Meant to post this on Monday, but time got away from me: the St. Louis Symphony's Blogger's Night made Amanda Ameer's "Life's a Pitch," blog, which is part of the brilliant ArtsJournal network. Her post focused on the NY Philharmonic's Blogger's Night, but she mentions SLSO's Blogger's Night as another model, and includes substantial quotes from Eddie Silva about the joys of inviting rock bloggers down to Powell Hall. St. Louis Magazine gets a nice mention for Jordan Oakes' writeup of Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin Suite for Bloggers' Night 3. (You can read Margaret Bauer's writeup for Bloggers Night 2 here, and my writeup of the first Bloggers Night here.)
Amanda and Eddie also weighed in on the pros and cons of live-blogging or Tweeting from a velvet symphony hall chair. It's an interesting question. I was down at Powell on Saturday to hear Dvorak's New World Symphony (in the cheapie seats, two rows from the front - I could see through the bridge of the double bass!) so the experience of hearing live classical music is still pretty fresh in my mind. I asked myself, if I'd had a Blackberry in hand, what would I have tweeted about Dvorak? I know that symphony pretty well, but I am not a classical music writer, so I can't write with authority on the merits of the performance. I could have mentioned that I went by myself, because everyone else I knew wanted to go down to the Crack Fox to drink beer, and that it seemed to freak everyone out to see a lady solo at SLSO. Or that a woman got queasy during the Romeo and Juliet suite and had to be escorted out of the auditorium. Or that the pie at the concession stand looked tasty, but I didn't have any. Or that Ward Stare has a far more understated conducting style than David Robertson. But how relevant is any of this, really? On the other hand, I did notice that the median age of audience members seemed to be about 70, and if a layperson Tweeting the joys of Dvorak inspires more rock bloggers (or just rock and roll guys, sans blogs) to sit in the $16 dollar seats with me, I'll microblog it all over the place. Another ArtsJournal blog, Mind the Gap, weighed in on the hip factor with classical music yesterday; read that here.
On a related SLSO note, I interviewed Mr. Julio Iglesias last week - he will be performing at Powell Hall tomorrow night - and I hope to post that Q&A here before the end of the day. --Stefene Russell
