Our February Salon Concert was an eclectic program.
It opened with the Kodaly Sonata played with great skill by Douglas Harvey, the remarkable young principal cellist of the Austin Symphony. Harvey’s performance, as fine as it was, didn’t erase memories of Janos Starker’s rendition at least 45 years ago in Toronto.
After Kodaly came the Poulenc Oboe Sonata played by Ian Davidson, [...]

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Last night we watched the Criterion DVD of Pygmalion with Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard. It was excellent. It was directed by Howard and Anthony Asquith, David Lean was the editor and Arthur Honegger, no less, did the music. Especially interesting in that George Bernard Shaw (GBS) chose Hiller to be his first Pygmalion on film – [...]

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I’ve been listening to a new DVD set of Solti performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (VPO). They are tremendous!
There are some rehearsal sequences with the VPO from 1995. Solti is unusually loquacious, telling stories about Kodaly (“He gave lessons barefoot”). In the Berlioz Hungarian March Solti shouts derisively [...]

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