Category: music

They’re not the best or the worst, necessarily, but Dan Wakin has compiled a list of other musical superlatives in 2008: Longest Road Trip (NY Phil in Pyongyang), Biggest Tumble (Alberto Vilar), Most Execrable Timing (the Juilliard Quartet’s new first violinist, who broke his wrist just days after getting the gig), and so on.

Mark Swed agrees with Steve Smith that Elliott Carter’s 100th and Satyagraha at the Met were highlights of the year. But Swed also cites Gustavo Dudamel, Andriessen’s opera La Commedia, Woody Allen’s staging of Gianni Schicchi and Terry Riley’s piece for the Disney Hall organ. (The Fly joins l’affaire Mortier on the fiasco list.)

36-year-old chemistry student Jingjing Pan has been deaf since the age of 1. (She can hear very loud sounds with a hearing aid.) Since she came to the Rochester Institute of Technology, several years of music therapy using the Orff method have helped effect a major improvement in her studies as well as giving her an outlet for self-expression.

Under the Nazi regime, Goebbels renamed the Berlin Philharmonic the Reichsorchester and turned it into the government’s flagship band. For years after the war ended, no one involved would speak about that period, and the orchestra’s archives from the time were destroyed. Now a historian and a filmmaker have produced in-depth looks at that hidden phase in the orchestra’s history.

On the list of best classical events in America’s first city this year: the NY Philharmonic’s trip to North Korea, and Elliott Carter’s 100th birthday celebration. The worst list is headed, of course, by the Gerard Mortier debacle at City Opera…

“The Montreal International Jazz Festival is falling victim to the global economic slowdown. The festival’s main sponsor, General Motors, has decided not to renew its five-year sponsorship contract, which expires at the end of next year.”

“Annual sales of digital songs will surpass 1 billion downloads this year, a first for the struggling music industry… Still, that’s not enough to offset the decline in CD sales. This year’s album sales are off 45% from the same time in 2000.”

The Fragmented Orchestra, installed at the FACT Gallery in Liverpool, consists of 24 “neurons,” microphone/speaker units placed at various points throughout the country; each neuron picks up sounds and transmits them to the central “brain” (a computer), which plays them on speakers in the gallery and sends them out to other “neurons.”

“Ice cream? That’s right, as Christman notes that Sacramento-based Dimples Records is now devoting floor space to the dairy-based dessert. ‘I can make a 50% margin on ice cream, while on CDs I can lose two bucks,’ the magazine [Billboard] quotes Dimples’ co-owner Dilyn Radakovitz as saying.”

“What is it about Felix Mendelssohn that so habitually slips the mind? For most of the 19th century, Mendelssohn was considered the equal of Beethoven and Bach. For much of the 20th, his music was known to at least as many listeners as the Beatles… Yet each season when the concert programmes drop through the door his is the name that gets oddly left off.”