Category: music

“The Minnesota Orchestra is over halfway to its $40 million capital-campaign goal and has balanced its annual budget … for the third consecutive year.”

A “$258,000 bequest from Hines’ estate will help support a UC Berkeley program that provides free music lessons to gifted low-income children in grades four to 12.” The late jazz pianist “lived in Oakland and once lectured on the Berkeley campus.”

“Recently a group of about 100 Tokyo residents put their complaints into a pile and a composer, Okuchi Shunsuke, turned them into a song. About 80 of the complainers (accompanied by an accordion, a bass cello and a tambourine) then performed the composition at various sites around the city, becoming the latest example of what has become known as a complaints choir.”

Mark Swed: “Most likely L.A. Opera has suspected since the Wall Street woes of last year that it was headed for this trouble. But what the company has done has been very savvy. It has created a Ring too big and too important to Los Angeles to fail.”

“The BPO said it finished its fiscal year, which ended on Aug. 31, with a $531,000 operating loss including a 10.4 percent drop in concert revenues and a three percent decrease in annual fund donations.”

The Mexican tenor, “who cancelled all his 2009 engagements after a cyst was found on his vocal cords, will make his comeback” at the Vienna State Opera in “a one-off appearance in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore on March 22. … [He] is then scheduled to sing the role of Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the Berlin State Opera on March 26 and 31 and April 2.”

“The world’s first bionic fingers were unveiled today after a set invented by a British firm was fitted to a former concert pianist. Maria Antonia Iglesias, 42, who lost all her fingers after suffering pneumococcal septic shock in 2003, can write, use cutlery and hold a glass again.”

Half a century ago, film composers had prestige — in the credits and in the creative process. Not anymore. “One major Hollywood filmmaker recently showed up at a composer’s studio to preview the music…, listened for a few seconds and declared, ‘Hate it! What else ya got?'”

“Surgeons have long listened to music while they work…. They say it helps them relax and concentrate. But now [Claudius] Conrad, an accomplished pianist and a senior surgical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, is scientifically testing how music affects surgeons, their patients, and even relatives in the waiting room.”

Including: “Once you’ve recovered from the grand aesthetic statement you just made, make sure your music is actually playable. And, hopefully, readable.”