Category: Concert

Friday Night Is Music Night has been broadcast on BBC Radio 2 continuously since 1953, devised to feature the extraordinary musicians of the BBC Concert Orchestra. It is now the longest-running orchestral radio programme in the world. I can’t imagine the founders ever planned for a quirky middle-aged American songwriter to hijack the entire thing…

Four years ago, I went to Potomac, Maryland, to conduct a concert version of Songs for a New World. Among the 87 instrumentalists and 35 singers involved was a woman named Nova Y. Payton, who sang the most electrifying version of “The Flagmaker” that I had ever heard.  I made a mental note that if…

Sutton Foster is a star. Broadway musical performers generally drive me crazy because I find they fall into one of two camps – either they’re insanely proficient, skilled beyond imagining, I-went-to-Carnegie-Mellon kind of dazzling where they can do anything you ask them and more, but they’re strangely cold, like they’re so busy pushing their talent…

For the majority of this residency, I’ve been focusing on writing and performing tracks for my new album, but since that album is now all but finished (fingers crossed), I thought it was time to look at some material that I haven’t played in a long time and see how it feels. I wrote “Hear…

The first time I recall meeting Stephen Schwartz was at a party at Daisy Prince’s apartment, before I had ever gotten any of my shows produced and long before anyone other than Daisy knew who I was. At a certain point in the party, most of the folks had wandered off to the dessert table…