Category: music

Italian violinist Matteo Fedeli travels with his $10 million Stradivarius – “and has been given police permission to protect it with a .357 Smith and Wesson Magnum.”

Tom Service: “But given that the only excuse for classical music’s fetishisation of big round numbers is to reveal music that wouldn’t otherwise get the chance to be heard, the almost complete lack of fanfare for Rimsky-Korsakov has been lamentable. And I’d take Rimsky’s Russian Easter Festival Overture over yet another Lark Ascending any day of the week.”

“Not so long ago, making a fanfare about big frocks and fancy sets in opera was the preserve of that crowd-pleasing impresario Raymond Gubbay. Heaven forbid that you uttered the words ‘authentic’ or ‘spectacular’ inside a ‘serious’ opera house.” But times have changed. “Ironically, going traditional has become the new radical – a shortcut to standing out from the concept crowd.”

“David Angus will become music director at Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York on November 1. He replaces Stewart Robertson, who left Glimmerglass in 2006 after almost 20 years.”

The Brits have fared miserably in recent years in Europe’s biggest pop music contest. Admitting he had accepted “mission impossible”, Lord Lloyd-Webber will only start work on the song for Moscow in 2009 once he has chosen its singer, who will be found through a live BBC talent show.

“With a weak dollar, strong euro, U.S. visas requiring much paperwork, and risk-wary American presenters, the once-global community of classical musicians has become fragmented in ways that beloved, familiar talents on one side of the ocean are unknown on the other.”

The debate over the supposed aging of the core audience for orchestral performances is raging again, and composer Matthew Guerreri has an interesting take. Acknowledging that audiences seem to have aged over the past several decades, he points out that both overall life expectancy and the age at which people settle into adulthood have gone up at almost the same rate. “The problem–if it even is a problem–would seem to be more a function of demographic evolution than a lack of cultural wherewithal on the part of classical music specifically.”

Want to know where classical music is headed in the future? Just check out the projects being pursued by some of the offspring of today’s classical luminaries, many of which seem to be elegantly straddling the worlds of high culture and pop.

“It has been interesting to watch the development of Adams’s appeal to the opera world since 1987, when ‘Nixon in China’ brought him wide attention, and his works got the label of so-called ‘docu-opera’… The trajectory has not always been smooth…”

The Tampa-based Florida Orchestra has never exactly been a model of fiscal stability, and the current economic meltdown has the potential to hurt the group severely. “We know that corporate sponsorship is taking a hit… We know that government funds are taking a hit.” But the orchestra’s executive director expects upper-end donations to increase in response to the downturn.