Since Chicago’s Orchestra Hall was retooled in 1997 there have been compaints, lots of them about the sound. Now the orchestra has hired another acoustics expert to see about fixing the sound. Chicago Tribune critics weigh in with their concerns. “In the discussions here, which also include CSO officials, sound consultants and performers, we tried to find out why the sound at Orchestra Hall has gotten worse since the 1997 renovation. Exactly how bad and why was at the core of our conversations.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Bocelli Spawn
There are those who think that one Andrea Bocelli is one to many. And then there is the music industry. “While the Tuscan tenor has inspired a following so devoted that it borders on being monotheistic, his success has sired a new musical genre and a host of fresh faces.” They’re known as “pop tenors, PBS tenors or Baby Bocellis,” and they’re selling millions and millions of recordings. “Bocelli and his brood have awakened the sleeping giant of the recording industry: devoted adult fans.”
A Vinyl Thing – Still Spinning
“Consumers who swear by LPs and their warm, analog sound have to search harder to find them, but thanks to the efforts of a small community of music lovers, even smaller record stores, and a handful of specialized record labels, the LP is still breathing. In fact, the cottage industry is thriving. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, manufacturers sold 177,000 (non-deejay) turntables to dealers, totaling $28 million in sales in 2001 alone.”
Tower Records’ Struggle
Music store giant Tower Records is struggling to get out of bankruptcy. “As 2002’s countdown to Christmas began, the family-held chain of 113 stores in 21 states – known for its steep prices, deep selection, and store band appearances – is in the hands of a corporate restructurer. The company recently cut 90 jobs and sold 51 profitable stores in Japan. More closings are imminent.”
My First Year At San Francisco Opera
Pamela Rosenberg’s first season as director San Francisco Opera has been marked by two things. “One is the theatrical style she has imported from her previous job at the Stuttgart Opera, marked by elaborately intellectual and sometimes baffling directorial conceits, as well as an unprecedented degree of theatrical commitment. The other is her ability to bring in gifted young singers to share the company’s roster with the big-name stars.”
The Sexualization Of Britten
Is it necessary that we know a composer’s sexual orientation to really appreciate his music? “The public sexualization of Benjamin Britten by scholars represents a nightmare come true for those who have spent decades grooming the composer’s image as an Everyman sort of genius. It has also shredded the genteel tissue of euphemism that allowed even the frankly homoerotic lust of Death in Venice to be described in asexual (“Dionysian”) terms only.”
Reimagining Buffy
“Fan fiction” is “a potent underground genre” where fans of fictional pop culture figures weave new stories from their own imaginations. “Cult TV series such as Smallville, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Star Trek inspire wild tangents of fancy and fornication” and the internet has given the genre a serious following.
Learning To Play The Game
“For countless authors, movies have proved a fatal temptation, savaging great novels from The Naked and the Dead to Portnoy’s Complaint, and corrupting F. Scott Fitzgerald and others who lived out their Hollywood years in drunken decline.” But in recent years, prominent writers have been finding success on the screen, “both by carefully choosing those who would adapt their books and by participating in the filmmaking process themselves.”
Too Much Heavy Lifting
Why must the British government try to coerce arts organizations who want funding? The arts get attached to education, to multiculturalism, to every social good of the moment. “There is a feeling across the performing arts that subsidised companies have been drained of vital energies during the Blair years – or, at the very least, have been distracted from their core function of creating art. A resentment has crept in. Many performers don’t want to be educators.”
Bolshoi Controversy
The inauguration of a new auditorium in the Bolshoi theatre complex “marks the end of the first phase of a £300 million restoration of one of the best-known buildings in Russia. But the rest of the project is in jeopardy as traditionalists and theatre administrators fight over the fate of the Beauvais Portico – the 10 marble columns around which the theatre was built. “Theatre managers want to see it moved from its current position – inside the stageworks of the old auditorium – to make room for improved stage machinery.”