Category: music

Relax, it’s a bar. Following the trail blazed by Matt Haimovitz, 24-year-old Haiou Zhang is making his Toronto solo debut this Friday at the popular goth/punk/rockabilly boîte.

A 1998 score by American composer Jay Reise (not to be confused with the 2003 works on the same subject by Einojuhani Rautavaara and Deborah Drattell) becomes the first opera on the Mad Monk to be staged in Russia.

The Oregon Symphony opened its 2008-09 season with Beethoven’s 9th, and critic David Stabler was notably unimpressed with the quality of the performance. So, it seems, were a number of patrons, and even orchestra staffers. Was a stage extension the source of the problem? “Saturday’s balances were so skewed,” Stabler writes, “even the symphony staff is wondering if the extension is to blame.” One orchestra violist blogged about what went wrong in the Beethoven.

Esa-Pekka Salonen recently took the reins of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, and is taking his new band on the road to some other UK halls. But things could have gone better in the Yorkshire town of Leeds, where “the atmosphere inside Leeds Town Hall was so stiflingly hot” that two audience members passed out during the performance and required medical attention.

A month after receiving a financial rescue package from the local city council, New Zealand’s Auckland Philharmonia has named 36-year old German conductor Eckehard Stier as its next music director.

A Swiss television network has staged Verdi’s La Traviata from a train station. “With scenes transmitted live from the main hall, the coffeehouse, the botanist shop and the train platforms of Zurich’s neo-Renaissance Hauptbahnhof, the country’s largest rail hub, the performance provided a grittier version of the opera’s themes of love, betrayal and redemption.”

On a difficult day for the city of Philadelphia, its orchestra proved its own relevance simply by “doing what only an orchestra can do at times like this,” Peter Dobrin writes. “I’ve no idea whether music was a salve for anyone in that crowd. But as a metaphor for how everyone and everything in a city is linked, the symphony orchestra is supremely able to demonstrate in art what is so hard to describe in life.”

The 54-year-old founder of the wildly successful choir The Sixteen wants to bring America’s oldest performing arts organization back to its roots. “The Handel and Haydn Society is a great brand name. You’ve got two of the great composers of Baroque and Classical music. Let’s concentrate on those two people. We don’t really need to go beyond those boundaries.”

“[Cleveland Orchestra music director Franz] Welser-Möst’s contract extends to 2018. [Critic Donald] Rosenberg has made it clear, over and over, that he believes the conductor routinely fails to get the most out of the orchestra, a view he seems unlikely to change or mute… Just as we would not assign a book review to a critic who is already on the record as loathing a certain author’s style or genre, is it reasonable to continue assigning a music critic to review performances by a conductor whose leadership he is unlikely ever to approve?”

The subject of the prolific Mr. Glass’s next operatic portrait will be Walt Disney. The new work, titled The Perfect American, is scheduled to open New York City Opera’s 2012-13 season – in time to honor the composer’s 75th birthday.