Email Author Gavin Borchert

2011 Stories by Gavin Borchert

• Ear Supply: Split Personality

  published December 7, 2011

  Imagine that there was such an instrument as a "rock oboe" (or "jazz oboe" or "blues oboe") that had been a foundation of popular music for... More >>

• Hipsters: Not the Annoying Brooklyn Kind, but the Fun Russian Dancing Kind

  published November 30, 2011

  Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union because it couldn't satisfy the people's unquenchable need for chartreuse checked suits and... More >>

• The Orchestra as Toy Box

  published November 16, 2011

  Composer Oliver Knussen made his name as a child prodigy, conducting his own Symphony no. 1 at age 15 with the London... More >>

• Ear Supply: The Sap Is Rising

  published November 9, 2011

  In his very first column for the New York Herald Tribune, in 1940, critic Virgil Thomson dropped a bomb with his dismissal of... More >>

• Opening Nights: Carmen

  published October 26, 2011

  Seattle Opera's current production of Bizet's best-known opera, which opened Oct. 15, is more traditional than the company's past stagings have... More >>

• Ear Supply: Dance Dance Revolution

  published October 26, 2011

  Though a staff member at Cornish College of the Arts for only two years, John Cage birthed three landmark musical developments there: His first... More >>

• Ear Supply: Like Clusters of Grapes

  published October 19, 2011

  "I am sick of love," says the text, but the music suggests sick with love would be a better translation, as Heinrich Schütz's two... More >>

• Ear Supply: Bizet This Weekend?

  published October 12, 2011

  If you've never been to an opera before, lose your virginity to Carmen. It's on the long side (with intermissions,... More >>

• Young Man in a Hurry

  published October 12, 2011

  Last weekend's Seattle Symphony concerts—Ludovic Morlot's fourth program as the orchestra's music director—included, for the first... More >>

• Ear Supply: The Dude Picks a Dud

  published October 5, 2011

  After the success, since 2007, of the Metropolitan Opera's satellite transmission of live performances into movie theaters worldwide, other... More >>

• Atlantic Crossings

  published October 5, 2011

  "Nobody, literally nobody, who has not passed his formative adolescent years in this country ever conducts American music with complete... More >>

• Ear Supply: French Connections

  published September 28, 2011

  Snappy, revved-up, machine-age urbanity, unburdened by centuries of stifling European tradition, vulgar and unschooled, but brash, visceral,... More >>

• Opening Nights: An Ideal Husband

  published September 28, 2011

  In some ways, Oscar Wilde's 1895 dramedy is even more fun than his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest: If it's not as... More >>

• Meat and Potatoes

  published September 28, 2011

  As snappy a concert-opener as any American composer ever penned, Frank Zappa's Dupree's Paradise, which opened Saturday night's... More >>

• New Kid in Town

  published September 21, 2011

  The long-awaited arrival of Ludovic Morlot, the Seattle Symphony's new music director, sold out his gala debut concert last... More >>

• Lost and Found

  published September 14, 2011

  Would you feel a frisson of excitement at the thought of visiting a spot where the latitude and longitude coordinates are exact round numbers?... More >>

• My, How You've Grown!

  published September 14, 2011

  Rule of thumb for debuting classical ensembles: If your first season doesn't kill you, you're got a decent shot at survival. Launched in... More >>

• Ear Supply: Patsy Cline Can Do No Wrong

  published September 7, 2011

  "Technique," said composer/accordionist Pauline Oliveros, "is the ability to make your art come out the way you want it to." Too often we... More >>

• Ear Supply: A Snowball in Hell

  published August 31, 2011

  Which of the following is actually going to happen? a) Michele Bachmann weds Jane Lynch at this year's Burning Man, in a public... More >>

• Ear Supply: Guitar at Twilight

  published August 24, 2011

  Each time I visit St. James Cathedral's neo-medieval chapel to hear Seattle guitarist Mark Wilson, I wonder why more musicians... More >>

• Country Casual

  published August 10, 2011

  The grounds of the Olympic Music Festival, outside Quilcene on the peninsula it's named for, was once a small dairy farm. It's been refurbished... More >>

• Living, Breathing, Bleeding

  published August 3, 2011

  George Gershwin had a successful Broadway career behind him when he tackled Porgy and Bess, and he put everything... More >>

• Ear Supply: Pieces of Music

  published August 3, 2011

  Among the more assumption-upsetting innovations of 20th-century music was the realization that a piece doesn't always have to travel the same... More >>

• Pit Boss

  published July 27, 2011

  At one end of the 5th Avenue Theater's orchestra pit, Paul Hansen has set up a sort of cage, or magpie nest, of percussion... More >>

• Opening Nights: Ruddigore

  published July 20, 2011

  By now I've seen the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society's splendid core actors often enough that I know that if any joke or bit doesn't come... More >>