Category: music

“As the debut production of Song of Houston, a broad effort to bind the innovative 52-year-old Houston Grand Opera to the community through a series of cultural events, Saturday’s performances, including a free matinee, attracted many first-time operagoers, some in native dress.”

Nah. He was just “testing acoustics.” “The blind tenor, who is friends with Met general manager Peter Gelb, sang some Italian art songs on the main stage on Nov. 2, Met assistant manager Elena Park said Friday. While the Met isn’t looking to cast Bocelli in an opera, he could sing an out-of-season piano recital, Park said.”

“A strange, uncanny force seemed to loom behind each bar, as if the notes on the page were pinholes burning with light from a place unseen. This curious power is an essential quality of the stripped-down, urgent art of Gyorgy Kurtag. He writes music of extreme concentration and searing existential honesty. Each piece costs him dearly.”

“London’s unique selling point is displaying the art of the perfectly formed theme and a knack for pulling off unique events. Last year the festival extolled London’s cultural diversity. This year it is the turn of the great jazz tradition.”

It seems there’s just no room on the pop charts any more for original movie songs that make the hit charts. “Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” rap from the 2002 film “8 Mile” is the rare recent Oscar winner that’s also had radio success — as catchy as “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” was from 2005’s “Hustle & Flow,” it wasn’t exactly radio-friendly.”

Charles MacKay is the new general director, replacing Richard Gaddes, who is retiring. MacKay, 57, has served for 23 years at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, where he followed Gaddes as that company’s general director.

To read the reviews of the orchestra’s European tour “is to begin to understand how polarizing a figure conductor Franz Welser-MÖst has become. In Austria, some consider him to be the heir apparent to the late, eminent conductor Herbert von Karajan. Elsewhere, Welser-MÖst is either admired or a source of mystification.”

“It seems only logical that orchestras and opera companies, desperate to attract young ticket buyers flush with cash and hormones, should resort to the sexual sell. Now the mating game has been taken up by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which last week inaugurated a series of exploratory evenings, entitled Connect at the Met, for singles.”

It’s “one in which artists share not just revenue from their album sales but concert, merchandise and other earnings with their label in exchange for more comprehensive career support. If the concept takes hold, it will alter not only the way music companies make money but the way new talent is groomed, and perhaps even the kind of acts that are offered contracts in the first place.”