Category: music

“The St. Paul-based Schubert Club has named [Philadelphia Orchestra Vice President] Kathleen van Bergen as its new executive director. She’s filling a position left vacant for the past 18 months by the death of the music organization’s visionary leader, Bruce Carlson… The organization is one of Minnesota’s oldest and most revered cultural institutions.”

Simon Rattle is on tour with Europe’s Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and seems to be having the time of his life. “You have to understand that I normally conduct an orchestra of teenagers. With the Berlin Philharmonic I’m a grizzly old grandfather. This is like an old rock group that’s been together for ages.”

“The Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra is in debt to the tune of about $300,000, a musicians union official said Thursday… The deficit is equal to about 25 per cent of the symphony’s operating budget, although it’s not clear how the organization got so far into debt.”

The latest entrant in Minneapolis’s cultural architecture boom is the new riverfront headquarters of the MacPhail Center for Music. “Its $25 million new home… is a steel-clad, state-of-the-art facility that’s wired for recording throughout, with an elegant 225-seat wood-paneled concert hall [and] 56 practice rooms specially tuned for the acoustic needs of instruments ranging from piccolos to snare drums.”

“In the heartland of French rap music, Zahia Ziouani is striking a chord with struggling youths in a Parisian suburb who flock to her music school and are joining her symphony orchestra.” The ensemble draws on the poverty-stricken Paris suburbs, known mainly for producing a generation of angry, disaffected rap stars.

“A total of 500.5 million albums sold as CDs, cassettes, LPs and other formats were purchased last year, down 15 percent from 2006’s unit total.”

“The film traces the path of a 9-foot concert grand over the course of a year, from a mill in Alaska where the wood is processed all the way to its eventual parking spot among its siblings in the basement of Steinway Hall on West 57th Street, in Manhattan.”

“Admittedly, Barbie at the Symphony is unlikely to have been conceived purely as an altruistic exercise in musical education. But it does address a serious issue. Symphony orchestras are in trouble.”

“The systematic selection of non-Brits to direct our symphony orchestras has been endemic for years and, as we start 2008, the prospects for a young British conductor have never been so bleak.”

“Successful as these HD broadcasts are, they raise some questions. Will newcomers to the form who attend these screenings be inspired to go to the opera house and hear the real thing, that is, to hear wondrous operatic voices in a natural acoustic?”