Category: music

“Miami-Dade County could give nonprofit New World Symphony $27 million to help fund an expansion of its campus… The money would come from conventional development tax funds.” The orchestral training academy is hoping to score a total of $45m in government grants for its $200m expansion project.

“The Metropolitan Opera has ended its informal policy of giving previous subscribers to “Der Ring des Nibelungen” first crack at tickets for the next round of the four operas, which is scheduled for the spring of 2009. Instead preference will now go only to subscribers to the regular Met season and to patrons, in effect, imposing what the irked “Ring” fans view as a surcharge on the tickets they had a right to buy in the past.”

The BBC Proms is changing, that much can be said with confidence. But in its first year under a new director, the backbone of the festival remains the symphony orchestra, and the addition of Doctor Who and his TARDIS won’t change that. “It’s a basic test of this 150-odd page brochure if you find yourself suddenly wanting to go to a lot of concerts. And I do.”

Record stores are supposed to be yesterday’s news to college students, rendered obsolete by iTunes and the easy availability of free pirated music. So what to make of the Princeton Record Exchange, which boasts 150,000 old media titles on everything from vinyl to disc? “The lesson of [the] store seems to be that if you’re going to be a dinosaur, be a serious dinosaur.”

“With Roger Wright taking charge of the BBC Proms planning only from last September, this year’s programme was always going to be a bit of a transitional one… Yet closer inspection reveals a few things that perhaps hint at the direction the season might take once Wright gets into his stride.”

“David Itkin, the music director of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra since 1993, is leaving to become director of orchestral studies at the University of North Texas in Denton… Under Itkin, symphony ticket sales have climbed 340 percent and contributions are up 282 percent.”

“Eight-time Grammy winner and Los Angeles native Herb Alpert, who in November pledged $30 million to UCLA to establish the cross-disciplinary UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, has now given $15 million to the School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts. In recognition of the gift, to be announced today, the school will be renamed the Herb Alpert School of Music.”

Washington’s Kennedy Center is home to a new concert series, Pro Musica Hebraica, which will explore the far-reaching genre of Jewish music. But right there at the outset, there’s a problem. What exactly is Jewish music? “In some cases the answer is clear… But in this realm of classical or art music, you run into all kinds of semantic debates.”

“The New York Philharmonic will give a free concert on Governors Island on July 5, officials said Tuesday, a possible step toward the orchestra’s cherished hope of finding a permanent summer home in the New York area.”

“A Toronto Symphony Orchestra veteran will be getting his prized violin back today, thanks to a bag lady and a sharp-eyed man who lives near where he left the instrument. But there’s a twist. The $1,000 reward offered by Jim Wallenberg will not be paid to the bag lady who found the violin, but to the couple who paid the woman $35 and a ring to give them the violin.”