Nico Muhly

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.

From the magazine, my profile of Edwin Outwater, the very impressive musical director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. He’ll be taking his band up the road to Toronto on Thursday to the Royal Conservatory’s new Koerner Hall, for a program of music selected by the young composer/ party host Nico Muhly, whom some of us saw last year in Toronto opening for (and rather overshadowing) Final Fantasy at the Danforth Music Hall. The program will include a new piece by Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire, in which stethoscopes are used in a novel way. This Kitchener-Waterloo, as I have noted on several occasions, is an unusual and impressive place, and Edwin Outwater helps make it so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z2jwDcb9wI

I came off the campaign trail last night and went home, napped for three hours, went out for dinner, and then started listening to music I’ve been too busy to enjoy for a while. I thought I’d share some with you.