Category: music

“For several months, the board had been asking the C-Jazz executive director for a detailed rundown of expenses and cash flow required for the 2010 festival. It wasn’t until … two days before the festival that we finally got a look. We were surprised that our wishes to scale down the festival following the difficult 2009 festival were, for the most part, disregarded.”

“Nézet-Séguin has conducted only two programs with the Philadelphians, in 2008 and 2009 – less contact than any other future leader has had since Leopold Stokowski was hired at age 30 in 1912, having never conducted them at all. Clearly, there are unknowns. Yet you get the feeling that this eager, deeply enthusiastic maestro will do anything he’s asked.”

“Adams is deeply interested in the broader musical dimensions of culture, how pop music and classical music coexist and sometimes cross-fertilize, how composers need audience feedback, how musical generations succeed one another and how some artists will fight quixotic battles to their dying day, holding true to avant-garde orthodoxy no matter how isolating it is.”

“All along the way, Nézet-Séguin gave good-humored syllable-by-syllable lessons on how to pronounce his name (Yah-NEEK Neh-ZAY Say-GUN), a conflation of his mother’s maiden name, Claudine Nézet, and the family name of his father, Serge Séguin. The day’s best mispronunciation was at City Hall with Nutter: It came out something like ‘Unique Cezanne.'”

“A group of organisers that represents independent music festivals in the UK and Ireland claim that if fees aren’t cut, fans could suffer. They say the money top acts are demanding to play has continued to rise despite the recession. Last year’s festivals were estimated to have brought in £130m for the UK economy.”

As the legendary opera house “reopens in a limited season after a seemingly interminable eight years of upheaval, including three years of complete closure, the feeling for many is more of outrage than affection. … Like much else in volatile Argentina, … the project has lurched from crisis to crisis, plagued by grandstanding, cronyism and economic mismanagement.”

“The restoration on the organ will be undertaken by Harrison and Harrison Ltd, its original creators. The work, which is the final phase of revamp of the building on London’s South Bank, will finish by 2013.”

Dahl thought of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” on which “The Golden Ticket” is based, “as his most musical story. But his widow, Felicity, says that didn’t help it get to the stage. ‘I think there is a problem in the opera world — that they associate the story with children,’ she says. ‘There’s great difficulty in getting new repertoire for children in opera.'”

Since 2006, Rhythm Road, a State Department-funded arts diplomacy initiative administered by Jazz at Lincoln Center, “has sent more than 100 musicians on tours to 97 different countries, most of them outside the reach of American music. … The program is a revival of the Jazz Ambassadors of the Cold War,” this time with more teaching.

“The company finished the year with its net worth down substantially and sizable debts looming in coming years. In financial statements, filed on Monday, the opera house listed net assets of $236 million, down from $380 million a year earlier.”