Category: music

“The turmoil within Opera Australia has deepened with revelations that most of a A$1.75 million bequest has been squandered in a long-running legal action. At last count, the legal bill was an alleged A$1.3 million and rising.”

The Louisiana orchestra has canceled this Saturday’s opening night concert “due to what the board is calling an ‘illegal strike’ by the musicians.” The walkout, which began Oct. 2, is over the change of the orchestra’s 24 full-time musicians to freelance pay-per-service status.

When McKim, Mead & White designed Boston’s Symphony Hall, which opened on Oct. 15, 1900, they “did something unprecedented: They hired Wallace Clement Sabine, a young assistant physics professor from nearby Harvard, to act as acoustical consultant. For the first time ever, scientifically proven acoustical principles were applied to concert-hall design.”

The Metropolitan Opera launches its online audio and video streaming service, Met Player, next Wednesday. Daniel J. Wakin tested it out. “Several times during the trial an attempt to stream a 2007 high-definition performance of ‘Il Barbiere di Siviglia’ hiccupped and caused the browser to close. But the process worked on the next try. The sound was clear and rich, and the video sharp.”

“A Japanese game maker has teamed up with the nation’s leading mobile phone network carrier to enable users to play an orchestra with their fingertips.”

“I would love, if I had the time and the sponsors available, to just do music to bring the people of Kashmir – the Hindus and the Muslims, who are at odds with one another – together,” says the Indian-born conductor, doubtless keeping in mind the similar efforts of his colleague Daniel Barenboim in the Mideast.

The ideal musical accompaniment to the worldwide financial debacle? “Bach’s short, rarely performed Cantata 168, a setting of passages on the parable of the unjust steward from Corinthians and the Gospel of Luke. It won’t bring you much solace – at least not until the closing chorus of consolation – but you will be able to feel and share the anger and the wrath, directed at bankers and accountants.”

Manhattan School of Music teachers have begun organizing to form a union, arguing that “they are poorly paid, lack job security and have little say in how the school is run and no recourse for complaints. … The struggle has injected a dose of real-world politics into the melody-basted halls of the Manhattan School, one of the city’s top conservatories and the producer of legions of highly skilled singers, pianists, fiddlers and other performers.”

With the notable exception of Barack Obama, “hanging off the coat-tails of musicians is a dangerous game for any politician to play.”

“Few composers in recent times have been celebrated, reviled, imitated and talked about as much as he, from his breakthrough in 1960 when he was in his mid-20s, through the amassing of heaps of medals and honorary degrees since then.”