Life on edge, part 1
I am a very, very anxious person. There, I’ve said it. And when I say that, I mean all day, every day, since I was a young child; worrying, ruminating, convinced that something is just on the verge of going wrong. It’s not really environmentally related – I mean, yes, I get uncomfortable on particularly turbulent flights, but what I’m talking about is an underlying baseline state of dis-ease that has always been with me. My anxiety manifests as an inexplicable sense of existential dread that has no practical explanation. And for my ordered and rational brain, the fact that I can’t reason my anxiety out of existence is both…
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Stuff you should listen to #1
Confession: I don’t spend a lot of my spare time listening to classical music. It’s mostly because of the fatigue – I hear enough of it at work and want to let my ears be open to something else on my off time, and my tastes are eclectic. But occasionally I’ll encounter an orchestral work that strikes me as that “something else”, music that gives me a slightly different perspective, music that inhabits a slightly different world than the one I work in daily. A few weeks back I was with the Virginia Symphony performing a program that included a new piece for me, Tan Dun’s Pipa concerto My soloist…
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Please excuse my soapbox
I was sitting in my hotel room this afternoon and relaxing post-rehearsal, idly going through my newsfeed on my phone when I came across this headline: Michelle Williams Was ‘Paralyzed’ After Learning Costar Mark Wahlberg Was Paid More Than Her Yes, it’s from People magazine, and yes, I read Hollywood gossip because, frankly, I feel like it’s a fascinating insight into an industry that has quite a few parallels to the music industry. You can read the whole article here. In a nutshell, the story is this: Michelle Williams was paid less than $1,000 for reshoots in a movie co-starring Mark Wahlberg, who was paid $1.5 million, even though they…
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Tick Tock
I was in Dublin a few weeks back working with the RTE National Symphony Orchestra. An afternoon off afforded me a few hours to take in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Trinity College and a handful of other highlights. Although the major sights were nice, it was a chance encounter that ended up being the most meaningful visit of the day. Searching for a caffeine hit I turned down a promising road but instead of a coffee shop I found the National Library; a sign told me that it housed a free W.B Yeats exhibit. I love Yeats and I love free stuff, so I wandered in. It was a beautifully…
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Daily smile
Just something that made me happy this cloudy morning. It’s not often that I’m able to see the reaction of an audience as music is being played. The sense of delight is visceral, and it reminds me of why I love (most of the time!) what I do…
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Small gestures
Pinkerton and I see a lot of Starbucks. It’s a reliable place for a cup of caffeination and a portable breakfast, and if there’s one close by wherever I’m staying (and there always is) we’ll be there every morning, pre-rehearsal. The Starbucks we frequent the most is one attached to a hotel in downtown Minneapolis, where I conduct monthly. Your typical hotel Starbucks is usually a scene – long lines of customers with their complicated custom orders (“sugar-free no-whip half-caff mocha with soy milk”) and harried baristas with barely a moment to look up from the register. This one is different. A few years ago, a new barista started working…
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The glamorous life
I was in Belgium a month ago conducting concerts with the Antwerp Symphony. I’d never been to Antwerp before, and was delighted to discover a city of beautiful architecture (Central Station), exquisite art (Rubens) and delectable food (moules frites and waffles). The orchestra was great, and their schedule was such that I had enough time to make the hour long trip to Bruges, which was utterly charming, if overrun by tourists. On a sunny Saturday morning I set out for a run in the brisk autumn air of Stadtpark. And on the afternoon before my last concert I had time to troll the city for the best chocolate boutiques to…
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A continent, a people
Apologies for the extended hiatus, I had an unusually busy end-of-summer season that was followed immediately with back to back mini-vacations. (A view from one of the countless switchbacks on a trail up the side of a peak in Yosemite. It. Was. Amazing.) Spending my time communing with nature means I haven’t been indulging in slightly more civilized pleasures like movie-going, which is really the only reason I have yet to see “Crazy Rich Asians”. For those of you who haven’t heard about this cinematic juggernaut-cum-cultural phenomenon, it’s based on Kevin Kwan’s 2013 bestseller by the same name. I read it – no, devoured it – over the course of…