Category: music

“A student of Ernest Bloch and Arnold Schoenberg, Kirchner was a fiercely independent composer who never adopted the twelve-tone technique although his music was rigorously chromatic and atonal.”

“One of the things boards of cultural organizations have steadfastly refused to believe is that arts administration is a legitimate and distinct profession. No one steps in and does a good job of running an orchestra or a museum without special training and hard-won experience – especially if your organization is treading water in perilous times….”

As the New York Philharmonic’s new music director, “Gilbert, on paper, has all of the right qualifications: young (42 is young in conductor years), American, a serious musician with a great appetite for the contemporary. … All the ingredients, in short, were there. All that was missing was the excitement.”

“Members of the defunct CBC Radio Orchestra tuned up again this week [in Vancouver], for their first public appearances together as the National Broadcast Orchestra.” Music director Alain Trudel says “that the NBO will focus on multimedia studio work, with perhaps three or four public concerts a year. He added that one of the NBO’s main partners so far is the CBC.”

“The opera by [composer] Brett Dean and [librettist] Amanda Holden, based on the Peter Carey novel of the same name,” will have its world premiere runs in Sydney and Melbourne next March and April before heading to the Edinburgh International Festival. The story “is described as a modern fable in which suburban everyman Harry Joy ‘dies’ for nine minutes after a heart attack on his lawn and wakes up in hell.”

The good folks at Tina Brown’s House of Buzz are not only taking notice of orchestral music, they’re featuring it: alongside a profile of the NY Phil’s new music director, Alan Gilbert, the Beast has assembled a list of “the Most Exciting Young Conductors.” (No. 1 is, of course, Gustavo Dudamel.)

The magazine’s “easy high-to-pop-culture conversion guide” to the Met’s new season offers such advice as “If you worship at the altar of Madonna, pay homage to Tosca” and “If you go goo-goo for Lady Gaga, play a love game with Lulu.” Oh dear.

“Brazilian composer Jarbas Agnelli saw a photo in a newspaper of birds sitting on five parallel wires, and was inspired to treat their positions as avian sheet music. He interpreted what he saw as music and orchestrated the tune.”

“[T]ucked into the nooks and crannies of the city are thousands of microbusinesses, bookbinders and jewelry makers, pet groomers and Pilates trainers. If they are prudent enough not to bother the neighbors, most of them escape official notice, even if they are in violation of zoning laws.” One violin-repair shop isn’t so lucky.

Christoph Eschenbach’s dozen-orchestra, multi-tour season schedule looks punishing. “The slightly frightening thing is that this workload is about par for the course for a major international conductor. But it does raise questions about a human’s ability to sustain a high level of performance, week after week.”