Category: music

“The Fort Worth Opera has announced it will stage the world premiere of Before Night Falls, a new opera by Cuban American composer Jorge Martin, as the centerpiece of its 2010 Opera Festival. Before Night Falls is based on the autobiography of Cuban dissident poet Reinaldo Arenas, whose memoir by the same name was made into a 2000 film starring Javier Bardem.”

“[T]hroughout its life span, Opera Pacific was rarely on firm footing. Its financial structure was never that solid from the start. […] Attendance was not really the problem, though that could have been improved… the pool of donors to the company was much too small. More like a puddle.”

Mark Swed observes that the giant city-wide festival that Los Angeles Opera, the Getty, LACMA and other institutions are staging around Wagner’s Ring in 2010 is risky in the current financial climate, but that “[t]aking bold artistic chances always opens new avenues.” Meanwhile, the teetering Orchestras of Pasadena and all-but-dead Opera Pacific “represent failures of imagination.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the title of a piece of music is as important to its success as what it sounds like. So why do composers seem to be so uncomfortable with the titling their works? “Perhaps the notion of giving a work a title makes composers feel awkward.”

“The idea of China as the gravitational center of a globalized world is something most countries have gotten used to. But classical music hadn’t seemed like it would be part of that mix, if only because Western opera and the Eastern world never made a natural fit.” But that’s been changing fast, and China is experiencing a classical boom that may yet make it a global center of the art form.

“It survived, broken but not destroyed, a remnant of a World War II Nazi concentration camp. Then, for more than 60 years, the violin emblazoned with a Star of David was silenced… On Tuesday, this violin, one of 16 ‘klezmer’ violins that [have been] painstakingly restored, will be heard for the first time in the United States and for one of the first times since the war.”

The Toronto Symphony will be in Ottawa next week, playing Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes. Problem is, a local orchestra is scheduled to play the same piece at the same venue four days later. “It’s the second time in recent years that the [National Arts Centre] failed to cross-reference the programs of the Ottawa Symphony and a touring orchestra.”

The Guardian‘s Charlotte Higgins, who as a teenager “lay on my bed moodily listening to late Beethoven or Shostakovich quartets,” got tired of saying “I don’t do pop.” She tries out five gigs and tells us about it – from indie-folkster Bon Iver (she uses the phrase “invernal forlornness” and leaves “feeling elated”) to Metallica (which gives her “nauseous, pounding dreams”).

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is sending off its departing music director with a special microsite (www.celebratesalonen.com) featuring 15 hours of music, 4 hours of audio interviews and 3 hours of video clips (all free and on-demand), as well as an interactive timeline of Esa-Pekka’s 17 years with the Phil.

The premiere of the 1929 silent New Babylon, with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich performed live, didn’t exactly go according to plan: Soviet censors cut entire scenes from the movie, and nobody told the composer. The resulting fiasco led to the music being shelved for decades. Now a Russian film festival in Australia has resurrected the original version of New Babylon – with Shostakovich’s score.