Dudamel visits MIT
Conductor and violinist Gustavo Dudamel will be visiting MIT today to accept the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts. Part of the awards ceremony will include a session with Dudamel conducting the MIT Symphony Orchestra; I'll be on stage playing Oboe and English Horn on Rimsky Korsakov and Mozart. Our regular conductor (Adam Boyles) has been prepping us for this by taking, erm, unusual liberties in tempo and phrasing.
I'm not usually very aware of names of conductors, but I have heard Dudamel's float across WQXR on occasion. The evening promises to be exciting.
Non sequitur. You can join PDF files together using pdftk input1.pdf input2.pdf input3.pdf cat output output.pdf. You can also use GhostScript, but this results in quality degradation since the file gets converted to PostScript first. (This may also explain why we keep finding 2.5GB PostScript files filling up our server disks.)