Category: music

“With the Ontario economy likely facing economic recession in coming months, COC president David Ferguson announced the sixth surplus year in a row at the organization’s annual general meeting… Box office revenue was the COC’s highest ever at $12.3 million, representing 41 per cent of total revenues. Private and corporate giving were also up over previous seasons.”

“Caught in a budget crisis, the Orchestras of Pasadena have laid off their two top executives, [and] issued an emergency fundraising appeal to save three remaining classical concerts and an 11-show outdoor summer pops series… Whether the remaining music will be played by the Pasadena Symphony and the Pasadena Pops depends on how the fundraising push fares in the face of a wounded stock market and a foundering economy.”

A slew of performers and backstage workers at London’s Royal Opera House have posed nude for a calendar raising funds for charity. “The Royal Opera House expects sales to outstrip the more sedate Royal Ballet calendar, which features photos of the performers fully clothed.”

“News that heavy metal is to receive serious scholarly attention in Salzburg has raised some eyebrows elsewhere in these pages. So is it heretical that the city of Mozart should be putting Metallica and Slayer centre stage? Not a bit of it. Heavy metal is probably the only other musical discipline that fetishises technical virtuosity as much as classical music: Edward Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen are the Horowitz and Kissin of their genre.”

“The Canadian Opera Company had a surplus of C$41,000 for the 2007-08 season, COC president David Ferguson announced Tuesday. It was the company’s sixth consecutive surplus. […] Box office revenues hit a record high and annual private sector support for the company has increased, he said.”

“If John McCain wins this election, it won’t have been thanks to the music community. With less than 24 hours to go until Election Day, recording artists continue to urge people to vote — and, overwhelmingly, to vote for Barack Obama. … Meanwhile, artists who have complained about McCain using their music at his appearances include Foo Fighters, Bon Jovi, Heart, and members of Van Halen.”

The 1717 “Amaryllis Fleming” Stradivarius cello received only one bid when it was put up for auction with the online house Tarisio. And that bid didn’t meet the reserve price.

A Russian violinist and teacher has hanged himself in Rome after being arrested for fraud. He had confessed to buying violins at flea markets and re-selling them to his students as 18th-century instruments for hundreds of thousands of euros.

Philip Hensher: “It seems a tragic justification of the career of the author of Gruppen that it would lead, in the end, to a multi-million selling pop album called OK Computer. But such Lilliputian testaments were very much in the air in 2007 because, for the best part of 30 years, the people who understood what had made Stockhausen interesting in the first place were generally not willing to stand up for his whole career. Since the mid-1970s, the composer who had once ruled a vast swath of contemporary taste had turned into a curiosity.”

“I remember sitting in [Stockhausen’s] studio in Cologne, surrounded by 12 speakers, him creating a current traveling up and down, swirling around us like the force of nature that electricity is, my insides pulsating to his noise… Now the 21st century has started, Karlheinz was right, things are great, we are communicating telepathically, of course (as he prophesied), and music schools have changed.”