Category: music

Composer Jacob Cooper’s opera, “Timberbrit” — “as in Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears” — is “a tragic tale that imagines Spears’ last concert, in the final hours of her life. … Cooper began work on the opera by experimenting with a technique called time-stretching. Using digital audio software, he slowed down Spears’ songs — and suddenly the light pop tunes seemed hauntingly tragic.”

This year’s Bard Music Festival “will turn its attention to Richard Wagner, whose towering music dramas are among the most influential and popular works in the operatic literature” — but who, as festival co-artistic director Leon Botstein notes, “was arguably … the most persuasive and evil figure of the Western cultural pantheon.” So Bard is also presenting “major rarities by the two composers whom Wagner singled out for his most vicious shafts of anti-Semitism.”

“Musicians at the Minnesota Orchestra have agreed to contract concessions in the face of financial pressures on the organization. The deal saves about $4.2 million – from salary, pension reductions and frozen positions – over the remaining three years of [a] contract that expires Sept. 30, 2012.”

“Opera has emerged as the big winner in the first round of Sustain funding from Arts Council England, the new cash pot set up to help cultural organisations combat the effects of the recession.” The largest award, £900,000 went to Welsh National Opera (which tours in England every year), with English National Opera receiving £750,000 and the Royal Opera House £700,000.

Conductor Charles Hazlewood writes that he’s “launching Play the Field, a new breed of orchestral festival … [n]ot in a cathedral or any august temple of the arts, but in a field on the Somerset Levels.” He says that outdoor concerts “have tended to be indifferent performances by under-rehearsed orchestras and third-rate conductors … Has anyone heard the Amsterdam Concertgebouw orchestra perform in a field? Or Simon Rattle conduct under the stars?” (Well, there’s Ravinia and Tanglewood, and the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl and the NY Phil in Central Park …)

Welsh National Opera, Birmingham Opera Company, Dorset Opera, London’s Chelsea Opera Group and University College Opera, and Haslemere’s Opera South all have a history of using amateur choruses in some of their productions. They’re not the only ones. “Many of these groups have a reputation for presenting challenging or unusual repertory,” and “[a]ll of them aim higher than a good old romp through G and S.”

More than 10,000 tickets to Gustavo Dudamel’s Hollywood Bowl debut as Los Angeles Philharmonic music director went on sale to the general public on Saturday. They were snapped up “at a pace more common for concerts by pop stars, not classical musicians,” and in the process, “about 550 of the estimated 800 patrons who showed up at the Bowl, some of whom arrived early in the morning and waited for hours in the heat, went home empty-handed.”

Ever since June, when it eliminated the position of artistic director and got rid of the beloved figure who held that job, Milwaukee’s Skylight Opera Theatre “has suffered demonstrations, petitions, mass resignations of performers, subscriber revolt and Facebook vitriol interpreted by management as violent threats. Happy, um, 50th birthday, Skylight.”

There are myriad right ways to listen to a concert, and reading tweets can be one of them. “Some people listen with their eyes closed, others follow a score (is that inherently less distracting than reading a Twitter screen? I sometimes feel I miss things about the performance when I focus on reading along in the printed music), others focus on the conductor. Some let their minds wander….”

For most Ravinia patrons, this rock-concert brand of intimacy — introduced this year — has been a welcome addition to Chicago’s storied music festival. Ravinia CEO and executive director Welz Kauffman states that 99 percent of the feedback he’s received on the giant screens has been in the form of “outrageous praise.”