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The Toronto Symphony touts next season’s programming as “balanced.” “You might think that an orchestra that’s all ours would aim to be reflect where it lives; and that ‘balanced’ would imply some kind of symphonic variations on the old rhyme about something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. But at the TSO next year, the old and the borrowed trump everything else. The new is hardly there, and as for the blue – well, that would describe the mood of anyone scanning the new schedule for music created in Canada.”

The early music movement changed the way we listened to msuci of the Baroque and earlier. “As audiences, we have already got used to the idea that the music of Monteverdi or Bach is normally played and sung with pure tone, without the use of steady vibrato, a minute fluctuation of pitch intended to make the sound more intense. With the aid of period orchestras we are gradually accustoming ourselves to the same sound for Haydn and Mozart — even, on occasion, for Beethoven. But surely here, on the threshold of the Romantic era, pure tone must be questionable.” Should we ban vibrato in Brahms and Schumann and…?

The success of 23-year-old Norah Jones, singing a traditional mix of jazz, has piqued recording company interest. “Older listeners are gravitating to the authentic, organic sound of Norah’s records. She speaks to a huge group of people that the music business has forgotten and declared irrelevant. The latest sales statistics confirm the relevance of that neglected group. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, consumers 45 years and older now constitute a quarter of the record market and are the fastest-growing group of music buyers.”

The New Jersey Symphony has pulled off a deal to buy 30 priceless string instruments – including 12 Stradivari violins – for $18 million. It “is believed by experts to be the first time in history that any ensemble has purchased so many instruments from Italy’s Golden Age at one time – and that includes during the lifetime of Antonio Stradivari himself. Details of the deal are to be released at a press conference in Newark on Wednesday.”

The US Congress declared 2003 the Year of the Blues. But the blues are in trouble. “When the blues tries to grab a mainstream crowd, it cleans up and cools down a genre that began as raw field songs and work hollers. Today’s popular version reeks of facsimile, with theatricality replacing raw passion, and mimicry usurping originality. Rare is today’s blues singer or guitarist who doesn’t call to mind his biggest influences with familiar riffs first played with fire a half-century ago. Rarer still is the songwriter who can craft an inventive blues tune. It is as if imagination has been banned.”

Construction began Monday on the Norwegian capital’s new opera house. “The project, budgeted at NOK 3.3 billion (nearly USD 500 million), sparked years of political debate. Oslo’s current opera house at the central square known as Youngstorget is well past its prime, but the sheer cost of a new opera, not to mention where it should be located, was the subject of seemingly endless argument.”