Category: music

Let’s Hear More Unfinished Music!

Tom Service: “There’s no better way to get inside a composer’s head than to hear their works in progress. What about putting the first and last versions of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony next to one another? […] What about performing Beethoven’s original ideas for the end of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony (something Leonard Bernstein did in a famous recording)?”

‘Why I Walked Out Of Doctor Atomic‘

Literary critic Ron Rosenbaum now thinks of John Adams’s 2005 work as “the Emperor’s New Opera.” He found that “the music and the sets couldn’t have been more effectively dramatic. But the libretto, the words [assembled by Peter Sellars] … They were pedestrian, speechifying, and painfully simplistic (when not embarrassingly schlocky as in the “love scenes”). […] I began to wonder whether opera follows different rules: Because words are sung, do they transcend any bombastic triviality, any wounding awfulness?”

The Pirates On Britain’s Airwaves

“Every major city in Britain fizzes with unofficial broadcasters… Though the popular image of a pirate DJ is of a teenager in his bedroom, spinning tracks and spitting rhymes, the better pirates are no amateur affair… Pirates are unlikely to go away because they give listeners – and those who work on them – something that legal stations never can. Everyone involved in a pirate feels like they’re close to and representing a scene.”

Cincinnati Symphony Teetering Between Red, Black Ink

“Expense cuts, personnel layoffs, and some banner summers at Riverbend are helping to keep the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in the black – at least for now.” Attendance at the CSO’s main concert hall declined 10%, but the drop was offset by a strong showing at the orchestra’s outdoor summer venue. Still, a deficit is possible when final fiscal 2008 numbers are released.

Slow-Developing Play

So many musical performances seem to come together in a flash that it can seem odd to observe a collaboration that builds over a long period of time. But such is the nature of an unusual project bringing together the soprano Dawn Upshaw, the director Peter Sellars, and the composer Gyorgy Kurtag.