Category: music

The largest music store in the US by sales volume, the Times Square flagship is still profitable, but the Manhattan real estate gods are unforgiving: “Virgin pays only $54 per square-foot when the market rent in the area is about $700 a square foot.”

“When Schroeder pounded on his piano, his eyes clenched in a trance, the notes floating above his head were no random ink spots dropped into the key of G. Schulz carefully chose each snatch of music he drew and transcribed the notes from the score.”

“People in Europe are hearing nice things about us,” says new DSO music director Jaap van Zweden. “Whenever they ask me, I tell them how inspiring the orchestra, the hall and the people around us are. They would like to see for themselves.” Among the stops on the 10-concert tour are Birmingham, Manchester, Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna and Cologne.

In yet another consequence of the shrinking economy, “Florida Grand Opera will eliminate one production from its 2009-2010 season, presenting just four operas for the first time in decades.”

Ivan Hewett: “Half a century after his death, the jury is still out on Erich Korngold. Was he just a talented but unself-critical dreamer, following the late-romantic style of Richard Strauss and Mahler but without their genius? Or was he a really distinctive voice who had the misfortune to be born at the wrong time?”

“In an effort to avoid debt and to shore up its finances, the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra has canceled its last two concerts of the season and asked its musicians to donate their services for a Jan. 25 concert. The canceled concerts, of the orchestra’s 26th season, were scheduled in February and May.”

Cornelius Meister, a young German who is currently Generalmusikdirector in Heidelberg, succeeds Bertrand de Billy, who declined to renew his contract in the wake of a funding dispute with the Austrian state broadcast corporation, which operates the orchestra.

“Acclaimed composers such as Joseph Schwantner, Richard Danielpour and Michael Gordon have written substantive opuses on 9/11, but none that have had the popularity of [John] Adams’ composition… Mr. Adams himself first thought that ‘you couldn’t do this unless it was in the worst possible taste.’ But he composed a tactful, quiet piece – detached rather than the in-your-face nature of some other responses.”

“But now, 38 years after the Third Symphony, Pärt has written a Fourth, labeled it ‘Los Angeles’ and dedicated it to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian oil executive with political ambitions who was accused of fraud and now languishes in a Siberian prison.”

For more than 15 years the revered maestro has declined every invitation to return to the famous(ly tempestuous) opera house where he was music director from 1968 to 1986, when the house’s (famously) cantankerous orchestra chased him away. Now Abbado says he will come back to conduct for no fee – if Milan’s government agrees to plant 90,000 new trees in the city.