“Creating a little bit of heaven for classical music geeks, the New York Philharmonic has put online an ocean of data about its concerts, dating back to the first one on Dec. 7, 1842.”
Category: music
MPs’ Expenses: First The Poem, Now The Opera
“I am working on a comic opera, and who knows the set may have a few duck houses and moats in it,” said Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, a.k.a. Master of the Queen’s Music. “I may even invite a few MPs to the opening night. They will of course want free tickets, but be able to claim them on expenses for some fictitious fee. These people are a public disgrace and deserve to be publicly disgraced on stage.”
Season Pruned, Philly Chamber Orchestra Rumors Blossom
“Normally a rumor-free zone, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia is the focal point of speculation about its future existence amid the announcement of a dramatically curtailed season and questions about the continued presence of music director Ignat Solzhenitsyn. The surprisingly well-circulated Solzhenitsyn rumor appears, at this point, to be unfounded….”
Chinese Pre-Concert Caveat: Don’t Clap In The Wrong Place
“One thing I expected to find in China but didn’t seem to encounter were huge audiences eager to hear Western music.” Many who did attend seemed new to concert-going. Pre-concert announcements “included not only the familiar exhortation to turn off cell phones, but instructions about how many movements each piece had, and how the audience should uphold the country’s good image (or something along those lines) by not clapping in the wrong places.”
Broward Center To Fill A Classical Void
“The Broward Center for the Performing Arts will launch a new classical series this fall, partly filling the void left by the demise of the Concert Association of Florida earlier this year. The lineup of artists will include Joshua Bell, Dame Kiri te Kanawa, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Houston Symphony Orchestra.”
Skylight Opera’s Firing Fiasco Didn’t Have To Be One
Skylight Opera Theatre’s decision to eliminate the position of artistic director, in the process jettisoning its beloved and creatively successful a.d., Bill Theisen, has been a public-relations debacle. Even worse, if the company’s intent all along was to merge the artistic- and managing-director jobs, “reduce fixed personnel cost and … streamline the flow chart,” that could have been accomplished “without poisoning their own well.” Here’s how.
The Man Who Saved English Opera
“Nobody is yet calling 34-year-old Edward Gardner ‘great’, but, after his naming as Conductor of the Year by the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) in 2008, critics now pay respectful attention to his sound. In addition, Gardner has come to stand for more than just musical excellence: some see him as the symbol of the most brilliant operatic turnaround in recent history; others credit him with bringing that recovery about.”
Pittsburgh Symphony Glows With Its New Music Director
Manfred Honeck’s “inaugural season with the PSO went about as well as one could imagine. The post-Jansons experiment with a trio of conductors instead of a music director bought time to find the right guy and integrated capable union musicians in the running of the orchestra.”
Misdirection – Is American Music “Vertical”?
“American music is vertical; European music is more linear/horizontal.” At first this seemed too easy, as well as a trigger for memories of the classic early 1960s sci-fi TV program The Outer Limits; you know: “We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical.” But since then I’ve kept on thinking about it. Is this somehow true?
Will Arts Journalism Survive? (Of Course)
“Why, then, a degree in arts journalism at this particular time? There are several reasons. As long as there are artists, there will be people with a deep and serious interest in explaining, to themselves and to others, the creative manifestations of their time. Indeed, the blogosphere now permits a multiplicity of reactions to any given event, many more than were possible in the fattest years of daily newspapers.”