Category: music

“One highlight of the worthy Young Concert Artists series is its annual Irene Diamond gala concert,” but the organization “will not present the concert next year, because of budget woes and thinning donations. … ‘We’re cutting everything we can do without ruining everything,’ Susan Wadsworth, who founded the Young Concert Artists in 1961, said.” The group will also “lower cash prizes for audition winners to $2,000 from $5,000.”

“So, after all the buzz about the YouTube Symphony Orchestra altering the audition process forever, after months of interactive computer chat about the world’s first collaborative online orchestra, after 96 winning players were selected from among the more than 3,000 musicians who submitted audition videos and were brought to New York for a group summit and Carnegie Hall concert, how did the YouTube Symphony Orchestra finally play? Quite well, actually….”

“Milan’s Orchestra Sinfonica ‘Giuseppe Verdi’ has chosen the 35-year-old Chinese Xian Zhang as its musical director. The conductor, a mother with a two-month-old baby, is the first woman to hold such a post in Italy.” Zhang has just finished her term as assistant conductor to Lorin Maazel at the New York Philharmonic.

“No telling how well Gov. Edward Rendell sings, but the Pittsburgh Opera was all ears when he presented the company with a $1 million Capital Budget Redevelopment Assistance grant at the Allegheny County Courthouse yesterday.”

“Imagine an N.F.L. game in which the starting quarterback is replaced a day before kickoff, and his substitute, flown in from, say, the Canadian Football League, has to be fitted for a uniform, learn the plays and meet his backfield for the first time. Happens all the time at the Metropolitan Opera.”

“Composer Nathan Currier is suing the cash-strapped Brooklyn Philharmonic for $250,000 because it lopped off the climactic finish of his Gaian Variations in a ballyhooed [Earth Day] concert at Avery Fisher Hall on April 21, 2004. Currier claims that the philharmonic trimmed the work in order to avoid paying overtime to its unionized orchestra.”

“A crossroads of maestros and tyros, the venerable Joseph Patelson Music House in Manhattan has been like a living room for the classical music world. For more than six decades its shelves bulged with the fruit of Mozart and Bach, Stravinsky and Strauss, to be plucked by shoppers who wore its wooden floors black and sought counsel from expert and sometimes cantankerous sales clerks. Yes, you know it is coming: Goodbye, Patelson’s.”

“Word that the Juilliard School had lost financing for a prized musical training program for black and Latino children has brought forth numerous offers of help, including a major pledge from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation of Los Angeles, school and foundation officials said on Friday.” But that doesn’t mean the program is saved.

Alice Tully Hall has reopened to acclaim following its renovation, but the hall’s pipe organ, “a personal gift of Miss Tully herself, remains absent, dismantled and resting in limbolike storage in upstate New York. … [T]he chairman of the Juilliard School’s organ department, Paul Jacobs, and the organ’s curator, Peter Batchelder, have gone public with worries that Lincoln Center may secretly want to wash its hands of the organ.”