Category: music

“Acoustically, the 2,200-seat auditorium passed its first tests with top grades. Both solo voices and chorus carried powerfully from the stage, filling every nook and cranny of the hall. But there was warmth, too, and agreeable ‘ring’.” And the sound is consistent “in virtually every corner of the building’s five levels.”

Peter Conrad: “Start with the language, which is neither mellifluous like Italian nor gutturally potent like German. Its prosy disadvantages are made worse by the tortuous translators of opera librettos … Then there is the matter of the phlegmatic national temperament. The English are averse to the overwrought intensity of operatic protagonists.”

The Internet radio service “has hired a bunch of ‘musicologists,’ who sit at computers and listen to songs, one at a time, rating them element by element, separating out what sometimes comes to hundreds of data points for a three-minute tune.” The company uses algorithms on this data to point a listener to music she might like, “minimizing the influence of other people’s taste.”

“Managers of the Sacramento Philharmonic and musicians have agreed to a new contract for the next two seasons that includes a one-year wage freeze and a reduced number of performances for the 2009-10 season.”

In California, $549,000 has “been allocated for free and discounted live-music performances up and down the state,” draining “what’s left of a $6-million cash kitty that five big CD distributors and three retail chains anted up in 2004 to settle the Golden State’s share of nationwide price-fixing allegations.”

“A warm reception for the orchestra in the capital that endured Richard Nixon’s Christmas air raids in 1972 shows how far Vietnam has come from the days of the conflict known in the country as the American War. The Vietnam of 2009 is open to Americans, both for investment and culture, its government says.”

Says the orchestra’s chairman, “I have been associated with the symphony for 20 years and I can’t recall when the orchestra sounded better. But this year we will lose $100,000 from [the Regional Asset District], we don’t know how much if any we will get from the state and our endowment is down.”

After a 25-year tenure during which he developed the orchestra from a part-time, semi-pro group into a fully professional (if small) orchestra, David Stahl has announced that he will become laureate conductor following a three-year transition.

“Two weeks ago, a presentation was made in the Prinzregenten Theater here about plans for a new concert hall. Fifteen hundred people showed up … The idea of a new concert hall has captured the imagination of Munich’s music-loving public, yet the project stirs controversy at nearly every turn.”

“Once upon a time, young conservatory musicians wanted to grow up to play as soloists with major orchestras. Today, many of them are forming bands instead. The ensembles of the new alt-classical world are poised somewhere within the Venn-diagram intersection of traditional classical music and contemporary culture.”