Category: music

“So far, most everyone agrees that [Jaap] van Zweden has measured up to the dazzling first impressions. And top music aficionados elsewhere in the United States are talking about the new guy in Texas.” That includes his players. “‘I have not heard one negative comment, and for musicians, that is saying something,’ says Erin Hannigan, the DSO’s principal oboist.”

“The back door of CBGB, the punk rock monument that closed in 2006, opened onto Extra Place, and the street is perhaps best known as the setting for the cover photograph of the Ramones’ album ‘Rocket to Russia.'” Now a developer wants to buy the street, and the neighborhood wants the city to keep it.

Keith Lockhart is entering his last season as music director of the Utah Symphony, and it seems that the end can’t come soon enough for one of Salt Lake City’s music critics. “For some unexplained reason, Lockhart feels that opening night is an excuse for dumbing down the classics. There’s no other explanation for it… And it hasn’t gotten any better over the years.”

“Although musicians and patrons are expressing relief that the near-death experience is over, opinions vary on where the orchestra goes from here… Without a tangible increase in community and corporate support, ‘We’ve only succeeded in rousing a sick patient with a shot of adrenaline.'”

It’s easy to forget that there were a lot of naysayers when Esa-Pekka Salonen was named as music director of the LA Philharmonic nearly two decades ago. But orchestra and conductor grew together, says Mark Swed, and forged one of the most dynamic and successful partnerships in the music world.

The Pittsburgh Symphony, now done with its three-year experiment of making do without a music director, is hoping that the newly installed Manfred Honeck can take it back to the heights it enjoyed under conductor Mariss Jansons. The climb began this weekend, and early indications are good.

The National Symphony’s choice of Christoph Eschenbach to be its next music director puts one of the most polarizing figures in the classical music world at the helm. One Philadelphia critic once said that there were two schools of thought: “those who say Eschenbach is a second-rate conductor now being forced to the top by a vacuum; and another group claiming him as a major talent, long overlooked, now being forced to the top by a vacuum.”

The CBC may have killed off its Radio Orchestra months ago, but its conductor hasn’t given up on resurrecting it. “It’s a long shot but this is too good an orchestra to go down without a fight — it’s one of the four or five best in the country.”

“A British property developer… has given London its first concert venue since the Barbican’s opening in 1982, incorporating it in a 100 million pound ($185 million) office-building-arts-complex around the corner from the King’s Cross St. Pancras station.”

“In the years the Pittsburgh orchestra operated without a music director, [its] identity lost some of its luster. Good reputations are like gold in this ultra-subjective business, and it’s here that [new music director Manfred Honeck] and his connection to the Viennese repertoire can make a substantial impact.”