New album Mozart.Brahms.Berg now available…

The debut album of Turkish pianist Seda Röder is now available on CD Baby: http://cdbaby.com/cd/sedaroder

The first live internet broadcast of the Berlin Philharmonic

It felt vaguely ironic to be sitting before our computer in Germantown, New York, watching the first live internet broadcast from the Digital Concert Hall of the Berliner Philharmoniker, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting Dvorák’s G minor Slavonic Dance and Brahms’s First Symphony.

Opera, or the under-doing of women

Today I attended the Metropolitan Opera broadcast at my local movie theater in a performance of Puccini’s La Rondine (like La Traviata, only minus the tuberculosis and judgmental father). I cannot thank the Met enough for getting these performances out to a wide audience because for many of us here in the US, it is virtually impossible to see good opera live.

How the Classical Music Industry will (likely) survive

I believe that digital media offers many opportunities for the classical music industry to reach out to new audiences, interact better with those who are interested in their music, and ultimately find new customers.

Here are three aspects that need to be addressed by the classical music industry:

New Year’s Concert 2009

As I’m sure many of you know already, each year the Vienna Philharmonic presents a concert from the Musikverein showcasing primarily the music of Johann Strauss Jr. This tradition started in 1939, just after the Anschluss which made Austria a province of Germany — as you can probably imagine, there is a whole story to this, and I will elaborate on it further at another time and in another format. Since the 1950s, the concert has been broadcast around the world. There are several traditions associated with this event, including a minimum of two encores (Strauss Jr.’s Blue Danube Waltz followed by Strauss Sr.’s Radetzky March), and this year’s concert followed in the typical vein. Daniel Barenboim was the conductor.