Category: music

Luc Bondy’s staging is still neither sumptuous nor traditional, but some of the stage business that so upset many fans of the opera is gone. For instance, Scarpia no longer humps the statue of the Blessed Virgin, and while Tosca still doesn’t place a crucifix on Scarpia’s dead body, Patricia Racette makes what the character does do more credible.

Yes, this is how Angelenos celebrate the city’s first-ever Wagner Ring cycle. Actually, it’s part of the citywide Ring Festival. “Led by alto Christina Ascher, volunteers wearing camouflage helmets will march down Sunset Boulevard, from downtown to the Pacific Ocean, over the course of four days.”

“The Oscar-nominated screenwriter will direct a new production of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust. … Gilliam, who made his name with the British comedy series Monty Python, has also directed several Hollywood films, including the recent The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.”

The Boston Symphony Orchestra announced “that its former musical director says he needed to cancel more engagements than originally planned so that he could fully concentrate on continuing treatment” for esophageal cancer. “Ozawa was scheduled to lead BSO in [Lenox], Mass. on July 24 and 25.”

“It’s not for deadbeats. During one recent class, teacher Olivier Colignon–who goes by the professional name DJ Getdown–blasted a student for his narrow repertoire. ‘You have no pop-rock on your computer?’ he barked. ‘No Nirvana? No Queen? A DJ’s job is to make people dance, not just play music you like.'”

“Visitors learn about Bach’s penmanship, as well as the paper and ink he used. The display even explains how to date a Bach manuscript. But what makes this [newly renovated and expanded] museum unique is the interactive approach it takes to the teaching of its subject matter.”

A federal bankruptcy judge has “denied the Honolulu Symphony Society’s request to extend the period in which it alone could submit a plan for its reorganization. The decision allows the symphony’s musicians and other parties to submit competing plans for the troubled organization’s emergence from bankruptcy” along with those from HSO management.

“I had the good fortune to attend an important concert just a few hours after getting the news that I had won. … That’s when it occurred to me that the Pulitzer isn’t just about me or the Violin Concerto. It’s also about something that was reflected in the concert tonight: the myriads of folks who have taught me in various ways.”

“To whom do we owe our super-saturated superhero culture? … [I]f you excavate long enough, you will inevitably bump smack into Richard Wagner, the 19th century composer whose four-opera cycle ‘The Ring of the Nibelung’ is regarded by many as an important genetic mother ship for today’s fleet of action heroes.”

Aaron “Copland’s voice, with its Brooklyn tinge, can reveal different perspectives than notes or words crafted for the page. That’s the point of some 2,000 interviews that make up Yale’s still-growing Oral History of American Music,” which “was founded 40 years ago by librarian Vivian Perlis, and [is] still the only project of its kind.”