Category: music

“Last week a lead-poisoning expert at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York tested the same piece of Beethoven’s skull that had been examined in 2005, along with another, larger, fragment. The researcher, Dr. Andrew C. Todd, said that over all he had found no more lead than in the average person’s skull.”

“Motown revived Detroit. We were in a recession in 1959 when Barrett Strong first sang Money. We all needed some money. So when more Motown records hit, all of a sudden Detroit started getting more attention.”

“Each assessment stresses that this wouldn’t matter so much were it not that Dudamel is being billed as the future of classical music. Here’s the thing, though: Dudamel is not the future of classical music. He’s not even trying to be.”

“[R]iches don’t normally fall from the sky. But for Kirill Gerstein, age 30, it might seem that way. In January, he was announced as this year’s [$300,000] Gilmore [Award] winner. Then in April, Lincoln Center conferred its prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, worth $25,000. For a pianist with less than marquee status, it was a jackpot of huge proportions.”

“The music director of the Detroit Symphony has accepted the post of music director of the Orchestre National de Lyon, an important French orchestra, effective with the 2011-12 season.”

“Hilde Limondjian is stepping down as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s music impresario, the Met said, ending a 41-year run that turned the Met’s concert series into a New York fixture.”

“Today the directors of all 14 opera houses will hold a crunch meeting with Sandro Bondi, the Culture Minister, in a last effort to stave off the cuts,” which the government says are necessary as “part of a package of austerity measures. … But for performers and legions of opera lovers, what is at stake is an art form that is a symbol of Italy throughout the world.”

“[A]n elderly man and an elderly woman, neither of whom use language any more, gaze at each other, shaking their simple instruments in time. My first thought is a cliche: music drawing strangers together in the depths. Then the doctor sitting next to me gives me a nudge, and shows me what he has scribbled on the margin of his notes: ‘husband & wife’.”

“The glory days of the company achieving more than 100 percent capacity are gone, but Lyric announced Monday that it it sold 86 percent of its seating capacity for the 2009/10 season and surpassed its $16.6 million fundraising goal.” It also “tapped $2.7 million in reserve funds … to balance its $53 million operating budget.”

“Critics have the obligation of judging creative work by a set of standards, of allowing emotion or the crowd approval to be, at best, one variable in their judgment. But some seemed to bend themselves in elaborate contortions during this tour to parry the elation and thunderous ovations that greeted the feckless horde from L.A.”