Category: music

“Somehow, music is all about companionship, even the infant babbling with its mother – it’s a very early form, an innocent form, of companionship – all the way to sophisticated chamber music, where people are living in the almost chess-like intricacies of composition. Why music? All the intricacies of our minds, and our needs from the basic to the highest, are there in music.”

“Over and over again, the elitist committee of 50 record company executives and rock critics who do the nominating come up with a list that reflects their East Coat, intellectual biases, and, year after year, the voting body of FM radio disc jockeys picks the most mainstream possible candidates and votes them in.”

The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra plays Carnegie Hall. “Typically, the more players involved, the harder it is to play together. But these musicians perform with such discipline and well-honed precision that they can go for maximum expression and follow the lead of their impetuous conductor.”

Daniel Barenboim turns 65 this week, and increasingly sees it as his mission to put music into a broader context of ideas and initiatives. “It is not seen as part of the general culture; it’s almost a closed club. The whole association that music used to evoke is gone.”

“In an era of high-tech musical wizardry, the art of unaccompanied singing is more in vogue than ever before. College is prime a cappella time. Since 1981, the number of varsity a cappella groups has swelled from 250 to well more than 1,100.”

In rehearsal, Andrew Litton changed the acoustic in Miami’s “tunable” concert hall this week, and the resulting performance left much to be desired. “The question is do we in a nice way stand up to artistic personnel that say they want it a certain way?”

“Design renderings posted on Libeskind’s website show a long sloping body and a jagged-edged lid, all streaked with crisscrossing silver lines.”

Sales of CDs have been declining for years now. But recording companies think new download-to-phone services could revive their flagging fortunes.

Enter Piccola Lirica, which advertises itself as youth-friendly, meaning it hires fresh-faced singers and shrinks grand operas like “Tosca” from “Godfather” to “Pinocchio” length. It’s the CliffsNotes version of Puccini, fondly abridged.

With the Toronto Jazz Festival attracting 600,000 people over 10 days, pianist Robi Botos wonders why all the fans who “fill up the tent at the jazz festival” are not filling up jazz clubs during the rest of the year.