Jonny Greenwood

I just wanted to let people know what an extraordinary debut recording the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony has made under its fearless artistic director, Edwin Outwater. (It’s hardly the orchestra’s first recording, just the first under the new guy’s baton.) I wrote about Outwater two years ago. He’s a Californian who rather effortlessly mixes the standard orchestral repertoire with some really wild new compositions and multimedia projects. This season he’ll lead the orchestra in… something… he’s cooked up with the physicists at Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing. That’s the sort of thing he does. K-W already had a very good orchestra and, bizarrely, one of the two or three best concert halls in Canada. Outwater takes the whole package to another level.