Category: music

Editorial: “It is not difficult to question the extraordinary workload that the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, who holds major musical appointments in St Petersburg, London and New York, inflicts upon himself. … The Gergiev Ring may be a self-imposed challenge too far, but Mr Gergiev’s hyperactivity is overwhelmingly his strength rather than his weakness. His lifestyle may be intense, but so is his music-making.”

“On the one hand, orchestras are constantly looking for ways to reach audiences (let’s not even say ‘new audiences’ anymore; orchestras would be happy to keep diverting the ones they have). On the other hand, a good chunk of the orchestra-going public is horrified, and loudly so, at the thought of any modification to its beloved, traditional experience. It fears that introducing new technology automatically means dumbing down.”

“The instruments that kids in small towns around Oregon used to hit, rub and scrape as part of the Oregon Symphony’s award-winning outreach effort went quiet this summer. … The Roseburg-based Ford Family Foundation, the program’s primary funder, suffered losses to its endowment and declined to continue paying the program’s $150,000 annual cost.”

The Grammy- and Oscar-winning songwriter behind the musicals Wicked, Pippin and Godspell is working on “his first opera, intriguingly titled Seance on a Wet Afternoon, which will have its world premiere Sept. 26 at the Granada in Santa Barbara. … Schwartz wrote both the music and libretto for Seance, a psychological thriller about a medium, her husband and the spirit of their deceased 11-year-old son.”

“I’m going to leave aside the question of whether Blender and Vibe somehow deserved their undoing, via editorial missteps or poor business-side decisions, and whether Rolling Stone and Spin deserve their present difficulties. Criticisms attach to every title, and while such factors play a part in the music-mag death march, they’re negligible when considered alongside three bigger problems that cut deep and wide across the medium.”

“Mozart’s original score for the 1791 opera The Magic Flute called for a glass harmonica or keyed glockenspiel to represent a set of magic bells. The instruments were obscure even in Mozart’s day but more than 200 years after his death they no longer exist and no one knows how they worked.” Modern orchestras usually use a celesta, but that won’t work for period-instrument bands. Then a London organ maker set to work on solving the conundrum.

“The festival’s board of trustees named current music chief Markus Hinterhaeuser as interim director, bridging the gap between the departure next year of Juergen Flimm and the arrival of his successor Alexander Pereira in 2012.” The news comes just three days after Flimm’s early exit was announced.

“The two great-granddaughters of the composer Richard Wagner held their first Bayreuth Festival this weekend — and have promised to reveal the Wagner family’s link to the Nazis. They even want to tackle the question of whether their grandmother, Winifred Wagner, slept with Hitler.” They also say they plan to modernize the festival and “make it less elitist and less secretive.”

“Back in the 1960s and ’70s, when Italian opera was deemed a capitalist indulgence in China, no work was more despised than Giacomo Puccini’s ‘Turandot.'” But the Chinese are “singing a different tune these days. For the 60th anniversary of China’s communist revolution in October, a new production of ‘Turandot’ has been commissioned for the 100,000-seat Bird’s Nest stadium” — one of a raft of productions of “Turandot” and other Puccini operas in the country.

Michael Steinberg, the former Boston Globe music critic who died yesterday at 80, on the premiere of Bernstein’s “Kaddish”: “There is something enviable about the utter lack of inhibition with which Leonard Bernstein carries on. His Symphony No. 3 (Kaddish) is a piece, in part, of such unashamed vulgarity, and it is so strongly derivative, that the hearing of it becomes as much as anything a strain on one’s credulity.”