Category: music

“La Scala officials say the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli has been commissioned to produce an opera on the international multiformat hit for the 2011 season at the Milan opera house. The composer is currently artistic director of the Arena in Verona.”

During an April 9 restaurant inspection at the Met, the department found “evidence of mice or live mice present in facility’s food and/or nonfood areas,” according to reports on the department’s Web site.

“Choice of funeral music dates us just as surely as clothes or what children’s programmes you remember with affection. One of the UK’s current favourites, according to a recent survey, is Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

“Seen, however, from the relatively short distance of 19 years after his 1989 death at age 81, his lost utopia is hardly inviting. This is not to debunk Karajan but to examine what happens when one of the century’s great talents pursues an apparently noble goal that eventually becomes a gray area between the rarefied and the inconsequential.”

“The ever-popular cellist Julian Lloyd Webber is joining forces with composer Michael Wolters and an ensemble of students from Birmingham Conservatoire to present And Now, The News: the musicians will effectively improvise their way through a 7pm live news broadcast from BBC4 relayed into the hall.”

“The scores could be compilations from various Mozart works, or compositions by other authors just signed in his name, or — in the luckiest case for us — they could be unknown authentic Mozart. In that case we could talk of a sensation.”

“Bands often strive to broaden their audience by playing shows out-of-town for minimal guarantees. Their goal is a modest one: to make enough to pay for fuel to get to the next gig. But with the price of gas topping $4 a gallon, that’s becoming more difficult.”

“The inner ear includes filters built from personal history that don’t get talked about except in rushed, breathy whispers. ‘I used to dig metal,’ or, ‘I loved boy bands,’ or, “John Elliot Gardiner was the only baroque conductor I trusted in graduate school.” These truths may embarrass us, but they also shaped our identities as listeners.”

“Sure, jazz is historically a hybrid form. But while jazz always has been omnivorous, sucking up influences, it lately has truly entered the global age, sinking new roots and moving further afield than ever before.”

Dima Bilan’s “performance Saturday of the R&B ballad “Believe” brought Russia its first-ever win at the yearly extravaganza of pop and rock. He was joined on stage by Hungarian violinist Edvin Marton and the Russian Olympic skater Yevgeny Plyushchenko, who pirouetted on artificial ice to the tune.”