Category: music

Bruce Odland is a longtime composer and “sonic thinker” and he “wants people to question their audible world – and perhaps even enjoy some of those accidental sounds transformed into a type of music. The unintentional noises – the motors, ventilators, disc drives – have meaning, he says. But to absorb that meaning, we have to learn again to listen.”

“Glyndebourne has become as much an event on the social and business calendar as an opera festival. In a typically English way, much gentle wheeling and dealing takes place under the spreading oaks during the 80-minute dinner and picnic interval. Has the festival gotten too elite?”

“Already something of a misty legend at the time of his death in 1975, Walter Felsenstein is now largely forgotten by the public. It’s possible that American opera fans who regard the Met as the center of the universe may never have heard of him at all.”

“There’s nothing transparent about the Eschenbach era – a time of numerous crosscurrents, no one of which defines why it was one of the shortest and messiest in Philadelphia Orchestra history.”

The grumbling over Riccardo Muti’s appointment as Chicago Symphony music director doesn’t seem to be abating within the ranks of the New York Philharmonic, and Anthony Tommasini is confused: “Mr. Muti would have been all wrong for New York. I, for one, could not be more hopeful about [Alan] Gilbert’s potential. But I thought that the Philharmonic players all would have shared my enthusiasm.”

Ask 100 classical musicians what their favorite hobby is, and cooking will almost certainly be the #1 answer. “Which raises a question: Are food and music connected? Most musicians agree that their discipline often fosters a highly sophisticated sense of taste,” and the brain’s response to food is not unlike its response to music.

“For its latest revival of Tosca, opening Saturday, Los Angeles Opera has obtained a rare stage artifact — the jewelry worn by Maria Callas in 1956 for her Metropolitan Opera debut as Giacomo Puccini’s tragic heroine… The three-piece set, which consists of a tiara, earrings and a fanned-out necklace, is worth approximately $85,000.”

“Christoph Eschenbach’s all-Schubert final subscription concert as Philadelphia Orchestra music director was neither daring nor fail-safe. But it was certainly a reminder of what an individualistic musical thinker the community is losing, and of how resourceful he can be… at channeling the orchestra’s best qualities into something well beyond the luxury of its sound.”

The oratorio, a form to which high-profile contemporary composers have been returning in increasing numbers, is a bit hard to pin down. It’s an ostensibly sacred model imposed on an increasingly secular world. But “the religious oratorio model also offers a frame for one of classical music’s clear functions… At a time of national tragedy, for instance, music snaps clearly into focus.”

Minnesota Orchestra music director Osmo Vänskä isn’t known for a second career as a composer, the way his fellow Finn Esa-Pekka Salonen is. But Vänskä has been dabbling in composition for a few years now, and his latest work, which gets its premiere this weekend, was inspired directly by the tragic collapse of the interstate highway bridge in Minneapolis last summer.