Category: music

The new Eva-and-Katharina-Wagner regime at the Festspielhaus has begun presenting abridged versions of the Wagner canon intended for young viewers. Of this summer’s 70-minute Tannhäuser, Anthony Tommasini writes, “irreverent and completely charming  … I have seldom been among an audience of such delighted operagoers.”

“Citing money woes, the board of the nonprofit Healdsburg Jazz Festival has ousted festival founder and artistic director Jessica Felix – who created one of the country’s premier small-scale jazz celebrations – and scratched next year’s festival.”

“The New Jersey State Opera’s production of “Porgy and Bess” in May was heralded as both a cultural milestone for Newark and the rebirth of the company. But two months after the performances, opera officials owe about $230,000 — a third of all costs — to a variety of vendors and contracted workers, including the musicians in the orchestra.”

The 37-year-old Chen, the incoming MD of the Memphis Symphony and one of several promising women among the rising 30-something generation of conductors, takes over from the Sinfonietta’s founding music director, Paul Freeman, in 2011-12.

“The resignation is not immediate but will become effective on August 31, 2012, allowing the organization a period of two years to decide on a successor. Whoever takes up that torch will have some challenges to face: the group’s revenue was reportedly down by 20% last year.”

“People who do not believe in an open and tolerant society have always been wary of music. The ancient Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu advised rulers that in order to maintain a firm upper hand, they must forbid music.”

“Composer Leonid Desyatnikov called his position as the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre musical director ‘an interlude,’ and it is over. The theatre is entering its next season with a new musical leader, [63-year-old] conductor Vasily Sinaisky.”

Having led the Boston Pops since 1995, Lockhart takes the podium of the broadcaster’s pops orchestra, one “whose repertoire embraces classical, jazz, light music, contemporary and crossover.”

Mark Swed: “Carmen is a conductor’s opera. And if Dudamel is, in Esa-Pekka Salonen’s words, a conducting animal, he has now proved himself an opera animal as well, an utter natural for the lyric stage.”

“Blue whales are able to synchronize the pitch of their calls with an extremely high level of accuracy, and a very slim margin of error from call to call, according to a new study of the blue whale population in the eastern North Pacific.”