Category: music

The Dutch conductor, who last week extended his contract as Milwaukee Symphony music director through 2016-17, has accepted a similar position with the Royal Flanders Philharmonic, beginning in 2012 and also ending in 2017 (when de Waart will be 75).

In 2005, Philipp Maier, a pianist and conductor, quit his day job as a Dubai-based pilot for Lufthansa when he decided that a nation as wealthy and advanced as the UAE should develop its own musical culture by having a professional (Western) symphony orchestra. By December 2006, he had assembled the 70-member UAE Philharmonic. Now he’s trying to find the $10 million in annual funding he needs to pay his players full-time.

The Philharmonia Baroque director, like many of his colleagues, often leads his band from the keyboard. “The catch is that neither conducting while seated nor standing hunched over a low-lying keyboard is an optimal posture. The solution is a custom-built instrument that comes with two separate sets of legs – one for use while standing, another for sitting. ‘I was measured for it, like a Savile Row suit’.”

“Three quarters of the men and women in the choir are jobless, and half have been unemployed for more than five years. … For many, the rehearsals provide the structure and human contact they miss from being on the job.”

“But just what does the [Washington’s Vocal Arts Society, which organized the festival,] mean by ‘American vocal music’? Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Ladies’ makes the cut. Patti LuPone, at Strathmore, doesn’t. The classical music world seems unsure exactly what the American tradition is that it wants to preserve.”

“Currently CEO of Sheet Music Plus, the world’s largest internet-based sheet-music company, Keith Cerny previously spent three years as executive director and CFO of the San Francisco Opera. Before that, he held executive positions in communications and technology operations with Accenture and McKinsey & Company.”

“The heavy odds were for an insider – a career symphonic administrator who’d already led one of the nation’s top orchestras and was looking for a lateral move. Instead, the board of [the ASO] is naming Stanley E. Romanstein, 54, as its new president. For the past nine years he has been president and CEO of the Minnesota Humanities Center in St. Paul and has never led a performing arts organization.”

To accompany an exhibit of Spanish Renaissance art at the National Gallery in DC, Stephen Hough took portions of Victoria’s Requiem “and transcribed, translated, transformed them for a string sextet. Stripping the piece of its texts, and thus of its specifically religious context, was a thoughtful echo of the secularizing process of displaying religious art works in a museum show: their aesthetic value, rather than their religious value, being in this context of primary importance to most of the show’s viewers.”

“Technique isn’t just something that refines your voice into a polished, finished, pretty product, although too many singers and teachers do approach it as if it were a kind of finishing school: polishing the talent, as if painting roses on the cheeks of a porcelain doll. … Technique is something sturdy. It enables you to dig in and get some use out of your instrument.”

String players agree that a new violin or cello doesn’t achieve its full sound potential until it’s been played and played and played some more. Can’t wait that long? “The ToneRite slips over the strings of an idle instrument and begins emitting subsonic noise that is intended to mimic the physics of actual music making. The result, the maker claims, is a greatly accelerated breaking-in period.”