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Yes. After almost three years, 471 posts, 292 comments and 844 tags, we’re killing off the OAE Blog, and this is the last post.
Why?! We hear you ask…
Well…the answer is that it’s gaining a new lease of life. We’re integrating it into our new website, which is essentially a very large blog. Almost everything is a blog entry. It’s broken down into events, people, instruments, shop items and of course regular blog entries, and each of these appears in a ‘stream’ of items on the site.
So, you’ll no longer have to visit two places. Everything will be in one place. There’ll be no change in content, we’ll still bring you all the behind the scenes news, pictures and so on, but you’ll also, on the same site, be able to browse concerts, buy a CD and even make a donation.
All the old blog articles here have been imported into the new site, but we’ll also leave this here as a resource. but we wont be updating it anymore.
We’re hoping the new site will go live in the next few days…we’ll keep you updated, but you’ll be able to find it here. (update – it’s now live!)
Thanks for reading the OAE Blog – we’re a little sad to see it go, but we’re also confident this will be an exciting new future for it!
A couple of weeks ago our press team were busy getting papers and the Today programme interested in our story around Mozart Piano Concerto No.23. The press always like a picture to go with a story, so we hunted high and low for a picture of Barbara Ployer – Mozart’s pupil, who the concerto was most likely written for. We searched. And searched. And searched. But came up with nothing. It started to look hopeless. However Natasha, our communications intern, came to the rescue with some highly advanced photoshop skills and, using photographs of OAE staff members Katy Bell (Press Manager) and William Norris (Communications Director) as a starting point, and also piecing together documentary and historical evidence pointing to what Barbara Ployer looked like, she presented to us two startlingly lifelike images. These advanced photomontages are probably the closest we can get today to knowing what Mozart’s pupil looked like.
And, slightly more seriously, we did in the end source a sketch of Barbara Ployer, see it with the Guardian press story here.
Ahead of our The Works performance tonight, in which we’ll be giving the audience a guided tour of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.23, here a video with pianist Robert Levin talking about how differently things would have been done in Mozart’s day.
Another feature of tomorrow’s The Works event is a special speed-dating session after the show. Well, speed-networking is maybe a better way to express it, but we’re going to use the structure of speed-dating to enable the audience to meet the Orchestra. There will be 10 tables in the foyer post show each with a player on, who’ll be primed and ready to answer all your questions. Unlike a real date however there can be several audience members per player! You’ll have 5 minutes at each table after which time a bell will go and you’ll have to move onto the next table.
BBC Music Magazine picked up on this a couple of issues ago, with a great little article and brilliant cartoon by Jonty Clark of Double Bass Chi-chi Nwanoku enjoying a particularly hot date…
Many thanks to BBC Music Magazine for allowing us to reproduce this article.
Here at OAE towers we are just having our coffee and getting set up for the week ahead. It’s a busy start to the week though as tomorrow sees the launch of our brand-new concert series, The Works. Here’s a trailer for tomorrow night’s event:
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