Category: music

Daniel Barenboim recently spent three days in London, performing all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas for rapt audiences. It was a unique event, unrecorded and unbroadcast at Barenboim’s request, and even jaded London critics (whose slings and arrows Barenboim knows well) are calling it a performance “beyond perfection.”

“It may have no melody, no chord changes, no backbeat — nothing, in fact, that generations of listeners have come to expect from jazz. Its very name — free jazz — stirs heated arguments to this day, even though it has been a part of our musical life for more than 40 years.”

Quietly but quantitatively, the orchestra is reducing the number of traditionally formatted concerts and putting in their stead other kinds of performances. “I do think what we’re doing is groundbreaking. We’re really recognizing our audience in a meaningful way by putting together collections that are specific to their musical appetites.”

Clive Bayley lost his voice in the middle of an English National Opera performance of “Lucia” this weekend and couldn’t continue part way through. Luckily, Paul Whelan was in the audience, knew the part, and stepped in to finish the performance.

“It’s an era of shrinking budgets and exploding technology, a time when once-dominant MTV has morphed into reality-show central and the Internet has turned the entire planet into content providers. Size matters when cellphones are viewing screens and labels are staring down bankruptcy and a grass-roots, interactive culture is burgeoning in the music marketplace. Small, for so many reasons, is the new big.”

More than a dozen recording artists, including the estates of Count Basie and Benny Goodman, sued Universal Music on Friday, saying they had been cheated out of more than $6 million in royalties since 1998.

“Anyone with knowledge of both basketball and jazz recognizes natural affinities between the two pursuits: a marriage of form and improvisation, of individualism with teamwork; a primacy of rhythm (watch how basketball players dribble the ball before taking foul shots to re-establish a sense of tempo); and a requirement that players respond to one another’s choices and to rapidly changing situations in real time.”

Percussion concertos aren’t exactly standard concert hall fare, but in the next month alone, four major premieres in the US will bring percussionists to the fore. “These pieces are the latest sign that the percussion concerto, inherently a modern invention, has moved beyond its novelty phase. Orchestra administrators see percussion works as a draw for new audiences, with their athletic spectacle and ability to exploit non-Western sounds.”

Weeks after the end of a bitter lockout of the Jacksonville Symphony’s musicians, the organization’s president and executive director has resigned. Musicians had been harshly critical of Alan Hopper during the lockout. The JSO’s board chair says that the decision to leave was Hopper’s.

The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Scotland’s principal music academy, is in financia crisis. The Academy has to “find £600,000 of savings through job cuts and the curtailment of a popular drama course. No sooner had the dust settled than news quickly leaked of an alleged overspend of £100,000 in relation to its recent co-production with Scottish Opera of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.”