The LA Phil has a vastly improved website.... Soho the Dog is selling Strauss and Mahler T-shirts (profits go to a worthy cause).... NYC classical station WQXR is collecting votes for its annual Classical Countdown, held at the end of December. Wouldn't it be great to have some post-Tchaikovsky music pop up in the most popular category? I suggest a twentieth-century classic on the order of The Rite of Spring or the Quartet for the End of Time.... On December 5, Bob Shingleton's Future Radio broadcasts all four hours of Alvin Curran's marvelous Inner Cities piano cycle. In college, I put Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum on the air, then spent the afternoon working on my senior thesis, needing only to change the CDs once an hour.... Song of the day: Brooklyn band Barbez plays a wonderfully spooky arrangement of "The Portrait" from Schnittke's ballet Esquisses.
