Category: music

In honor of Bernard Haitink’s 80th birthday, the Dutch broadcast networks AVRO and Radio 4 are offering free downloads of the conductor leading the Royal Concertgeobouw Orchestra. Each weekday from March 9 to 15, one recording will be available at www.radio4.nl. (Repertoire has not yet been announced.)

“A 13-year-old schoolboy stabbed his music teacher with a kitchen knife, leaving the blade stuck in the teacher’s back as he made his escape. The pair had just finished a private violin lesson at a middle school near Venice… Fabio Paggioro, 36, had reportedly told the boy, ‘See how you manage to do well when you put the effort in’.”

A bit over a century ago, the Gramophone Company provided two dozen wax records to be sealed and locked for 100 years beneath the Paris Opera. Now they’ve been retrieved, and the recordings are about to be reissued on CD. “Most intriguing is the repertory chosen for posterity, and here the surprise is the lack of surprises.”

“The world of opera — famous for its implausible plots — acquired a new one last night when a new opera ended up being been premiered in the bar due to a power cut in the auditorium. A capacity audience had flocked to the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden to see the London debut of George Benjamin’s new opera, Into the Little Hill.” Then the lights went out.

“Felix Mendelssohn, whose two-hundredth birthday fell on February 3rd, was the most amazing child prodigy in musical history,” Alex Ross writes. “‘What about Mozart?’ you may ask. Go talk to Goethe, who heard the child Mozart in 1763 and the child Mendelssohn almost sixty years later, and who gave the palm to young Felix.”

“Muzak was always about more than just music and its core. In the 1940s, Muzak came up with Stimulus Progression, the belief that piped music in the workplace, properly played, could stimulate production. Obviously, true music lovers should look away now, but this quasi-scientific (some might argue pseudo-scientific) theory claimed that an individual’s mood could be lifted through listening to programmed sound in 15-minute segments.”

“The European Parliament’s legal affairs committee has voted in favour of a copyright term extension for musicians on sound recordings. It has backed the European Commission’s proposal to increase the term of protection from 50 to 95 years.”

“Online voting begins to select the members of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, which will perform at Carnegie Hall on April 15 under Michael Tilson Thomas — an ensemble selected entirely from video auditions posted on YouTube, culled by judges in leading symphony orchestras around the world and chosen in part by votes from YouTube viewers. This means you. Since the project was announced on Dec. 1, the YouTube Symphony site has gotten more than 10 million hits, and more than 3,000 video submissions from 70-odd countries.”

“Thanks largely to the efforts of the Metropolitan Opera, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are seeing live opera performances in movie theaters, and many others in repeat showings. Yet despite the general acclaim for the Met’s innovation, introduced and championed by its general manager, Peter Gelb, a few voices have raised concerns about long-term effects on the art form.”

“Already looking for a music director to replace Junichi Hirokami – let go in November with a year on his contract – the orchestra has started searching for a new executive director. Orchestra officials said today that ‘by mutual agreement’ the contract of Tony Beadle would be allowed to expire Aug. 31.”