Category: music

“To musicians, the growing pantheon of Bohlen-Pierce instruments – clarinets, a pan flute, and a 16-foot-long stringed instrument – are a new frontier. To neuroscientists, the exotic music offers a perfect test case for understanding how people’s brains learn an unfamiliar music system…”

“At a time when a pair of tickets to a concert by the biggest rock bands can run in the hundreds of dollars, tribute bands are gaining newfound respect, drawing big crowds, and earning more money than ever.”

“The current concert format is old-fashioned. It’s based on rules devised by the bourgeoisie at the turn of the 19th century to protect and elevate their culture. They tried to make it this semi-religious experience, sacred and serious. But in Mozart’s time concerts were more informal…”

“News that a school in Derby, Britain, was piping classical music into a special detention area set up to punish troublesome students has ignited a debate about the use of the pieces. The idea of using Mozart and Ravel as deterrent for the badly behaved has roused the ire of both music lovers and critics of the public education systems.”

“The moves are intended to reduce expenses in the 2010-11 season to $7.5 million – down from $9 million this season – and help chip away at an estimated $500,000 deficit in the current fiscal year, which ends Aug. 31.”

A growing number of Chinese opera singers – Hui He, Ying Huang, Haijing Fu, Hao Jiang Tian, Liping Zhang – have been appearing on the world’s stages. Their mentor and teacher is the 93-year-old Zhou Xiaoyan, who learned music from the Russians in 1930s Shanghai, made a European career, lived through the Cultural Revolution and befriended Zhou Enlai.

How’s this for adding visual elements to classical programming? Music director Marin Alsop has assembled a month’s worth of circus-related concerts under the title “BSO Under the Big Top.” Over the next four weeks there will be magicians, aerialists, puppets – and Copland, Prokofiev, Bartók, Barber, plus John Corigliano’s “loudest piece ever,” Circus Maximus.

It’s a far cry from, say, a Berlin Philharmonic visit. “On their nine-week tour, these Muscovites are slogging to Ashland, Ky.; Quincy, Ill.; and Zanesville, Ohio, often riding buses for up to seven hours, moving from highway to budget hotel to concert hall, and then all over again the next morning. They have a day off every two weeks, on average.”

“In an operation that involved a container ship, 2 cranes, 6 weeks on the open seas, 17 trucks, 57 workers, 137 crates of costumes and wigs, 8,000 nuts and bolts and 20,000 pounds of hanging scenery, the gargantuan Mariinsky Opera and Orchestra production of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera has been imported from St. Petersburg and reassembled on the stage of the Kennedy Center Opera House.”

“Located in Warsaw’s revamped 17th century Ostrogski Palace, perched on a hill near the Vistula River, the museum is designed to plunge visitors into Chopin’s universe via cutting-edge audiovisual and interactive technologies.”