Category: music

“An amateur musician lost a violin worth £180,000 when he left it on a train. Robert Napier, 67, left the rare Goffriller violin on the luggage rack of a train from Paddington to Taunton as he returned to his home in Bedwyn, Wiltshire.” The loss comes less than a week after a Toronto Symphony violinist left his instrument at a streetcar stop.

The once-struggling English National Opera, feeling confident after posting a £1m budget surplus, is planning a whopping ten new productions next season. “Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami and actor Fiona Shaw are to make their… directorial debuts, in a new season that will seek to refresh the artform by bringing in fresh names from outside the opera world.”

The plan to create a summer home in Southern Ontario for the Toronto Symphony and National Arts Centre Orchestra will require at least CAN$20m in road and sewer improvements for the proposed site. “The target site is a 300-acre lakefront property that formerly housed a tank training area and rifle and artillery range.”

Melinda Bargreen, who has served as classical music critic at the Seattle Times for more than three decades, has accepted a buyout offer. Her position will go unfilled, as the Times becomes the latest daily paper to eliminate the position of full-time critic in favor of freelance reviews.

“The San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music is one of the most ambitious music education outreach programs in the nation, and one that aims to integrate music into the lives of every first- through fifth-grade kid in the San Francisco Unified School District.”

“Classical music’s move to the margins of popular culture came about for a lot of reasons–too numerous and disputable to discuss here–but let’s entertain one phenomenon that occurred in the larger culture that left the classical crowd behind: Sex, or, more precisely, sexy.”

“Opera Cleveland’s first season last year was as operatic offstage as on. Revolving-door syndrome struck early; the new company said goodbye to recently arrived artistic and executive directors and its principal conductor. Staff was cut almost in half. Tensions often ran high on the board.” So what will it take for the fledgling company to settle down and create a sustainable business model?

The CBC claims that its Vancouver-based (and soon to disband) CBC Radio Orchestra is anachronistic and too expensive to maintain, despite the fact that it actually makes up a measly 0.0035% of the broadcaster’s budget. Meanwhile, CBC is also gutting its classical radio programming. “Have we really reached the point where to voice a preference for classical music is to disenfranchise oneself?”

A video game that’s making the rounds of concert hall lobbies this year allows anyone to play conductor, leading a real orchestra on the screen before them, which actually reacts to their movements. “The challenging part of making the games was ensuring the pitch didn’t change as the video slowed or sped up.”

“Like many other American arts organizations, it fell on particularly hard times in the wake of 9/11; unlike most other institutions, it has yet to bounce back. Not incidentally, it was also in administrative disarray from 2003 to mid-2006, when it functioned without either a full-time executive director or a music director.”