Category: music

Trey Devey, a strategy consultant for Boston Consulting Group, a global consulting firm with 66 offices in 38 countries, will assume his new post on Jan. 20. He succeeds Steven Monder, who retired in June after holding the job for 31 years.

Italian tenor Marcello Giordani Giordani performed the title role in Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust during a matinee Saturday. A few hours later he sang the leading tenor role of Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton in “Madama Butterfly.” He replaced a sick colleague.

“Country music is an exception in the ailing music business, a genre still thriving in tough times. But back in November 1958 it was a commercially endangered species during a pop and rock ‘n’ roll boom.”

“El Sistema measures its success less by how many world-class professional musicians it churns out than by how well its pupils are able to absorb the values of self-discipline and teamwork in service of social harmony. Roughly 80% of the students are from low-income families.”

“When the charismatic South American takes over from Esa-Pekka Salonen, who is stepping down after 17 years at the podium [at the Los Angeles Philharmonic] to further his composing career, he will bring a rare combination of youth and experience, gravitas and exuberance, old-school European repertory knowledge and a New World willingness to break with fusty practices when necessary.”

“In an extremely rare public flare-up in the outwardly genteel world of major symphony orchestras, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, the 77-year-old maestro… pulled out of the entire run of four concerts he was scheduled to conduct with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He is outraged, he said yesterday, at how disrespectfully, in his view, the BSO administration had marketed his appearances to the public.”

Gramophone’s poll of music critics names the world’s top 20 orchestras. “Seven American orchestras, four German and three Russian make the list, which is topped by the Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam. The mighty Berlin Philharmonic and the refined Vienna Philharmonic are second and third respectively.”

First Obama, now the Chicago Symphony. “Gramophone asked classical music critics from the U.S., Europe and Asia to come up with their top 20 favorite orchestras. After the lists were compiled, the Chicago Symphony came out on top in the U.S.” It beat out six other American orchestras that also made the cut.

“[H]undreds of artifacts [are] being prepared for the opening on Tuesday of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC, a $9 million branch of the Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. The Annex, in a 25,000-square-foot basement space at 76 Mercer Street in SoHo — upstairs, facing Broadway, is an Old Navy store — was created as a smaller, quicker offshoot of the headquarters.”

Just as the violinist was finishing up a recital – being filmed by PBS for Live From Lincoln Center – conductor Gustavo Dudamel appeared in the audience and told Shaham and the crowd (and the TV viewers) that he had won the $75,000 award.