Category: music

“Sometime after moving to Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003, Esa-Pekka Salonen decided to shake things up by placing the second violin section on the opposite side of the stage from the first violins, in what is known as European seating — and it has stayed that way for the most part ever since.” Then came Verdi’s Requiem this month….

Ezra Furman is “writing a song for every fan who buys his latest album, Moon Face: Bootlegs and Road Recordings 2006-2009. More than 100 albums have been ordered since it became available a few weeks ago. Each consists of 10 tunes culled from Furman’s voluminous archive plus a customized song written directly to and for each paying customer.”

“ITV1 is currently working on a new show following celebrities as they train to become opera singers. We’ll find out who will be hitting (or not as the case may be) the high notes next year.”

“This trend isn’t just exhausted, it feels like a cruel perversion of a concert’s real-time magic. Live music might be the last bastion of unpredictability in today’s hypercurated mediascape: a fleeting opportunity to experience something unfiltered, spontaneous and really real. Instead, we’re paying to see our greatest living, breathing, sweating, bleeding rock stars behave like iPods. And with no “shuffle” function!”

Ever since 1996, when Sydney and Melbourne companies were merged to form the Sydney-based Opera Australia, Melburnian opera fans have complained that the national company gives their city too few performances of too few works with too few top-tier singers. New OA artistic director Lyndon Terracini plans to address their complaints, with more new productions, including a Ring cycle to start in 2012.

In the wake of the firing of Oleg Caetani from the Melbourne Symphony, apparently for unsatisfactory performance, and a very successful guest engagement by 18th-century specialist Reinhard Goebel (whom the musicians cheered), the MSO’s chairman and other managers are considering doing without a chief conductor altogether.

“The idea of underground rock in a communist capital might seem like a culture clash waiting to happen, but it hasn’t played out that way. Even as new bands emerge and become more popular, it’s still just a blip on the government’s radar.”

“In a case of Hollywood-meets-Haydn, the star factory is busy at work on a rare subject: a 28-year-old Venezuelan conductor whose life revolves around scores, not scripts. With only a handful of concerts here behind him, Mr. Dudamel is more or less making this town swoon.”

Alan Fletcher, who had been recently fired by the Festival’s board, was offered reinstatement. Following a meeting of the festival’s board of trustees last Wednesday, Fletcher “was offered a contract to continue as president and CEO through September 2010, which includes provisions governing any extension for future seasons.”

“The rabbit-out-of-the-hat success” that was New York City Opera’s season opener “was begun in late February, weeks after George Steel was appointed general manager and artistic director amid suspicions that he knew little about running an opera company.” But “so far, his decisions aren’t wrong.”