Category: music

Nuclear disarmament isn’t the cause it once was, but in Cleveland, an organization calling itself Performers and Artists for Nuclear Disarmament (PAND) is turning 25, helmed by two former members of the Cleveland Orchestra.

St. Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican’s church, has a long and venerable history, but in recent years, the in-house choir had deteriorated, even becoming known as St. Peter’s Screechers. Then, Rev. Pierre Paul arrived, and began revolutionizing the Vatican’s approach to choral music.

The Columbus Symphony may be officially shut down, but “with the grass-roots support of volunteers and others, the musicians, acting as their own managers, have played on.” Still, the expense and logistical challenges of putting on orchestra concerts with no access to the CSO’s usual venue and library have been immense.

“Buoyed by a gift from Target, the Minnesota Orchestra announced Thursday that it will go ahead with its concert Sept. 14 at Lake Harriet Band Shell in Minneapolis. Last week, the Orchestra canceled the annual event, anticipating budget problems in the next fiscal year. Target representatives soon called with a sponsorship offer.”

“The first-ever multimedia concert production of the Persian Trilogy, based on the Persian national epic poem Shahnameh, will make history tomorrow at [Toronto’s] Roy Thomson Hall… Composed by Iranian-American composer Behzad Ranjbaran between 1989 and 2000, the concert will be a highlight of the Seventh International Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies.”

The latest from Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho is a gut-wrenching opera about the rape of a strong-willed woman by a soldier living in an unspecified war zone. “Ms. Saariaho has said that the idea for this opera came to her when she was pregnant and saw a sonogram of her baby… And pregnancy can be experienced as an invasion by the ultimate other, a metaphor that resonated with [her librettist’s] ideas about cultural clash.”

“In the old days it was easy: you bought your album, put it on your hi-fi and listened to it while reading the lyrics on the record sleeve… But a survey released yesterday shows that we are finding it harder to find accurate song lyrics – and we don’t like it.”

Presidential contender Barack Obama has strongly condemned a song by rap star Ludacris which refers to President Bush as “mentally handicapped” and also takes shots at John McCain and Hillary Clinton. Obama has met with Ludacris in the past, and praised him in a Rolling Stone interview earlier this year.

“A performance of Richard Wagner’s “Siegfried” at this year’s Bayreuth Festival was delayed by 10 minutes on Thursday evening owing to torrential rain that flooded parts of the legendary Festspielhaus theatre. The so-called “under stage” — installations below stage level that are invisible to the audience — and a low-lying building adjacent to the theatre were flooded.”

He humanized the avant-garde, says one critic. “Ligeti had his own singular and unpredictable parameters. Sometimes he’s almost alarmingly funny, other times mesmerizing, uncanny, hyperbolic, touching, ironic – all the good stuff music used to do.”