Filarmonica della Scala

Prova Aperta March 8, 2009 Originally published in Pinball People, March 2009, and re-posted here. Carl Maria von Weber Oberon, Ouverture Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Concerto in E minor, opus 64 for violin and orchestra Robert Schumann Symphony no. 4 in D minor, opus 120 It’s rare that one gets to see the workings of an orchestra …

La Scala

1 February 2009 Quartetto d’archi della Scala Giacomo Puccini, Crisantemi, elegia per quartetto Giuseppe Verdi, Quartetto in mi min. per archi Giuseppe Verdi, Antologia da “Rigoletto”, arranged for strings by A. Melchiori This originally appeared in Pinball People in February 2009; I’m re-posting here. I was a bit skeptical about going to see a string …

Zombie Rock and the Duke of Hazard

What’s going on with hipster music? It’s an interesting question. About ten years ago I wanted to write a piece for my local weekly, Baltimore City Paper, on how the fuzzed-out, overdriven indie rock of my youth, largely springing from the AmRep and Touch & Go labels, had been replaced by another genre with the same …

On the Last Rock Star

On a hot August evening, the sun was setting over Barricata beach out on the Po Delta. The beach bar was deserted and the lifeguard-cum-barman started up his tractor and began to pick up the sunbeds. To do his work he put on the sound system and turned it up, loud. Sandwiched between the usual …

Evergreen

Note, September 26, 2025: Thanks to industrious Louisville underground archivists, we’ve got what is likely one of the first Britt shows on the YouTubes. A good amount of jams, some of Sean playing guitar, and three songs which were later recorded — Plastic Bag, Remembering the Queen and Beat. A rowdy summer party on the …

Superheroes

To conclude all this southeastern Europe-focused posting on a positive note, I strongly urge all fans of energetic guitar-based music to check out Belgrade’s excellent Stuttgart Online and to buy their infectious album Radost Svakom Domaćinstvu. They definitely capture the dada-street art sound of late seventies Belgrade as immortalized on the anthology Paket Aranzman — …