Feb 10
The Des Moines Metro Opera Years – Part One I ended my last blog post with my winning the taped audition for the post of Principal Timpanist of the Des Moines Metro Opera Festival Orchestra, a post I was to hold for eighteen years – or nineteen seasons. To recap, as a result of our …
Nov 10
.The Transition – from the Oslo Philharmonic to the Des Moines Metro Opera….. June 1998…. With the final glorious chords of the finale of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony resounding in my ears, I stood behind the Hinger timpani on the stage of the Oslo Konserthus with the orchestra accepting the applause of an appreciative audience for …
Oct 13
The Year 1998 – The last Six Months with the Oslo Philharmonic We now come to the last six months of my tenure with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. To recap, my wife and I made the decision to move our family back to the United States at the end of 1996, and the actual move …
Sep 14
The Year 1997 – Some Afterthoughts Wow! Three long blog posts to describe my musical comings and goings as well as those of the Oslo Philharmonic in the year 1997! Until I started with Part One, I did not realize how musically busy that year was! On top of making the decision to move the …
Sep 12
The Year 1997 – The Penultimate Year – Part Three When I started this blog post, I anticipated one long post, but not overly long. As I wrote what turned out to be Part One, and checked my resources – journal entries and concert programs – I realized that there would have to be a …
Mar 08
The Year 1995 – Part Two In the previous blog post, I intimated that the year 1995 was a good, but not exceptional year, and that the post would be relatively brief. Boy, was I wrong! Not that it was a particularly long post, but it turned out that 1995 was more interesting than I …
Feb 25
The Year 1995 – Part One It has been some time since I finished the previous post in this series which dealt with the events of the last part of 1994. That was a very busy period for both the orchestra and myself musically – two recording sessions, several tours and the orchestra’s seventy-fifth anniversary …
Nov 24
Warner Classics release of all twenty one EMI Jansons/Oslo recordings plus five DVDs of selected NRK TV broadcast concerts In the first installment of this blog post, I discussed how Warner Classics put together the package under discussion, and my reaction to it, as well as my assessment of the first three recordings in the …
Nov 14
Warner Classics release of all twenty one EMI Jansons/Oslo recordings plus five DVDs of selected NRK TV broadcast concerts Back in 2020, Warner Classics, which now owns the rights to recordings made by the former EMI record label (among others), gathered together all of the recordings made by the late Mariss Jansons and the Oslo …
Jul 22
1994 – Part Three The Peace Concert, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, the USA Tour – and cable timpani? As it turns out, the year 1994 turned out to be as much of a seminal year for the orchestra and myself as the year previous year was. The last two blog posts covered the first two thirds of …
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