Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Tonight was the last concert of the regular Symphony Hall season for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, with our final production of Berlioz’s Te Deum. (For those keeping track at home, that’s two seasons in a row that we’ve closed out with Berlioz, though the Te Deum is a different order of magnitude–literally–from Les Troyens.)
It was [...]

Last Friday’s Billboard classical chart featured the debut of the two BSO CDs on which I performed, the Brahms Requiem and Ravel Daphnis et Chloé. (A third BSO recording in which I participated, Bolcom’s Symphony No. 8, is only available as a download.) The Ravel was at number 8 on the top 10, and the [...]

I apologize for the plethora of linkblog posts here over the past little bit, and for their relative paucity. It’s been a busy few months. I got a new boss and transitioned from a “second product manager” to more of a lead role, at about the same time that we launched a set of significant [...]

I finally got around to ordering copies of the BSO’s Brahms Requiem recording (BSO Classics 0901); thanks to commenter SteelyTom for the prompt. I don’t, alas, have a SuperCD player or even good speakers at my disposal and am listening to it in my car and over headphones. But I’m enjoying it nonetheless.
As I wrote [...]

Words cannot express the emotions I felt, after a weekend in the 50s, I awoke this morning to see big fat flakes of snow coming down. I keep thinking that I’m used to it, but at heart I’m still a Virginia boy; snow is a rare treat at the beginning of winter and a stupefying [...]

Winter sure came in with a roar. I didn’t go to the office on Friday–we had pushed a new release of our software late Thursday night, and I knew that the storms this weekend were going to snarl up traffic Friday afternoon. So I used the snowblower on the driveway Saturday morning–we had about ten [...]

It’s a perfect storm today: I have family commitments at home, significant redesign of our customer dashboard and our entire portal due tomorrow, a software release that begins at 9 PM tonight… and six to twelve inches of snow due starting late tomorrow morning, with up to 1 to 2 inches of snow per hour.
I [...]

Three things entwine for me this morning: the beginning of the Christmas season, the 100th birthday of Olivier Messiaen, and the crack in the wall of Old South Church.
I spent Monday night and Tuesday morning in rehearsals for the upcoming Boston Pops holiday concerts at Symphony Hall (my performance schedule: 12/12 4 PM and 8 [...]

Random collection of thoughts this morning:

I just rode on my first Segway this morning. One of our QA engineers was an employee and got a pre-production experimental model as part of his severance, and he brought it in this morning. My question to him after tooling around a little on it: how on earth did [...]

The endgame of the 2008 election season is interesting in a few ways. First, I find it interesting that Obama’s numbers go way up after people get to see him in action (e.g. during debates), and start to edge back down when robocalls and other personal attacks start to hit. In particular, it’s interesting to [...]

As promised earlier, I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts about our performances of the Requiem this weekend, now that I have some distance on the music (meaning: the third movement fugue is no longer obsessively pounding in my head).
I have a long history with the Requiem. I first almost performed it in the [...]

I’ve been in rehearsals all week at Symphony Hall for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus’s first concert of the 2008-2009 Symphony Hall season, the Brahms Requiem with the Boston Symphony under James Levine. It’s an amazing work–I’ll try to describe it in more detail after our performances. But the two really amazing things for this weekend [...]

Two stories caught my eye in the Globe, one with proximity to my vocation and one to my avocation.
The first was regarding the undeveloped land to the south of our offices in Burlington. Pointedly subtitled “city can’t develop land in Burlington, Woburn,” the story details the ongoing dance between citizens of the suburbs who want [...]

I was about to delete an email from Bob Cramblitt on my old blog, until I actually read it and realized it was relevant to at least some of my readers:
Hi Tim:
Thought you’d like to know that Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Jason Fried and others are coming to Boston for the Business of Software 2008 [...]

Seriously, people, what is going on with the rain out here? We have had deluging thunderstorms every day this week. There was a stranded van on my commute this morning. On Route 2A in Burlington, for heavens’ sake.
On Monday this week, I was picking up some things at the Walgreens in Arlington Heights, which has [...]