Category: music

Oslo’s new $800 million opera house is “being hailed as one of the most important buildings to be erected in Norway since Trondheim got its Nidaros cathedral at the start of the 14th century.”

A study of school music classes by the International Journal of Music Education indicates big gender gaps in the instruments students choose. Just 19% of the schoolchildren currently learning bass or electric guitar are female. Eighty-nine percent of those studying flute are female.

“Wolfgang has publicly declared himself prepared to hand over the reins to his two daughters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 63, and Katharina Wagner, 29. Over the years, the half-sisters — daughters respectively of Wolfgang Wagner’s first and second wives — have made no secret of their enmity. This surprise solution was announced by the octogenarian in a personal letter to the Festival board last Tuesday.”

“The problem with white reggae has always been that reggae depends for its force on its context. All of which makes it surprising that there is a new crop of white reggae performers, eschewing the melanin-deficient basslines and embarrassing attempts at patois that have caught out their predecessors.”

Recently there was big excitement in some circles when it was announced that we now have a real portrait of Mozart. But “knowing what Mozart looked like tells us nothing of value about the only reason why he matters to us today, which is his music.”

“An $800 million opera house that seems to slope like an iceberg into the Oslo fjord opens tomorrow. The Carrara-marble-clad opera house — Norway’s largest cultural building in seven centuries — aims to revive the industrial waterfront and showcase the country’s oil wealth.”

“In a slumping music business,” summer festivals “pack a box office punch: the top five American festivals generated a combined $60 million in ticket sales last year, according to Billboard magazine’s estimates. At least four new festivals will make their debuts this summer, raising the total to more than a dozen. Various concert promoters are already warning of the dangers of oversaturation, and point to the clutch of stars headlining multiple festivals.”

England’s Opera North might well be the most innovative and exciting company in the UK, in an age when regional companies elsewhere are cutting back and programming cautiously. “The priorities for Opera North are now all about gentle expansion.”

How did an apprentice mechanic singing arias to his co-workers become one of the UK’s great operatic success stories? Alfie Boe is the name of the singer in question, and when he was “discovered” by a customer with connections to the music business, he made his way to London on only the barest promise that anything awaited him there.

“Concert pianists, used to being the centre of attention, are not known for their modest egos. So it is a challenge, if not a risk, to put eight of the best from Melbourne and Sydney on stage with eight Steinway grand pianos and ask them to play like an orchestra.” Yet this is exactly what a concert promoter in Australia is doing.