Category: music

“Sophisticated Milan may be blasé about many things, but along with design and soccer, opera is not one of them. Domingo’s presence in town is a local happening, and it is hard not to bump into his image touting Operalia … quite literally in the case of the advertisement placards dangling from the ceilings inside subway cars.”

“About the only thing everyone at the Aspen Music Festival and School seems to agree on is that the respected 61-year-old organization is in crisis. The music director abruptly quit earlier this month, the executive head could be next out the door, and both the board and the faculty are divided on the future.”

A year ago, the county’s only professional opera company closed. “Getting another company going will be a tough proposition; it would be even if the times weren’t as hard as they are. It’ll take imagination and stamina and a lot of money. The cheapest way may not be the best way artistically (then again, it might), but it’s probably the most likely way that opera will regain its foothold.”

“An idea to allow people to create their own “satellite symphony” through an iPhone app has been shortlisted for a new music prize.Other shortlisted concepts include recycling existing sounds – music will be collected and filtered by a portable structure resembling a fairground organ. Another design aims to create automatic musical instruments which can be played by audience members.”

“Just 19 commercial classical stations remain on the air nationwide, by one count, down from about 50 in the early 1990s. But as ad-supported programmers also decide that the classical format is no longer practical, the music has started to find a new savior. And, to the surprise of many, it is public broadcasting.”

Jonathan Gold, posting on Twitter, calls Rich “a force at L.A. Weekly for decades; the last great critic in LA.” In addition to the Weekly, which fired Rich in 2008 after 16 years, he had written for the Herald Examiner, New West and California magazines, CityBeat, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, New York magazine, Newsweek, Daily Variety and, most recently, for Bloomberg.

“To say this new conglomerate has inspired fear in the live-concert business doesn’t capture the extent of the quaking. A coalition of consumer groups and independent promoters lobbied hard against the merger, warning that Live Nation Entertainment could quietly threaten venue owners by hinting that if they dropped Ticketmaster, they would have a hard time booking Live Nation tours or Front Line talent.”

It’s “not that the company engages unusual directors, but that it doesn’t let them actually do what they’re good at. Peter Gelb seems to me to have the same micromanaging side that Joe Volpe did: the side that would see something unusual in a new production, get nervous about it, and try to rein it in. As a result, the work of directors who are quite good in other fields is, at the Met, muted or just plain bad.”

It was “Flight of the Bumblebee” and it happened at a San Francisco Symphony concert.

“The occasion was the West Coast premiere by the JACK Quartet of Georg Friedrich Haas’ third string quartet, “In iij. Noct. The title is taken from a section of the ‘Tenebrae’ by the mad Italian Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo. … Haas calls for his score, which was written 2001, to be played blind. … And it was good. Mind-blowingly good.”