APM's Mixed CompanyMixed Company is written by Saint Paul Sunday staff, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the show and the classical music they love. We welcome your online comments.Bigger than Life- September 29, 2006 Thomas Hampson has enjoyed a full career as a singer: orchestra, opera and recital performances around the world, recordings—there's not much he hasn't done. With all of his success, you'd think he'd just kick back and enjoy his life and his work. Well he does enjoy his life and his work, but it doesn't include kicking back. In fact, it's more like kicking forward. And what he's kicking forward is his passion for American song. Working with the Library of Congress' "Creativity in..http://www.publicradio.org/columns/sunday/archives/2006/09/bigger_than_lif.php TimeSpace Pianism- September 28, 2006 Leif Ove Andsnes doesn't so much interpret the works he performs as inhabit them. Maybe the distinction rings more semantic than real (a temptation for anyone who tries to write about music and musicians), but to me it goes to the heart of what's so special and perhaps paradoxical about his artistry. With Leif Ove, it's all about the music. The person is unassuming and kind, even humble, and the pianist doesn't get in the way of the masterpieces at hand. Yet he's very much...http://www.publicradio.org/columns/sunday/archives/2006/09/spacetime_piani.php Mystery Man- September 22, 2006 This program, performed by the great Emerson String Quartet, airs on the eve of Dmitri Shostakovich's hundredth birthday. With that in mind, it felt important to say something momentous, or at least new, about the composer, whose biography seems to grow less determinate with time, but whose music strikes me as ever more timely and accessible. For me, though, the debate over his agonized loyalties is increasingly beside the point. We know at least that he suffered terribly, in a kind of...http://www.publicradio.org/columns/sunday/archives/2006/09/mystery_man_1.php Visual contrasts- September 14, 2006 We recorded Anonymous 4 at St. Bernard's Catholic Church in north St. Paul (rather than in the studio) so that the last notes of their music could resonate and linger like the singing you might hear in a cathedral or another large, echoey space. It turned out to be an acoustically, and especially visually, stunning change of scenery. We recorded in the evening after the last mass and turned off all of the lights and air circulation so that the church was completely silent. It was also...http://www.publicradio.org/columns/sunday/archives/2006/09/visual_contrast.php Sui Generis- September 7, 2006 Listening to this week's program, some lines from Norman Maclean's beautiful flyfishing memoir A River Runs Through It improbably came to mind—lines about beer, of all things, and how it used to be that each of the small cities of a certain size in Maclean's and my home state brewed its own kind: You could leave beer to cool in the river, and it would be so cold when you got back it wouldn't foam much. It would be a beer made in the next town if the town were ten thousand or over. So it.http://www.publicradio.org/columns/sunday/archives/2006/09/sui_generis.php |