Category: music

“Levine is 66 and he’s been in lousy health for parts of the last three years. … But not only is Levine’s vision not outdated, he’s been an absolute tiger for new music and for the highest performance standards of the classics.” And besides, “[Elliott] Carter’s music is a real challenge for audiences. It takes guts to bring him back to the stage again and again.”

Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna” came in at number one, while “Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia On A Theme was in second place. Third place went to a 1990 recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade by the London Symphony Orchestra and conductor Sir Charles Mackerras.”

“If you think about it, drums are the new violins. This is a realization I have come to relatively slowly, given the prominence of percussion in contemporary music, not to mention the number of performances by solo percussionists and percussion ensembles I’ve reviewed over the last two decades.”

Jeremy Eichler has a “lingering concern is the state of James Levine’s and the BSO’s larger artistic vision. Across the country, orchestras are updating their approaches to programming with the goal of engaging listeners – current and potential – more broadly, deeply, and imaginatively. They are also experimenting with new ways of bringing select composers and performers into the mix, assigning them key roles not only in making music but also in artistic planning and community engagement. In these departments, Levine and the BSO are notably lagging behind the curve.”

“Manfred Eicher’s emphasis on state-of-the-art sound and a cool, spacious aesthetic, with evocative cover art and intelligent liner notes. This approach, which helped ECM to build a following among aficionados and audiophiles alike, has inspired several books and countless imitators. Even now, with music consumption increasingly shifting from physical objects to digital downloads, Mr. Eicher’s releases still retain a sense of being coherent objects of art.”

“Downloads brought the classical recording industry to its knees and rendered the standard format of the $25 CD an endangered species by decade’s end. But downloads also led to a wider consumption of classical music.”

“The link between The Messiah and money goes back a long ways. It turns out composer George Frideric Handel, whose names means “market” in German, wasn’t only a musical wiz, but an entrepreneurial one.”

“Douglas Knehans, dean of the University of Cincinnati’s acclaimed College-Conservatory of Music, is under fire from the college’s professors to the point that he could be replaced.” A letter from faculty to the university’s provost says, “No dean can function without the trust and respect of his faculty, and Douglas Knehans has neither.”

“The Charlotte Symphony will play for another season. The financially beleaguered group announced Tuesday that it has reached its year-end goal by raising $500,000 in cash to match an anonymous $500,000 grant that was offered in August.”

Julian Lloyd Webber: “Using the safe haven of the symphony orchestra, 300,000 Venezuelan children are involved in the scheme at any one time, and many claim it has saved them from a life of delinquency and crime. … There are currently 208 local centres or ‘nuclei’ and another 40 are expected next year … [the nuclei often have] waiting lists of more than 1,000 children clamouring to join.”