On March 8, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra announced that Mark Russell Smith would be its new music director and conductor. And as the Minneapolis-based musician serves as artistic director of orchestral studies at the University of Minnesota, director of new-music projects for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and music director for Virginia's Richmond Symphony Orchestra, his current positions alone made him sound an appropriate, and sufficiently intimidating, choice.
Yet a day before our recent phone interview, Smith received an e-mail from the Quad City Symphony Orchestra that managed to intimidate even him - a document, he says, titled "Repertoire from 1917 through 2007," listing every piece the venerable area institution has performed publicly during those nine decades.
Wow, I say.
"I know," he says. "It's a little light reading."
As
he prepares for his third solo studio album, the guitarist Johnny A.
- who will perform Saturday at the Redstone Room - wants to
return to where it all started nine years ago.
Throw
Me the Statue's debut album, Moonbeams,
was largely built by one man, and you can hear it in the synthesized
beats, the emphasis on front-loaded keyboards, the occasionally
oddball instrumentation, the aggressive processing, and a complete
disregard for the concept of "enough."
The
Cowboy Junkies first made a name for themselves with The
Trinity Session, recorded
live with a single microphone in a Toronto church in one night for a
couple hundred bucks.
