Classical Post

The Grammy Award-winning Catalyst Quartet joins us on the Classical Post podcast today to discuss their latest album, UNCOVERED Volume 2, featuring the music of Florence Price. The star pianist Michelle Cann is also on the show as this album was a collaboration with her.

The quartet’s UNCOVERED project is a multi-volume set of albums released on Azica Records. The initiative celebrates beautifully crafted works by artists who have been overlooked and sidelined in classical music, especially because of their race or gender. Volume 1, released last year, includes the string quartet and quintets of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor with clarinetist Anthony McGill and pianist Stewart Goodyear. Volume 2 just came out this year and features music by Florence Price. Volume 3 and beyond will feature Coleridge-Taylor, Perkinson, William Grant Still, and George Walker, among others.

As a side note, violinist Abi Fayette was not on the podcast, but you will hear the other quartet members — violinist Karla Donehew Perez, violist Paul Laraia, and cellist Karlos Rodriguez — and the pianist Michelle Cann.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

Zachary Carrettín and Mina Gajić are the dynamic duo on the podcast today. Zachary is music director of Boulder Bach Festival and Mina is its artistic and executive director. They have just released a chamber music album on the Sono Luminus label — Confluence — featuring a fascinating juxtaposition of Balkan dances and tango. I know tango speaks deeply to me, so I was very intrigued to hear the backstory of how this album came to be — seemingly disparate styles, but dovetailing so cleverly into a strong artistic statement in this album.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

Film director Ted Braun joins us on the Classical Post podcast to discuss his new documentary ¡Viva Maestro! that chronicles two of the most challenging years in the life of Grammy-winning conductor Gustavo Dudamel, famously known as the music director of the LA Phil.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

The Gateways Music Festival Orchestra makes its Carnegie Hall debut this month led by Anthony Parnther. The concert features Jon Batiste, who just won five Grammys at this year’s ceremony,  including the highly-coveted title, “Album of the Year”.

The debut of this orchestra at Carnegie is important because it spotlights the work of the Gateways Music Festival, which celebrates the contributions of classical musicians of African descent, bringing together professionals from leading orchestras across the country to perform and inspire communities through the power of music.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Anthony ahead of this major New York appearance. He’s conducted artists spanning every musical genre — from Kanye West to Joshua Bell. It’s particularly profound what he said near the end of our chat about what he hopes people takeaway after listening to this concert at Carnegie. He specifically wants to debunk the myth that there is a lack of Black talent in the classical space. Quite the contrary; there is plenty of talent. So stay tuned later in the episode for this discussion.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

Our guest on the Classical Post podcast today is Elizabeth Sobol, president and CEO of Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Upstate New York. The venue is most notably the summer home to the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York City Ballet. It also presents Live Nation concerts that feature the likes of Josh Groban and the Dave Matthews Band.

You will find our conversation insightful simply because of Elizabeth’s wealth of experience. She spent three decades at IMG Artists managing careers of glossy names like Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Renee Fleming, James Galway, Evgeny Kissin, and Kiri Te Kanawa. She also was most recently president and CEO of Universal Music Classics immediately prior to now leading Saratoga Performing Arts Center (or SPAC for short).

Listen to our discussion on the magic of synchronicity as a leader; how meditation in the morning and boxing at night helps to sustain well-being; and the important work of the Philadelphia Orchestra programming the works of Florence Price.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

The Swedish folk jazz duo — Elise & Tobi — just released their award-winning music video Je te verrai, which is the French translation based off of the American classic song from 1938, “I’ll Be Seeing You”.

The backstory is quite interesting, however. They discovered a French translation of “I’ll Be Seeing You” from 1945 and found that the French lyrics had been forgotten. A recording of the song was nowhere to be found, even though they found clear evidence that “Je te verrai” was extremely popular when it was first released in the 1940s.

In order to ”give the song back” to France, they decided to make a new recording of it. The short film was made to reinforce the song’s message and to put it in today’s context.

Apart from winning “Best Music Video” at Toronto Indie Shorts, the film has also been selected for the Montreal Independent Film Festival and has already been screened at the Berlin Short Film Festival.

They also recorded the original song, “I'll Be Seeing You”, which will be released as a part of their album this fall.

Elise & Tobi combine music production with film-making. Their first project together was a short film that was awarded the first prize in a Dutch film competition organized by the Heimans and Thijsse Foundation in Amsterdam. Between 2014 and 2016, Elise & Tobi were the producers, photographers, screenwriters and music composers of the documentary An Axe and a Blade of Grass, which was broadcasted twice on Dutch national television. The film music was written by Elise & Tobi and performed by them, as well as the internationally renowned Swedish baroque orchestra REbaroque and the Stockholm-based chamber choir Adolf Fredriks kyrkas kammarkör. In 2019 the duo released their first album, Tales of the Cobblestone, a musical tribute to the street as a public space and the people who roam it.

In the summer of 2020, Elise & Tobi had planned a tour in Paris, which had to be canceled due to the pandemic. Instead, they built a mobile scene on wheels where they gave a concert tour in multiple locations on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea.

Listen to this episode of the Classical Post podcast as we discuss the release of their music video, where they find inspiration as artists, and how they approach life.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

There’s a zany book published several years ago by British author and photographer Ben Schott that has “invented words” using the German language. This book — Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition — inspired composer Eric Nathan (who teaches at Brown University) to write an 84-minute magnum opus — Missing Words — that now has its world premiere recording. Released on New Focus Recordings, the album and how it came to be is quite out-of-the-box with a synergistic collaboration between many artists and ensembles such as the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, American Brass Quintet, cellist Parry Karp and pianist Christopher Karp, International Contemporary Ensemble, Neave Trio, and Hub New Music.

Both Ben Schott and Eric Nathan join me on the Classical Post podcast to discuss how this project came to be, along with random miscellany that is delivered with witty charm.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

German composer Sven Helbig is part of a new generation of composers for whom there are no longer any barriers between the classical world of the orchestra, experimental art, and pop music. He composes choral, orchestral, and chamber music for the classical concert stage and tours solo performing electronic music.

He is 'Composer in Residence' at the German National Theatre in Weimar, at the University of Leipzig and the National University San Martin in Buenos Aires. Sven is also a co-founder of the Dresden Symphony Orchestra, the first European orchestra devoted solely to the performance of contemporary music.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Sven on the Classical Post podcast. Most notably, he details his childhood in the East German city of Eisenhüttenstadt and how those formative years created a non-compartmentalized philosophy toward music.

People in classical music often silo themselves off from the rest of the world, unfortunately. But Sven, having had this unique background in a pre-planned East German city — growing up in the 70s and 80s — saw music as one.

Now as he reflects on his career having recorded for Deutsche Grammophon — one of the top shelf labels in classical music — and collaborating with the likes of Snoop Dog, his philosophical approach is really fresh and exciting for anyone who’s into art in the broadest sense of the word.

Be sure to check out his new album Skills on the Modern Recordings label. The work is a dissection of what it really takes to acquire a skill—from dedication, to repetition, despair to transfiguration.

For those of you who love truly aesthetic-driven short films, Sven’s music comes alive in a series of artful videos on YouTube. Watch this one in particular that he references in this podcast.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

Composer Danaë Xanthe Vlasse recently received a Grammy nomination for her album Mythologies featuring sopranos Hila Plitmann and Sangeeta Kaur. The album is a collection of works inspired by Ancient Greek myths. Danaë’s father Marcus (née Vlassopoulos) grew up on the island of Ithaca, once ruled by Homer’s legendary hero, Odysseus. Centered on vocal works, Mythologies celebrates some of the most lasting myths of history and invites listeners to ponder long-standing cultural concepts, such as idolized heroism, divine power, crisis of faith and morality, and the junction of fate and free-will.

We spoke with Danaë on the Classical Post podcast about creating this album. Now that it is Grammy-nominated you should certainly take note of it. We’ve added one of the tracks to our new Fabuluxe playlist on Spotify. So go and check that out, too.

One of the standout concepts from our interview with Danaë was exploring “cultural patience” — the need to be more self-reflective as a society. We also speak on the similarities between the ancient Greek hero’s journey and the American dream. 

Below are the various recommended products/places we discussed on this episode.

Doubledown Cosmetics

Letterpress Chocolate

Milk Frother, BODUM brand

The Comedy Cellar

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

Patrick Cassidy joins us on the Classical Post podcast today. You will certainly know his music from the Ridley Scott film, Hannibal, starring Anthony Hopkins. Patrick wrote the famous aria, "Vide cor Meum", that was written as a “mini” opera for this film.

The aria has been presented at both the Oscars and Emmy Awards ceremonies, and it has appeared in multiple top 10 lists and essential collections throughout the world including Warner Classics album, 40 Most Beautiful Arias.

Patrick’s newest work The Mass, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and London Voices, was released in November 2019. Now in 2022, he’s released the same work, but this time for choir and organ.

Keep listening to hear where this composer finds inspiration to create some of the most glorious music. I know when I listened to his Mass, it has such a pathos and controlled grandeur to it, giving me goosebumps!

Also, stick around to hear how he views his accomplishments. He cites the truism, which I know I’ve tried to pursue in my own life, and that is: “Do what you love and you will never work another day in your life.”

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.