Category: music

“The award, which comes with a prize of $50,000, has been given annually since 2006 to singers between 25 and 40 who have appeared in featured solo roles at the Met.” Previous winners include Nathan Gunn, Joyce DiDonato and Matthew Polenzani.

“[Pierre] Schwob, a businessman who is largely unknown in the insular world of orchestras and operas, has put some $4 million of his own money into the launch of Classical Archives, which is a new version of a site Mr. Schwob founded 15 years ago. His site’s selling points: an emphasis on high-quality audio and a browsing system designed by musicologists.”

Anne Midgette: “But isn’t the point of an on-line social network that it puts you in touch with hundreds of like-minded people around the globe? Is the San Francisco Symphony really going to pull in the numbers to make a viable network, which involves people wanting to log on regularly to post, chat, check out other people’s profiles, and so on?”

“Plácido Domingo … withdrew in midperformance at the Metropolitan Opera’s production of ‘Die Walküre’ on Tuesday evening and was replaced by Gary Lehman in the role of Siegmund, the Met said.”

“If you have never understood why an old saying calls opera ‘the most expensive human endeavor, with the possible exception of war,’ a day at the Metropolitan Opera explains it. The divas, maestro, managers and orchestra are just part of the equation. So much else goes into the productions, made more complicated by the Met’s tradition of staging operas in repertory. The Met is often a 24-hour operation. Make that a 24/6 operation, and occasionally 24/7.”

Michael Kimmelman: “From where I stood it seemed touch and go whether the Jewish businessman was actually going to slug the chief of the Flanders Opera, Aviel Cahn, a young Swiss-born Jew (a glass-jawed bantamweight, by the looks of him) in an ascot and important glasses.”

“When the season opens later this month, there will be a new restaurant designed by architecture’s oldest enfant terrible, Nigel Coates. A scheme has been introduced to woo the under-thirties by allotting them cheaper tickets. There’s been a clean-out of the notorious 20-year waiting list for admission to the club which sustains the enterprise, and 4,000 of those in the queue have just been fast-tracked into ‘associate membership’.”

The company, a summer country-house opera festival along the lines of Glyndebourne (but smaller), “stands to benefit by £250,000 in its 20th anniversary season after winning a dispute with HM Revenue and Customs over its VAT liability.”

“A forgotten piece of music by 18th century German composer George Handel is to be performed for the first time in more than 250 years.” The funeral anthem “was originally commissioned by King George II to be played at the burial of his wife,” after which the king “ordered the music be thrown away and never heard again.” Turns out never is a very long time….

“The English National Opera’s season has been thrown into chaos after an acclaimed Iranian director pulled out of a production in a row over the ‘disrespectful’ behaviour of British Embassy staff in Tehran. Abbas Kiarostami objected to the behaviour of officials as he attempted to negotiate his way through the ‘unduly time-consuming and complicated’ visa application process, which requires all applicants to be fingerprinted.”