Category: music

“Eight years after Sydney hosted the 2000 Summer Olympics, officials with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra acknowledged their stirring performance at the opening ceremony was entirely prerecorded. And perhaps even more cringe-inducing for Sydney residents: some of the music was recorded by the symphony of rival city Melbourne.”

“Among players, the tantalizing rumor is circulating that the candidate pool has been winnowed down to one: God. With such Talent not on the roster at CAMI or any of the other classical-talent agencies, the orchestra might think back a mere five years for a reality check to the conductor before last. Wolfgang Sawallisch was good enough. And then some.”

“What I do is not spectacular, but I am doing a lot of things. They may be small movements, but they are directed exactly to the musician who needs them. And in performance, the force is always more because of the excitement of the concert. You have to impose your will – not with a hammer, but you have to be able to convince people of your point of view.”

Some have wondered after the museum announced it would open a New York annex. But the museum’s president says emphatically no. “Cleveland didn’t create this and a lot of folks in this region forget that. They think that we had this idea one day and decided we’d build it. We have a license with New York and that was something that was negotiated over a period of time.”

Rufus Wainwright wants the opera, “Prima Donna,” to be in French; its would-be commissioners — the Met and Lincoln Center Theater — insisted on English. Wainwright said another stumbling block was the date of a potential production at the opera house. The earliest the Met could offer, he said, was in 2014. “They work on that sort of scale; I wanted to get it out as soon as possible,” he said, adding wryly, “because I’m an impatient pop star.”

With the days counting down before the board meets to decide on the succession, Nike Wagner joined forces with Mr. Mortier. She is the daughter of Wieland Wagner, whom many feel provided strong artistic leadership. Mr. Mortier, in his e-mail statement, called Nike Wagner the “favorite of the music press.”

“There was no ignoring the large black cloud that hung over the international festival which, year by year, is losing its lustre. Whatever the ups and downs of one show or another, the underlying narrative of Salzburg and Edinburgh this summer was a tale of two festivals, one of which is urgently renewing itself while the other determinedly ignores the overhanging storm warning.”

Mortier said he submitted a joint application to run the Wagner festival at Bayreuth with Nike Wagner, one of the composer’s great granddaughters, because “part of the Wagner family insisted.” A joint bid by two other great granddaughters, Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier, is regarded as the favorite heading into Monday’s meeting of the festival board.

“Following the demise of the televised music video, Mathieu Saura’s videos show a new marriage of music and film that replaces the artifice of big budget music videos with the raw simplicity of performance. He’s clearly struck a chord. The videos may not be playing on MTV, but they’re all over the Web, where sites like the Black Cab Sessions and Pitchfork TV have joined in with a similar minimalist style. Meet the Music Video 2.0.”

“The U.S. music performing rights org earned revs of more than $901 million in the fiscal year ended June 30. Of the total revenue, $786 million will be distributed to the songwriters, composers and copyright owners. Distribution represents an 8% increase over the prior fiscal year.”