Recent Blog Posts

Here is a clip from 2013 where you can see Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s performance as Music Director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra conducting Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overture ‘Romeo and Juliet’

The Salzburg Festival starts this year on July 18 and goes through August 30.

The Vienna Philharmonic will perform their first concert on July 25 with ‘Les Fresques de Piero della Francesca’ by Bohuslav Martinů. The frescoes in the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo in Italy were his inspiration for this concert. The actual world premiere of this concert took place in 1956 also at the Salzburg Festival and was then conducted by Rafael Kubelik. The conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic this year is Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a native of Montreal.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s bio and accomplishments can be found on his website: (http://www.yannicknezetseguin.com/biography.html).

During the Salzburg Festival, he will also be conducting Anton Bruckner’s Mass No. 3 in F minor.

Should your summer travels take you to Austria this year, a stop at the Salzburg Festival will surely be a special event.

Tickets are still available: http://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/summer

A song about a cultural man, who respects his spiritual dreams.

Born in a small town close to Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, the mbira master Linos Wengara Magaya plays and teaches a mix of traditional and modern mbira-reggae style music. The instruments he plays are the marimba, a wooden Xylophone, the mbira, which is called a thumb piano, the hosho (a pair made of maranka gourds which typically contain hota (Canna indica) seeds inside to make that typical rattling sound) and the bass.

The hosho are original instruments used in Shona music, especially together with the mbira and the marimba, the hosho are mostly considered the lead instruments by the mbira players.

“Her figure is amazing for a cow of her age,” said judge Klaus-Dieter Augustin at the pageant in Oldenburg, Germany. Lady Gaga, the name given to this beauty of a cow, prevailed last Thursday against about 200 participating cows from Germany and Luxembourg. Days before the actual event, the cows were kept in a training camp, receiving special diet and extensive grooming. Cow beauticians were at hand to provide perfect grooming for the event. A farmer, Henrik Willie, is the proud owner of this most beautiful cow. To celebrate her big award, he said, Lady Gaga will be washed and milked, before receiving an extra portion of hay.

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Mountain Man (Echo 2015 Live Show)

By Sabina Wrightsman

Andreas Gabalier is a very well known Austrian folk singer who received several music awards. In 2012, he won the ECHO (an association of German recording companies organized to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry) award in the folk music category, the Amadeus Austrian Music Award, also in 2012, as Best Live Act and best ‘Schlager’ (pop song) singer and in 2013, again the Amadeus award in Folk music category.

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By Sabina Wrightsman

In the late 1980s, I started managing translations of telephone scripts. One of my first tasks was to cross check all numbers between the original language and the translation, the asterisk (*) and the pound key (#), to make sure that ‘press 1’ was really translated as ‘press 1’ and not accidentally as ‘press 7’.

Even though the beginning of the end for the rotary dial came in 1963, not many people switched over to a touch-tone keypad right away or knew about them. It took a while for everybody to understand the additional ‘star’ and the ‘pound’ key. At that time, telephone systems were popping up everywhere, often very complicated.

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By Amanda Scott

Over the weekend music-goers got more than they bargained for at the Rock am Ring Festival in Mendig, Germany, when 33 people, including production crew and concert attendees, were struck by lightning. It was actually two separate strikes that occurred within hours of each other causing injuries. No one suffered a direct lightning strike and all of the injured are now being observed at local hospitals.

The festival, which ran through Sunday June 7th, continued as planned with an expected 90,000 music lovers. Headliners of the concert included two popular American bands, Foo Fighters and Slipknot, The Prodigy, an English electronic music group hailing from Braintree, UK, and Germany’s native Die Toten Hosen, a punk band whose name literally means ‘the dead pants’. Interestingly, all members of Die Toten Hosen, a highly successful band, are self-taught musicians. They have been playing together for thirty plus years. Check out this song, Tage Wie Diese (German) or Days Like These, from their most recent 2012 album.

By Amanda Scott

Babies start using their hands and arms to communicate around nine months of age. Often first learning to wave, clap, or point. Now, some babies are also learning sign language.  Sign language is giving parents a way to communicate with their babies well before they are effectively able to communicate through conversational language.

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Frank Barham was an amazing jazz musician and a disability activist. In 1980 at the age of 24, he was paralyzed in a car crash, and despite being in a wheelchair, he never gave up playing music.

In order to raise money for the charity ‘Wheel 2 Live’ and in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, he started rolling in his wheelchair from Atlanta to Savannah on May 11, 2015, travelling about 30 miles per day, stopping at various places, raising awareness and raising money for the charity. He retraced the route of Gen. William Sherman’s “March to the Sea” during the Civil War. Barham Along the way, he met many people and on some days he even received a police escort. People contributed money to his campaign and offered lunch to the team.

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