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DAY 2: August 18, 2015 The first day of rehearsal is always an eye-opener. One person shows up with everything in a tabbed notebook, another has a wad of loose, double-sided, folded Xeroxes. Someone nails one song with emotional depth and convincing Argentinean...
DAY 1: August 17, 2015 There is a lot of drama surrounding the beginning of any project, and today--the official day one of NYFOS@North Fork--is no exception. Three of the singers arrived yesterday. and two of them (Anna Dugan and Alex McKissick) jumped gamely into...
Steven Blier's last pick of the week: I am due to start my work on the Rachmaninoff project soon, and to give my mojo a jump-start I have been working on one of his final songs, “Son” (“Sleep”) from Opus 38. It’s one of those sublime pieces of music that needs to...
(from Steven Blier) I have been listening obsessively to the late American soprano Teresa Stich-Randall this week (as one does). Her name came up during an email interview exchange I was having with writer/critic David Shengold, who casually let it drop that...
from Steven Blier: I am up to the “White Album” in my summer traversal of the Beatles songs. My feeling so far is that they reached their apex with “Revolver,” a startlingly good record. But there are certainly some amazing songs on “Sgt. Pepper” (“A Day in the Life”...
from Steven Blier: Right now I am at Wolf Trap working on a concert devoted to the Rodgers clan—songs by Rodgers with both Hart and Hammerstein, along with music by his daughter Mary Rodgers and his grandson Adam Guettel. The comforting, lyrical Rodgers sound is...