Category: music

“Detroit Symphony Orchestra musicians, who have been on strike since Oct. 4, have announced that they will picket Friday night’s concert at Orchestra Hall by jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater. The concert, part of the DSO’s Paradise Jazz Series, will be the first performance the players have picketed since going on strike.”

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, composer Diedre Murray and director Diane Paulus are cutting and adapting Gershwin’s opera to fit a Broadway-style format; the result will open next September at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA.

There’s “a national effort to guide visually impaired people through the arts. A small group of volunteers, trained by Vision Australia, began offering the service in Victoria in the mid 1990s before spreading to other cities.”

Simon Woods, who left the top job at the New Jersey Symphony after only a few months to run the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, is returning to the US. He steps in full-time at the Seattle Symphony – which had lacked a permanent executive director since last February – next May, joining incoming music director Ludovic Morlot.

“‘Thumb piano’ is a generic, westernised name for a range of different sub-Saharan lamellophones (instruments played by plucking tuned fixed metal tines or keys). Usually, thumb piano refers to either the mbira or its more modernised variant, the kalimba.” The Guardian explains where they come from and how they work.

The experimental Toronto opera company Urbanvessel is using an actual boxing ring as the set for its next production, Voice-Box. The singers will have black eyes and boxing gloves; blows to the head are off-limits.

“The orchestra shaved $1.6million from its previous year’s budget by reducing expenses, including a 13 percent cut in pay and benefits for musicians and staff. Also, the orchestra paid off its long-term bank debt of $7million from unrestricted funds in its endowment, saving about $400,000 a year in interest costs.”

“On a boat back from Ischia, in Mannheim tram station, in a supermarket in Frankfurt. Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Bartók have been performed. The pocket orchestra always appears spontaneously, the cellists using extra-long spikes to steady their instruments while standing — or finding somewhere to perch.”

“It would have cost at least £80 million to renovate the Palace Theatre to accommodate ROH productions, and at least £1.5 million a week to house the companies and stage performances. Nor was it was ever clear that there was any genuine call or need for such an extravagant venture.”

“Is it possible to write music that a majority of people would think sounds ugly for an orchestra playing their instruments using established and accepted techniques?”