Music as passport to the world
When I was a teenager learning to play the fiddle, it was all about the tunes. Tunes were the passport into the white-hot center of the late-night sessions, and that’s where I wanted to be. Soon, the tunes revealed themselves as different languages and dialects. I realized that I could learn a few tunes in each language and participate in any session, or I could choose one style, learn the language, and work my way into the middle of that bonfire. Read This Blog

Whammy! It’s the Grammys
Hilary Hahn, the Pacifica Quartet, and a few other string players brought home the bacon from the 51st Annual Grammy Awards. Hahn won in the Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (with Orchestra) category for Schoenberg/Sibelius: Violin Concertos (Deutsche Grammophon), with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Hahn talks about the recording here.

The Pacificas won the Best Chamber Music Performance category for their Elliott Carter: String Quartets Nos. 1 and 5 (Naxos). Pacifica violist Masumi Per Rostad talks about the Carter quartet cycle here.

Conductor Bernard Haitink and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra won the Best Orchestral Performance category for their Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4 (CSO Resound). Read a review of the CD and multimedia DVD here.

Bluegrass fiddler and country singer Alison Krauss and Robert Plant’s Raising Sand (Rounder) was a monster hit. The duo mopped up the competition and won Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album, Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, and Best Country Collaboration with Vocals.
BeauSoleil and Cajun fiddler Michael Doucet won Best Zydeco or Cajun Music Album for Live at the 2008 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. For a complete list of winners, visit grammy.com.

Sphinx Announces Winners
Cellist Tony Rymer, 19, of Boston, Massachusetts, won the 12th annual Sphinx Competition, Senior Division, in Detroit, Michigan, on February 1. Rymer was awarded $10,000, a one-year contract for career management, a professional CD engineered by Naxos, and an opportunity to appear as soloist with a few major symphony orchestras. Cellist Khari Joyner, 17, of Atlanta, Georgia, was named the First Place Junior Division Laureate in the competition. He’ll also receive scholarships and appearances with orchestras. The Sphinx Organization promotes the participation of string players of color as well as the creation, performance, and preservation of works by black and Latino composers.

Levine to Be Remembered
Aldo Parisot and the Yale Cellos, violinist Syoko Aki, and several others will pay tribute to the late violist Jesse Levine, professor of the practice of viola and chamber music at Yale University and coordinator of the string department, in a memorial concert February 22 in Battell Chapel on the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut. Current viola students will perform the first movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, and professor Levine’s former students will follow up with a special arrangement of Schubert’s “An die Musik.” Levine died in November from pancreatic cancer.

Master of Space
German violinist Julia Fischer will take part in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Master Class Series, which will have one or two musicians perform onsite at the Kimmel Center with Fischer and one or two musicians broadcast through two-way Internet2 video conferencing from the University of Florida. Fischer will give her master class on May 26.