Three days of music in New York

It was a joy to attend the 14,438th concert of The New York Philharmonic this past weekend at Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center. The all-Brahms program included the Academic Festival Overture and Symphony No. 1 in C minor. Twenty-four year old Julia Fischer performed the Concerto in D major. I now know why reviewers have described her as “not a talent, but a full-fledged phenomenal violinist”.

The other phenomenal part of the evening was watching Lorin Maazel -- Music Director since 2002. He has led more than 150 orchestras in more than 5,000 opera and concert performances around the world. This truly remarkable man uses no score yet seems to know every note and passage intimately. He not only conducts but he leads -- providing a queue just before notes and passages are played. (Having memorized six minutes or so of Beethoven and Mozart for my own conducting experiences, I have great respect for someone who knows countless hours of music). Maazel made his first conducting appearance at age six and I estimate he must be 77 years old. After seventy years of conducting, there are likely not many classical music pieces he doesn't know.

The following evening we attended the UBS Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall. Maxim Vengerov, Conductor and Violinist, added yet another dimension to conducting. He is less than half the age of Lorin Maazel but has the same potential. He conducted with a bow in hand and also performed the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 4. He then conducted the Shostakovich Chamber Symphony, Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 2 and the great Sinfonia concertante -- all without a score.

An orchestra is only as good as the sum of it's great musicians and the conductor. The New York Philharmonic consists of many stars, each famous in their own right. Glenn Dicterow, the concertmaster, has been winning numerous awards and competitions around the world since he was a boy. Stanley Drucker is the most famous clarinetist in the world. (See Marvelous Mozart). The list goes on but I was most impressed with Liang Wang, the twenty-six year old principal oboist. The principal oboist sits in the center of the orchestra and in many ways *is* the center of the orchestra, second only to the conductor. Liang Wang spends hours every day shaping the reeds for his instrument. As he performs he rises six inches out of his chair and provides strong leadership appreciated by all. Wang was born in in Qing Dao, China, in 1980 and comes from a musical family. He studied at the Beijing Central Conservatory, which has a thirteen acre campus, over 500,000 volumes in the Music Library, and more than 500 pianos. Needless to say, there is great appreciation for classical music in China. There are currently ten million Chinese children taking violin lessons, and 30 million are learning to play the piano.

Epilogue: On Saturday a lighter program was equally enjoyable -- Mama Mia. Not as far in the past as Mozart et al but a lot of nostalgia.

Other patrickWeb music-related stories

Music , Travels April 23, 2007 05:34 PM

New Home for patrickWeb

It was time for patrickWeb to get a new home. The original site -- ibm.com/patrick -- was setup in 1995 and IBM has been kind enough to continue to maintain the link. Then, after e-tirement at the end of 2001, I setup patrickWeb. For the first year I rented some server space in New York and then in 2003 moved patrickWeb over to Interland which was subsequently acquired and became Peer1. The dedicated IBM server at Peer1 in Miami has been very good for the past four years but managing it has become a bit complex and time consuming. With all the bad guys out there trying to hack into anything and everything there is a need for near constant surveillance -- even with all the automated tools. I decided that having a shared server with constant and professional monitoring was better than having a dedicated server with part time security inspections. patrickWeb's new home is at DreamHost.

DreamHost is an employee owned company. They seem to have a passion for providing solid web hosting at a very affordable price. For $7.95 per month you get more capacity than I can imagine using. They have no telephone support but the combination of a really good interface to their hosting environment plus a good Knowledgebase and normally responsive email support makes me feel confident. One thing I like is their status page where you can always see what is going on. Adding and managing databases is a piece of cake and Dreamhost includes full backup "snapshots" of your data at various regular intervals -- hourly, daily, and weekly.

Last weekend I bit the bullet and began the move of patrickWeb and other sites and related email that I manage over to Dreamhost. I changed the DNS servers at Network Solutions to point to the Dreamhost servers in Los Angeles instead of the Peer1 server in Miami. The change propagated through the Internet in a roughly a day and most everything works. There are a few glitches on patrickWeb that I haven't figured out yet. If you see some pages on the site that have a missing menu, that is one of the issues I am working on. Feedback on broken things is always welcome.

The cost, speed, and reliability of DreamHost is just one more reminder of how much the Internet is being woven into our lives. Not that long ago it was necessary to get a CD and install software on your PC to be enabled to utilize an application. Now you can get almost any application online. In the early days of dial-up modem connections to the Internet it wasn't practical to depend on the Net for applications. With "always-on" connections, high speed, dramatically low cost storage, and impressive new Web 2.0 interfaces (such as kayak.com), the Internet is really becoming the computer. The next phase is going to move that capability to our handheld and mobile devices. The Nintendo Wii with WiFi and the Opera browser offers a glimpse of the future that is right in front of us.

Home Automation , Internet Technology , Personal Computing April 18, 2007 02:12 PM

Politics

Politics is the process by which groups make decisions. A key part of the political system -- and one of the many great freedoms we have in America -- is the ability to vote. We often don't think about it, perhaps, and some people don't take the opportunity, but voting is very powerful because it can enable us to determine who our leaders will be and what policies will be followed. Some people thrive in the political environment, some complain about it, and a few throw their hat in the ring with a commitment to make government better. That is the case of James Marlow.

I met James more than a dozen years ago when he was at Lotus (subsequently with IBM). Some years later James, a native Georgian, invited me to come down to Atlanta and give a talk about the future of the Internet. At that point and for another six years James worked for Yahoo!. He has had a passion for politics for a couple of decades and when a U.S. Congressional opening occurred in Georgia's 10th District, James decided to make a run for it. There is going to be a special election in June. It will be a crowded field of potentially over a dozen candidates.  James says that his focus will be on "common sense solutions and bringing innovation to government". The specific areas he is going to hone in on are to improve education (the high school drop out rate is over 30%), healthcare (electronic medical records), and achieving energy independence.

I don't know anything about Georgia politics or about the opponents that James will face, but one thing I do know is that we need more people in government that have experience in the technology industry. The U.S. Senate includes 53 (53%) lawyers and the Congress overall includes 211 (39%). Many people feel that the American legal system is one of the nation's top domestic problems. If you feel that way then the fact that the lawyers in Congress have such influence over the political system may keep you up at night.

We need innovative yet simple policies to deal with the major problems in education, healthcare, energy, immigration, and defense. What are the odds of getting simple legislation from our Congress? Currently, congress is seeking advice from the biggest accounting firms to help them rewrite the income tax laws. What are the odds of the result being a simpler tax code? The laws adopted by Congress are highly complex, written by lawyers. Then lawyers represent plaintiffs to sue based on the laws. Then the defendants hire lawyers. When taxes are an issue, both plaintiff and defendant hire professional accountants. Then the accountants hire lawyers to make sure their advise isn't subject to drawing a suit, but advise often does draw a suit and then another set of plaintiffs and defendants hires another set of lawyers and we end up with layers of lawyers. All of them charging $200-$800 per hour.

The legal aspects of the political system are important. Solid principles have be at the cornerstone of the system and lawyers are needed to write, defend, and prosecute in the legal system. It is a matter of balance. Currently, one might argue that we are out of balance. The key problems of our country require innovative technology solutions. People die because of lack of modern technology in healthcare. We don't need complex layers of laws to solve this. We need visionary political leaders with technology backgrounds and experience at investing in and deploying advanced technology solutions. I hope when people go to the polls in June in Georgia's 10th district that they will look beyond political parties and examine the technology experience of the candidates.

Other patrickWeb stories in the people category

People April 9, 2007 10:48 AM