Category: music

“Despite the brutal economy, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association scored another financially solid performance in fiscal 2010,” with the fourth surplus in a row and fundraising, single ticket sales and the endowment all up from the previous year.

Ian Bostridge writes about a troika of singers that fired opera stages and composers’ imaginations in the early 1700s: Francesco Borosini, for whom Handel wrote two of his greatest operatic roles (Bajazet and Grimoaldo); Annibale Pio Fabri, another Handel regular and one of Vivaldi’s top stars; and John Beard, a London theater star who sang the heroes in many of Handel’s late oratorios.

Russian musician Yulianna Avdeeva has become the first woman in 45 years to win the prestigious Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, Poland.

“I think if the human has conflict in his soul and with everything, then this system of 12-tone music is exactly good for this. But if you have no more conflict with people, with the world, with God, then it is not necessary. You have no need to have a Browning in your pocket, or a dagger.”

“What dance needs from music is not very interesting to me. … You just saw three dance pieces of mine, and I didn’t choose the choreographers. They chose me. And at the Morphoses one, they didn’t even choose me – they were assigned me. So they’re not my choreographers; I didn’t choose to work for them.”

Tom Service: “The miniature song Owls: An Epitaph – halting, dissonant, weird – is the most powerful corrective I know to the image of Elgar as moustachioed imperialist.”

The feedback shows how alienated young people feel by traditional concerts and how they blame their own lack of knowledge when they fail to enjoy the music.

“Krzysztof Urbanski has been named music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. He’s the seventh music director in the ISO’s 80-year history, and the youngest musician to hold that post with the orchestra.”

“The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra faced some unexpected dissonance off the stage last year, but its leaders think the orchestra is poised to emerge from the economic ritardando it has been in since 2008.”

“A group of American musicians who play gamelan, a traditional form [sic] of Balinese music, are so good that they were invited to appear at this year’s Bali Arts Festival. They were the only non-Indonesian group ever to participate in the festival’s music competition.”