San Francisco Opera's Opera in the Ballpark event is one of the best things about living in San Francisco. I've been to every single simulcast, which the company presents once a year at the …
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 07:40PMMy life has been a bit of a blur between returning from working for the music division at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and preparing for the Public Radio Program Directors Confer…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 08:20PMOne of my final acts as a hired gun at the Library of Congress's music division this summer was to help the concert office produce a podcast to advertise its upcoming season. The challenge w…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 08:42PMIt's official: the classical music revolution has arrived.I think there can be no greater sign of this than the advent of the upcoming music festival created by Classical Revolution, a grass…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 02:16PMThe Library of Congress's Music Division looks like the archetypal government institution. The walls are beige. There's little natural light. The staff cubicles and reader study desks are un…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 02:56PMArtists as diverse as John Gay and Bono have long used the stage as a pulpit from which to preach a political, religious or social message. Al Green has come to realize the power of sharing …
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 11:23AMThere's an interesting disconnect at the Library of Congress in the way it presents some of its concerts.The Coolidge auditorium, where the venerable institution's live music programming gen…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 03:34PMSharon Jones, the amazing soul-funk diva whose groovy version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" recently changed my life, performed with her band, The Dap Kings, in a free concert …
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 06:15PMIt's interesting to read in Forbes about Beck's new album, which the indie pop star is releasing...wait for it...as a bunch of pieces of sheet music. Forbes hails the singer-songwriter's eff…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 12:14PMIncongruity can be a powerful thing when it comes to creating memorable arts experiences.The lively dissonance I experienced by chance over the weekend when a friend and I stumbl…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 11:20AMNo sejourn in the Washington DC area can be considered complete without a visit to the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, I'd heard on many occasions in the past.The open air, woo…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 08:30AMThe Athenaeum must be one of the loveliest hidden delights of Boston. I went there over the weekend while I was in town recording an episode of VoiceBox about street musicians with my friend…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 09:46AMAs I wandered around The Phillips Collection's monthly evening "party", it struck me, as it so often does at these things, that the formula is getting tired.The milling around, the live band…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 08:01AMThomas Choinacky likes Kate Winslet. A lot.In Thomas Is Titanic, the solo performer's sweet, self-absorbed show at DC's Capital Fringe Festival, Choinacky shows us the inner workings of an o…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 08:02AMThe Library of Congress is consistently giving me more to snack on during my lunch breaks than mere sandwiches and coffee. I get food for thought here on a regular basis. Right now, I am sit…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 12:24PMAs an arts journalist who covers a very broad spectrum of musical genres, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of the etiquette that surrounds the start times of various different …
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 03:54PMWith Beertown, The Washington DC-based ensemble theatre company Dog & Pony has created a theatrical universe that is so compelling and inclusive that one barely notices two and a half ho…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 08:34AMThe year was 2006 when Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a musical about the United State's bullish seventh president was first developed.The piece was workshopped by the New York-based experime…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 09:49AMJuly in Washington DC is the perfect month for a Fringe Festival. It's unbearably hot and muggy outside and much more blissful to be indoors experiencing weird and wonderful performances.I a…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 10:00AMThe picture to your left shows a bunch of Washington DC Fringe Festival audience members reenacting a scene from a children's book about human reproductivity.The people in the photo, which I…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 12:19PMOne of the great delights of working at The Library of Congress is being able to attend all manner of lectures on marvelously obscure subjects.Yesterday's fascinating jaunt through the cultu…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 11:13AMThe Daily Telegraph reports that sales of the Tallis Scholars' recording of Thomas Tallis great, 40-art choral work, Spem In Alium, rapidly rose this week owing to readers of E L James's ero…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 09:44AMThe first thing I did after I first landed on the East Coast in 1998 was attend the July 4 celebrations. I was just about to embark upon a fellowship year at Harvard and I have dim memories …
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 09:37AMOne of the things you don't want to do in Washington DC in July or August is go outside. So it's a good thing that the three buildings of The Library of Congress, where I am currently workin…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 06:57PMHesperus, an early music trio, rounded out the 2012 Washington DC Early Music Festival by performing a live soundtrack of assorted Medieval European music to a screening of the 1923 movie ve…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 10:28AMI often think that the most satisfying concert experiences follow a narrative arc. And I particularly love it when programmers manage to move an audience from one set of feelings and experie…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 03:16PMIt's hard to fault The Scottsboro Boys. The 2010 John Kander and Fred Ebb musical, which is currently running at San Francisco's Geary stage in an arresting co-production between the America…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 05:01PMI've known about the Djerassi Resident Artists Program for quite a while.Carl Djerassi, the scientist-turned-playwright who founded the residencies on his spectacular ranch in the Los Altos …
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 02:41PMThe San Francisco Opera's company premiere production of John Adams' Nixon in China left me feeling a bit nonplussed on the whole apart from one thing: Hye Jung Lee's performance as th…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 02:16PMIt's sometimes the case that I go to the theatre to see a new drama and walk away struggling to figure out where exactly the play lay amid the myriad ideas, words, sounds and images that wer…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 03:04PMArts journalists should make a point of attending arts events with people under the age of 20. I'm saying this having attended a production of The Magic Flute this week at San Francisco Oper…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 01:58PM