Category: music

New York Philharmonic music director Lorin Maazel had plenty to say about his orchestra’s trip to North Korea in the leadup to the controversial performance. Now, after the concert, he remains adamant that the trip was worth it, and says that, “in a way, it was alerting the populace that the party line had changed. Americans are no longer criminals and mad people and fanatic warmongers.”

Soprano Deborah Voigt had to leave the stage of the Metropolitan Opera midway through the second act of Tristan und Isolde on Friday night due to illness. The performance was halted for about 15 minutes, then continued with Voigt’s understudy in the lead role. Voigt is expected to return for future performances.

The management of the 24-member Shreveport Symphony wants to cope with a $500,000 accumulated deficit by converting all of its musicians from full-time employees making a minimum of $12,683 per year to freelancers paid by the service, averaging $3,123 per year. Musicians would also lose their health insurance under the plan.

There are many pictures purporting to be likenesses of Mozart. But “nobody really knew what Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart looked like – until now. To the great excitement of musical scholars, two previously-unknown oil portraits painted from life- and which can be traced back to a close friend of the composer’s father – have been discovered.”

“Opera officials blame the mess on the fact that the nonprofit company has funneled increasing amounts of money into its shows in an effort to raise its artistic profile and woo attendees. But it hasn’t been as successful in finding donors, resulting in ongoing annual deficits anywhere from $1 million to $3 million.”

The China Philharmonic’s worldwide tour with Lang Lang as soloist has been cancelled. Scheduled to run May 3 to 28, the tour was to have covered Europe, North America, South America and Asia, focusing on cities that have hosted the summer Olympic Games in the past, such as Mexico City and Montreal.

New York may get an important new classical music venue as plans for the Park Avenue Armory are unveiled. Final decisions about the armory’s piecemeal restoration and use haven’t yet been made, but “impresarios, directors and conductors are salivating at the possibilities.”

The English National Opera and the Young Vic Theatre are producing wwo chamber operas using both hi-tech and traditional approaches. “If it succeeds, the collaboration, certain to become an annual event, could lure new audiences and help give contemporary opera, traditionally regarded as difficult and esoteric, a chic and radical makeover.”

“Karajan isn’t being celebrated because he was an especially profound musician. He’s being celebrated because he was enormously successful and enormously rich. No one ever nominates Karajan’s recording of a work as their favourite, though his version might come in at number three or four.”

In July Covent Garden will stag a “pop opera’. It includes “a cartoon animal, dozens of acrobats and jugglers and a martial arts troupe. In a remarkable departure for the theatre, it has scheduled seven performances of Damon Albarn’s ‘pop opera’, Monkey: Journey to the West.”