Category: music

“If volunteer choruses are serving as a canary in the coal mine, the air appears to be better than we thought. Because if old choruses are closing, new ones are springing up to replace them — with far smaller budgets and more flexible organizations.”

“When it comes to the future of classical music in America, the most significant and promising concerts of 2009 were the inaugural programs of the new music directors at major orchestras on opposite coasts.”

“He needs a concert piano to practise on.” Irene Besse said “there are no strings attached to her gift. She bought it with a bank loan and put the piano in the teenager’s name.”

A survey for The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) revealed one in three consumers are using illegal sites.

“After just 2½ years, Thomas Philion is reaching his coda. The Seattle Symphony president and executive director announced Wednesday that he won’t renew his contract when it expires in June.”

“In the latest addition to its collection of high-resolution ‘virtual books,’ the British Library has uploaded images of the draft score of Handel’s Messiah, scribbled onto 280 pages in the summer of 1741.”

“For decades, blue whales have been singing with increasingly deeper voices, reports a new study. In some cases, the pitch of their songs has dropped by more than 30 percent. Frustrated researchers cannot yet explain why.”

“Among the recipients of the special artist awards are the Italian soprano Mirella Freni who is receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award and the Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt, voted Instrumentalist of the Year. Two singers are receiving the Singer of the Year, the Latvian mezzo Elina Garanca and the German baritone, Christian Gerhaher.”

“New Yorkers are a big bunch of weenies. … This muscular, clear-sighted and often powerful staging of a familiar repertory standard – marred, admittedly, by a handful of small but painful directorial missteps – is all it takes to arouse the collective ire of New York’s opera crowd?”

In a YouTube video, the male vocal ensemble “sings an ethereal version of the ‘Carol of the Bells’ with appropriate lyrics paying homage to Leno’s ‘gigantic chin’ and mentioning ‘watching Leno give his f- monologue.'”