Category: music

Taylor Swift’s career has been “noteworthy for what happens once the songs are finished. She has aggressively used online social networks to stay connected with her young audience in a way that, while typical for rock and hip-hop artists, is proving to be revolutionary in country music. As she vigilantly narrates her own story and erases barriers between her and her fans, she is helping country reach a new audience.”

“Susan L. Baker, the chairwoman of the company’s board, has been a big Mortier booster. But in retrospect, the combination of what now seems her naïveté with Mr. Mortier’s conviction that he could run the Paris company while planning an artistic transformation of City Opera during perilous financial times proved disastrous.”

“I think we’re ready to expand in what we offer to our public, and I think that it makes a lot of sense to look at what we’re doing from a broader, grander, and more holistic viewpoint… I would like to see us branch out and add concerts, vocal recitals, performances of large choral works or oratorios, and seminar series that shed light on the multiple aspects of creativity connected to a particular opera.”

“The economic downturn has scored its first high-profile casualty on Washington’s arts scene. The Washington National Opera has indefinitely postponed its performances of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle, which was to be a highlight of the 2009-10 season.”

Violin lessons are certainly not for everyone – the endless hours of practice, the humiliation of sitting in the very back of a youth orchestra, unsure what everyone else is doing. But for an adult 20 years removed from the experience, suddenly carrying around a violin for a day can lead to an unexpected outpouring of good will. “It is code for a different sort of person – artistic, freethinking, single. A wearer of Goth tops, not a person with lice shampoo in her handbag.”

With the media gasping in awe every time a Stradivarius or Guarneri del Gesu sells at auction for some ridiculously inflated price, it can be easy to forget that there are modern luthiers crafting string instruments today that sound every bit as good as the old Italian masters. They may not be household names, but to musicians who could never hope to afford a Strad, they are an essential part of the music world.

Robert Everett-Green was looking forward to John Adams’s operatic take on the Manhattan Project, Doctor Atomic. But he came away from the experience confused. “Why, I wondered (as [Tom] Wolfe did a decade ago about American fiction), is there so much free-floating introspection and soul-searching in this thing? With such a big story at hand – the first successful atomic detonation and the start of the nuclear age – why not just get on with telling it?”

Two years ago, Ontario’s Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony was on the verge of bankruptcy when public and private entities stepped in to put it on the path to recovery. Now, things are better for the ensemble fiscally, but “it is impossible to look at the symphony’s dwindling audiences and decreased ticket sales over the past year and not come away with serious questions about its future.”

Conductor Edo de Waart is stepping down from the directorship of Santa Fe Opera after only two seasons, citing health problems stemming from the city’s extreme altitude, and a desire to see more of his family, who are based in Wisconsin. De Waart takes over the Milwaukee Symphony next season, and joins the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra as an “artistic partner” in 2010.

Announcing its citywide “Ring” festival this week amid the general financial cataclysm, “L.A. Opera may very well be motivated by desperation. But it is also L.A. Opera’s leap of artistic imagination with this production that has provided it with the stimulus to think big. … The Pasadena Symphony and Pacific Opera, on the contrary, represent failures of imagination.”