Category: music

Celebrated architect Alvar Aalto may have created a Nordic modernist icon with his 1971 concert hall, but he didn’t much care about acoustics, and it showed. So the powers-that-be are turning the place into a convention center and building a new six-venue concert hall with acoustics by Yasuhisa Toyota, known for Disney Hall in L.A.

“It’s been an interesting journey. Slowly and surely we have come together through honeymoons and the opposite. I remember Karajan said that with an orchestra like this the first five or 10 years are tradition. I didn’t quite believe him. But after what has sometimes felt like moving at the speed of tectonic plates, … we now have a tradition to build on.”

“The CD player is dead. So says Linn Products, the high-end audio specialist based in Glasgow which for 20 years has been making … CD players. The reason: its audiophile customers have moved, with alacrity, to hard drive-based systems.”

“Digital downloading and distribution, illegally or otherwise, has had a greater effect on the recording industry than anything in its history. As the legal variety grows rapidly, driven most significantly by iTunes, so those old-school players are having to adopt radical new business plans to compete in the brave new world of music.”

Director Francesca Zambello recounts the story (in both senses) of Cherevichki (a/k/a “The Tsarina’s Slippers”), Tchaikovsky’s only comic opera, which is based on a madcap Christmas Eve story by Nikolai Gogol. (Zambello is directing a new staging of the work at Covent Garden.)

That would be Bang on a Can’s Julia Wolfe, whose latest album has works for four drum sets, six pianists, eight double basses, and nine bagpipers. She’s written an accordion concerto and a piece for musicians in pedicabs. “The last time I did something practical … was [in graduate school] at Yale – I wrote a woodwind quintet.”

A newly rediscovered letter reveals the awful truth. “His skills were so poor that when the composer from Worcester started playing a specially inscribed trombone for a dear friend, she ran out of the room in a fit of hysterical laughter, leaving the composer swearing in frustration.”

“They are more limited in terms of their experience, and to engage a new work is a major challenge,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer says. “I’ve learned that you have to be patient; you have to give them an opportunity to digest this music and make it their own. But … I’ve seen them rise to the challenge.”

More than midway through her three-year contract as music director of the conductorless New Century Chamber Orchestra, “Salerno-Sonnenberg hinted strongly that she’s inclined to stay a fourth year…. For now, New Century concerts have taken on the fascinating cast of a soloist meshing her distinctive traits with an integrated orchestral texture.”

“The deficit is the result of shortages in ticket sales and annual fund donations, as well as declines in major one-time gifts and contributions from the ISO Foundation, whose board manages the orchestra’s endowment.” Musicians and staff took pay cuts earlier this year.