Category: music

“Levine, the Boston Symphony’s music director, said doctors told him he’s made great progress, but have advised him to ‘err on the side of caution and take the summer off to recuperate more fully from the two back surgeries of this past year.’ Levine’s latest surgery was in April.”

“The venerated institution will change its name to the Glimmerglass Festival starting next summer to reflect a broader array of productions and events. For 2011, the festival is expanding its scope to include regular productions of Broadway musicals plus expanded offerings of concerts, cabaret and readings.”

“‘Destructive and hurtful to the professional musicians and the marketplace of Chicago’ is how Gary Matts, president of the Chicago Federation of Musicians, characterizes the Harris Theater’s electing to replace the Chicago Sinfonietta with [a university orchestra] for the Chicago premiere of [Mark] Morris’ ‘Romeo and Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare’….”

“One reason to link to the videos at all is that opera companies themselves are putting them out there more and more as a way to promote what they’re doing. Which is well and good; but it’s a mistake to equate them with a movie trailer in terms of giving you a sense of what to expect when you get into the house.”

Anthony Tommasini: “[The] idea that unadventurous audiences keep classical music conservative is part of the accepted narrative within the field. From what I can tell, no comparable resistance to contemporary music has afflicted ballet, least of all New York City Ballet,” which has been working with new scores for its entire existence, going back to the Balanchine-Stravinsky partnership.

“The one thing we’re trying to fight against is this notion that jazz is this mysterious code people are trying to break,” says founder Brice Rosenbloom. With a $35 ticket price (about $1 per act), “the main thing is to get people in the door.”

Terry Teachout: “What, if anything, justifies the existence of a regional symphony orchestra in the 21st century? Many people still believe that an orchestra is a self-evidently essential part of what makes a city civilized. But is this true? … The best regional theater companies and museums provide an aesthetic experience that cannot be duplicated by any other means. Not so third-tier orchestras.”

“Bring an esoteric 30-year-old German ensemble that specializes in extremely complex, sometimes inscrutable, music to perform on the West Coast for the first time. Program the concert with works of a dead white guy with an Italian name. And what do you get? … That’s right, a bowl full of seniors who swayed and danced in their seats. Who whooped and hollered and whistled. Who appeared to have a working knowledge of controlled substances.”

We Are Scientists, the band behind “Goal! England,” explains it all: “The lyrics to a great football anthem must beg listeners to sing along, which means they need to be catchy and easy to memorize. But that’s not enough: They also have to be informative and accurate. We took our starting point from the most basic act of football: kicking the ball. We decided to say most of it a few times: ‘Kicking the, kicking the, kicking the ball’.”

Tom Service gives his “pick of the football-indebted pieces you won’t be hearing on the terraces this summer.” Elgar wrote a chant for Wolverhampton Wanderer fans; Martinu did an entire symphonic piece, Half-Time, a Rondo for Large Orchestra; Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera The Silver Tassie is about a soccer player. And there’s Michael Nyman’s Beckham Crosses, Nyman Scores.