Kent State was elated to get their hands on the quartet. "This is easily a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our university," says Jerome LaCorte, director Kent/Blossom Music, Kent State's annual festival and music school. "I was surprised to learn they were leaving Miami, without a doubt. It's rare enough to get a single teacher of such high-caliber performing and teaching ability, let alone four."
The quartet will become full-time artists in residence at Kent State this fall, bringing a prominence that LaCorte expects will help the university recruit top-tier musicians. "They're certainly one of the top four or five young to middle-aged quartets in the world," he says.
Jonathan Postal
One of Erin's admirers puts things into
perspective
Related Content
More About
Got your Sissel tickets? Didn't think so.
As if the demotion of long-time Morning Edition voice Bob Edwards, the double-barrel weekend assault of A Prairie Home Companion, and the co-opting of the station's alleged reporting staff by Harold news readers were not motive enough to tear up the donation check to WLRN-FM (91.3), National Public Radio local affiliate, the station's recent spate of grating promo spots is.
Listeners lately have been forced to endure the aural spectacle of folk and acoustic music show host Michael Stock doing a breathless jig (referencing Riverdance, not Antonioni) in a plug for his program, and an endlessly airing, painfully perky pitch for Carmen Pelaez's one-woman show, Rum and Coke ("refreshing and delicioso!").
Nothing, however, quite matches the sonic terror caused by any of several WLRN house ads for an upcoming performance by "Norwegian singer/songstress Sissel." An early version of the ad trumpeted that the May 4 concert in Fort Lauderdale would be Sissel's first "members only" benefit concert, failing to note that the beneficiary was WLRN. For $180, donors get a pair of tickets and the new Sissel CD My Heart. (Though Sissel's vocals are featured in the movie Titanic, her style more resembles a Scandinavian Enya than Celine Dion of the fjords.)
Dan Nelson, WLRN's pledge producer, says the irrepressible voice who has been hissing "Sissel!" over the airwaves for the past months is a professional ad-reader from a talent agency, not a member of the WLRN on-air staff.
Nelson adds that South Floridians seem less taken with Sissel than other supporters in her multicity, PBS-affiliated tour, with many tickets still unsold for the 600-seat theater at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. "Every other station has done incredibly well with her," says Nelson. "I'm talking about selling out 2000-seat halls in a matter of hours."
Nelson says he expects the station's upcoming pledge drive to increase the glacial pace of ticket sales, and notes, "I think there's so much stuff to do in Miami, people aren't really paying attention."
