king david

I liked our performance.
but sometimes people think little differently.



Oscar E Moore from the rear mezzanine for Talk Entertainment.com

Based on the Biblical tale of King David, with the New York University Symphonic Orchestra of sixty plus, a chorus of some two dozen and a cast of twenty one - the Steinhardt Program in Vocal Performance presented the rarely heard oratorio by Alan Menken (music) and Tim Rice (book and lyrics). It was an incredible experience.

Not that King David is without flaws. It is a problem of too much information, too much history having to be telescoped into the over two hour presentation. We see David the shepherd boy, David taking over for Saul, David with his wife Michal, David with Goliath, David with Bathsheba, David with his son Absalom, et al. It is an episodic piece that is completely sung through. It has some beautiful melodies and some very exciting pop and choral music going for it as well. The lyrics are serviceable and sometimes trite. But as someone next to me mentioned, “I’m having trouble following the story but the music is fantastic.”

As is the production. Fluidly directed by William Wesbrooks. Simply but colorfully and appropriately costumed by Michelle Humphrey and well lit by Jeff Croiter. And some nice choreography by Stephanie Lang. The splendid orchestra was conducted by Gerald Steichen. This piece deserves an excellent symphonic orchestra and we were not disappointed. It was sumptuous. How exciting to hear them all - actors, singers and orchestra in the stirring “This New Jerusalem”.

But without a charismatic David you might as well forget the entire experience. I am thrilled to report that Jay Armstrong Johnson is terrific. He is a huge star in the making, although he already is a star at NYU. I saw him last February in the title role of Floyd Collins and was extremely impressed with him at that point. As King David Mr. Johnson soars. He is simply an amazing performer. Gifted with good looks and a glorious voice.

Everyone in the cast is wonderful: Shane Quinn, Katharine Heaton, Bryan Welnicki, Kristen da Costa, Nic Rouleau, Roy Richardson, Jacob Bichachi and Bronson Murphy standouts.

What an impressive, memorable, thrilling evening of musical theatre.

I want to introduce a great young violist

Scott Lee
In 1994 at age fifteen, virtuoso violist Scott Lee advanced to the finals of the Concert Artists Guild Competition; in 1996, he came back to win the Nathan Wedeen Award after winning numerous other top competition prizes. A student of the Juilliard School, Mr. Lee performs at festivals including the lnternational Hindemith Viola Festival and the Marlboro Festival. The combination of viola sonatas and works for solo viola with chamber ensemble make this New York debut a unique occasion.


At age twenty, violist Scott Lee has already distinguished himself by winning several competition prizes, most recently a Nathan Wedeen Award at the 1996 Concert Artists Guild Competition. In 1990, he won First Prize in both violin and viola at the Taiwan National Instrumental Competition. In 1994, he was the First Prize winner of the Rio Hondo Young Artist Competition; Second Prize winner of the Corpus Christi Young Artist Competition and of the Pasadena Instrumental Competition; Third Prize Winner of the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition; and winner of an Honorable Mention at the Concert Artists Guild Competition, where he was the youngest artist in the 45-year history of the competition to have performed in the final round. In 1995, he won Third Prize of the William Primrose International Viola Competition.

Mr. Lee has performed as soloist with orchestras such as the International Chamber Orchestra, the Rio Hondo Symphony, and the Symphony Orchestra of the Music Academy of the West. Festival appearances in 1997 included the Steans Institute at Ravinia Festival and La Jolla Summerfest. In 1995, Mr. Lee was invited to perform at the International Hindemith Viola Festival. He premiered Michael Berkeley's Odd Man Out at the 22nd International Viola Congress in 1994. The 1998-99 season will include performances at the Marlboro Music Festival, and for the Tri County Concert Association in Pennsylvania.

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Mr. Lee began his music studies on the violin at age eight. He took up the viola at age thirteen, and came to the United States the next year to study at the Idyllwild Arts Academy in California, where his viola teacher was Donald McInnes and his violin teacher was Todor Pelev. He has studied with Michael Tree at the Curtis Institute of Music and is currently enrolled at The Juilliard School where he studies with Paul Neubauer.. he's going to be a faculty Idyllwild Arts Summer Programm

he has recording
Concert Artists Guild CAG6964 (1999)

Scott Lee, Viola
Pei-Yao Wang, Piano
Miró String Quartet

Johannes Brahms - Sonata for Viola and Piano in F minor, Op. 120, No. 1
Paul Hindemith - Sonata for Viola and Piano, Op. 11, No. 4
François Couperin - Pièces en concert, for Viola and String Quartet
Joachin Turina - Scène Andalouse, for Viola, Piano and String Quartet
Efrem Zimbalist - Tango from Sarasateana

Remembering Jesse Levine

I met professor Levine as a conductor at SUNY Purchase. I was a principle violist at there and he taught me lots of things as a violist. In my memory, Jesse was very passionate teacher and viola player. It’s very sad to lost virtuoso violist, great teacher, amazing conductor and my friend but I will remember him forever.

Renowned violist, teacher and conductor Jesse Levine died last week. He taught at Yale University and conducted several orchestras in Connecticut.

Jesse Levine was born in 1940 in New York City to a musical family. He began playing the viola at an early age..and studied at the Mannes College of Music. His first commercial job - performing with Harry Belafonte –landed him the money to buy a viola..one that he used for the rest of his career. As a young violist at the Tanglewood Music Festival, Levine played Igor Stravinsky’s Elegy, with Stravinsky. Later, he was principal viola of symphony orchestras in Buffalo, Dallas, Baltimore and New Jersey.

Cellist and Yale professor Aldo Parisot. "He had the most beautiful vibrato, the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. The sound of Jesse Levine was unique…something unique. We used to joke all the time..He used to say that I gave him the vibrato..and he taught me how to conduct. You know we joke all the time about this… "


Parisot describes Levine as a loyal friend, a master of jokes and a fantastic viola teacher. "First of all, he loved to teach. There are many people that teach because they’re making a salary..making a living. With Jesse it was the love of teaching".

Levine taught viola and chamber music at the Yale School of Music since 1983. In Connecticut, he was music director of the New Britain and Norwalk Symphonies. He played and led orchestras in Europe, South America, Israel, Australia and throughout the US. Jesse Levine died after a long fight with pancreatic cancer. He was 68 years old. -CPBN- 11/20/08

My Favorite Music and Musician.

Heifetz and Primrose -Passacagli by Hendel-
I Play this music about 3 years ago with my friend. It was really fun to play and it became one of my favorite piece.

compare with this performance. it'll be fun
also my favorite players !!!!
Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman

William Primrose

William Primrose CBE (August 23, 1904 - May 1, 1982) was a Scottish violist and teacher, probably the best known viola player of his and all time.
Primrose was born in Glasgow and studied violin there and, later, at the then Guildhall School of Music in London. From there he moved to Belgium to study under Eugène Ysaÿe who encouraged him to take up the viola instead. In 1930, he joined Warwick Evans, John Pennington, and Thomas Petre as the violist in the London String Quartet. The group dissolved in 1935. In 1937, he began playing in the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini. When it was rumored that Toscanini would leave the Symphony in 1941, Primrose resigned. His career as a soloist took off when he started touring with Richard Crooks. He later signed with Arthur Judson, an influential concert manager. In 1946, he was the soloist in the first recording of Berlioz's Harold in Italy.
In 1944 he had commissioned a viola concerto from Béla Bartók. This was left incomplete at Bartók's death in 1945, and had to wait four years for its completion by Tibor Serly. Primrose was the soloist in the world premiere performance of the concerto, on 2 December 1949.
In 1953 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II.
Primrose was known for his tremendous technique. When he performed Paganini's violin caprices on viola, Mischa Elman is said to have exclaimed, "It must be easier on viola!" Primrose wrote many transcriptions and arrangements for viola, often technically dazzling, including "La Campanella" (from Paganini's second violin concerto) and the famous Nocturne from Borodin's second string quartet, the latter "out of jealousy" for the cello's long melodic lines.
Later in his life, Primrose became a noted teacher, writing several books on viola playing and teaching widely in Japan and the USA, occasionally at the University of Southern California (with Jascha Heifetz), The Juilliard School, Eastman School of Music, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and the Curtis Institute of Music. In 1972, he published his memoirs, A Walk on the North Side.
The Primrose International Viola Competition, created in 1979 in honor of William Primrose, was the first international music competition for viola players.
Primrose played an Amati viola, formerly owned by his father[1]. The ex-Primrose Amati is now owned by Roberto Díaz, who is currently the president of Curtis and recorded a CD of Primrose's transcriptions for Naxos Records. Prior to the recording, the viola was inspected and was found to have had adjustments of questionable workmanship, which were subsequently repaired. Primrose had noted that the viola had a wolf tone and did not project easily. He was also known to have owned and played on at least one viola by William Moennig Jr. of Philadelphia.
William Primrose died from cancer in Provo, Utah on 1 May 1982. His large collection of annotated viola scores became the nucleus for the William Primrose International Viola Archive at the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. For his contribution to the recording industry, Primrose has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6801 Hollywood Blvd.
check out this amazing playing

William Primrose Plays Paganini Caprice 24

AUDACITY

Audacity is a digital audio editor application. Audacity is cross-platform, using the wxWidgets software library to provide a similar graphical user interface on several different operating systems.
Audacity was created by Dominic Mazzoni while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. Dominic Mazzoni now works at Google, but is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world.
The latest stable release of Audacity is 1.2.6, released on 15 November 2006. As of 13 May 2008, it was the 9th most popular download from SourceForge.net, with over 40 million downloads. Audacity won the SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia. Audacity is free software and is licensed under the GNU General Public License version two, but may update to GPLv3 after version 1.4.0
Some of Audacity's features include:

1. Importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via the LAME encoder, downloaded separately), Ogg Vorbis, all file formats supported by libsndfile library
2. Version 1.3.2 also supports Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)
3. Recording and playing sounds
4. Editing via Cut, Copy, Paste (with unlimited Undo)
5. Multi-track mixing
6. A large array of digital effects and plug-ins. Additional effects can be written with Nyquist
7. Amplitude envelope editing
8. Noise removal
9. Support for multi-channel modes with sampling rates up to 96 kHz with 24 bits per sample
10. The ability to make precise adjustments to the audio's speed while maintaining pitch (Audacity calls it changing tempo), in order to synchronize it with video, run for the right length of time, etc.
11. The ability to change the audio's pitch without changing the speed.
12. Converting cassette tapes or records into digital tracks by automatically splitting one wav (or the other supported types) track into multiple tracks based on silences in the track and the export multiple option.
13. Multi-platform: works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix-like systems (including GNU/Linux and BSD) amongst others.
The latest versions support Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista, but Windows 95 and NT are not supported.

Audacity can also be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including podcasts. It can be used for finishing podcasts by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out.[8]
It is currently used in the OCR National Level 2 ICT course for the sound creation unit.

iTunes

I have iPod since it was first released. So I used iTune for a long time. I thought iTune is just music library for iPod but I realized that it is more than just livbrary after I took a tech. trend class. It has much more features than I thought.

iTunes is a proprietary digital media player application, introduced by Apple Inc. on January 9, 2001, at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco.The latest version, iTunes 8, was announced at Apple's September 2008 keynote Let's Rock. The application is used for playing and organizing digital music and video files. The program is also an interface to manage the contents on Apple's popular iPod digital media players as well as the iPhone. Additionally, iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store via the Internet to purchase and download music, music videos, television shows, applications, iPod games, audiobooks, various podcasts, feature length films and movie rentals (not available in all countries), and ringtones (available only in the USA). It is also used to download applications for the iPhone and iPod touch as long as they are running the 2.X firmware.
iTunes is available as a free download for Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and Windows XP from Apple's website. It is also bundled with all Macs, and some HP and Dell computers. Older versions are available for Mac OS 9, OS X 10.0-10.2, and Windows 2000. Although Apple does not produce iTunes for other operating systems, it can be run on Linux-based operating systems through Wine, a Windows compatibility layer.
A version of iTunes was shipped with cell phones from Motorola, which included the ability to sync music from an iTunes library to the cellphone, as well as a similar interface between both platforms. Since the release of the iPhone, Apple has stopped distributing iTunes with other manufacturers' phones in order to concentrate sales to Apple's device.
iTunes 8 can currently read, write and convert between MP3, AIFF, WAV, MPEG-4, AAC and Apple Lossless.
iTunes can also play any audio files that QuickTime can play (as well as some video formats), including Protected AAC files from the iTunes Store and Audible.com audio books. There is limited support for Vorbis and FLAC enclosed in an Ogg container (files using the FLAC container format are not naturally supported) or Speex codecs with the Xiph QuickTime Components. Because tag editing and album art is done within iTunes and not Quicktime, these features will not work with these QuickTime components. iTunes currently will not play back HE-AAC/aacPlus audio streams correctly. HE-AAC/aacPlus format files will play back as 22 kHz AAC files (effectively having no high end over 11 kHz), and HE-AAC streaming audio (which a number of Internet radio stations use) will not play back at all. The latest version of iTunes (Win/Mac) supports importing audio CDs with the default iTunes standard file format of AAC at 128 kbit/s, but users can choose from 16 kbit/s to 320 kbit/s constant bit rates (CBR) in either AAC or MP3.
iTunes is an application that allows the user to manage audio and video on a personal computer. Officially, using iTunes is required in order to manage the audio of an Apple iPod portable audio player, although alternative software does exist. Users can organize their music into playlists within one or more libraries, edit file information, record Compact Discs, copy files to a digital audio player, purchase music and videos through its built-in music store, download free podcasts, back up songs onto a CD or DVD, run a visualizer to display graphical effects in time to the music, and encode music into a number of different audio formats. There is also a large selection of free internet radio stations to listen to.
Additionally, users can add PDF files to their library (to add digital liner notes to their albums, for example), but the PDFs cannot be transferred to or read on an iPhone or iPod.
In the most recent version, iTunes 8.0, the preferences menu was given a complete makeover. The result added very few new options, but instead removed several options that may seem trivial to most users. For example, iTunes once gave users the option to display arrows beside the selected song's title, artist, album, and genre that link directly to the iTunes Music Store. Now these arrows are not removable, except through the direct editing of a preferences file.
Importing of audio CDs into MP3 can also be accomplished using variable bitrate (VBR). However, a double-blind experiment conducted in January 2004 of six MP3 encoders noted that the iTunes encoder came last, in that the quality of the files produced by iTunes was below par. It was stated in the final results that these tests only covered VBR encodings, thus iTunes may have performed better with a Constant bitrate (CBR).
The Windows version of iTunes can automatically transcode DRM-free WMA (including version 9) files to other audio formats, but does not support playback of WMA files and will not transcode DRM protected WMA files. Telestream, Inc. provides free codecs for Mac users of QuickTime to enable playback of unprotected Windows Media files. These codecs are recommended by Microsoft.