Category: music

“[A]s a musician and a man, Wagner cast a spell, and that was as palpable at [the Bard Music Festival], if sometimes as oppressive, as the heavy rain clouds overhead. And however much the festival was designed to dispel the Wagnerian clouds and show you how he did it, revealing the mechanism was never enough. The better you know this master musician, the more mysterious he seems.”

“Gustavo Dudamel, the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, may be the hottest conductor on the classical scene, but box-office figures from Walt Disney Concert Hall show that even the young Venezuelan isn’t entirely recession-proof. Subscription tickets, which went on sale in February and account for a majority of total sales, have fallen 7% from last year, the final year of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tenure with the orchestra. That was at least partly offset by an uptick in the sale of single tickets.”

“What cruel irony … that it was the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment that was plunged into darkness mid-performance at the Usher Hall – just days after a £25 million makeover was unveiled. One of the [Edinburgh International Festival’s] flagship concerts was delayed by almost half an hour of ‘endarkment’ on Saturday night when the stage lighting failed as soprano Joyce DiDonato was performing.”

“For breadth and sheer number of albums, no one can match the world’s great orchestras, some of which have been recording for nearly a century.” Now several of the best are adding to their discographies with live recordings that they make available for download — but don’t always put out on CD.

“To audiences for whom the art of orchestral conducting remains a mystery, … there is now the enlightenment of MaestroCam. At five televised Proms this summer, if you press the red button on your remote control, you can spend the whole evening focused entirely on the man on the podium. Even better, you get a discreet and informative commentary from experts….”

“[U]nion negotiators were faced with the hard choice of penalizing their members or threatening the existence of a company whose problems are both self-inflicted and exacerbated by the recession. … Like many New Yorkers who have watched the goings-on at City Opera with sorrow and anger, I want the place to survive. But how that will happen with the same unapologetic folks at the top is hard to imagine.”

“The art of embellishment–improvising cadenzas, adding ornaments, taking other opportunities for creativity in performance–is a hot topic in classical music these days. For generations, conservatories preached absolute fidelity to the score: do what the composer wrote and nothing more. The problem is that the scores of prior eras can leave quite a bit to the performer’s imagination.”

“The contract is some good news for the opera, which says it has also seen a slight increase in individual donations over last year, despite its dark house.”

“The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported Wednesday that Muti would take up the position of “director” of the Rome Opera in December 2010, with a guarantee of two opera productions and two concerts each season in the Italian capital.”

“Trying to decide whether an album will be a huge hit or a major miss is expensive and risky for record companies. Music publishing, on the other hand, is reliable, tethered to the constellation of tunes that envelop us — on radio and television, and in movies, malls, elevators and greeting cards.”