Category: music

“What has become the world’s most famous amateur orchestra is about to perform in London. The Cadogan Hall is the site of this imminent musical disaster, and all 800 tickets vanished in a trice. Which makes one wonder: what is it that makes people want to listen to a group of extremely bad musicians torturing a piece that most of them cannot play? Is there something about failure and its cheerful acceptance?”

Franz Welser-MÖst is on tour with his Cleveland Orchestra in Austria. “Conductors, including Welser-MÖst, and soloists garner bigger print than ensembles. The Austrian conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra is viewed here as the local boy made good, even though he hails from the smaller city of Linz.”

Soprano Elaine Alvarez, who was serving as the understudy for Angela Gheorghiu in a production of “La Boheme” in Chicago last month. The Lyric Opera management, understandably miffed after Gheorghiu missed six out of 10 rehearsals, told the Romanian diva to take a hike and Alvarez found herself singing the role of Mimi on short notice, to public and critical acclaim.

Scottish-born conductor Donald Runnicles will become the musical director at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper in 2009. Runnicles, currently music director at the San Francisco Opera, will succeed Italian conductor Renato Palumbo in Berlin.

“Air guitar has shed its social stigma. The days of the lonely, teenage nerd standing before his mirror are over. Air guitar has come out of the bedroom and now proudly struts its stuff in public. In the past decade, a whole subcultural community based on the cult of air guitar has emerged. There are clubs, competitions, records, associations, fans and even air guitar stars. And now comes Air Guitar Nation, a documentary that chronicles the phenomenon.”

While being interviewed by The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta at a benefit for Syracuse University, NBC chief Jeff Zucker “claimed that Apple has made millions on its iPod ‘off the backs of our content’ and that the software maker ‘destroyed the music business in terms of pricing’.”

Talk to almost anyone in the music business’ vital indie and DJ scenes and you’ll encounter a uniformly optimistic picture of the vinyl market. “The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music.”

“Philip Glass is without a doubt America’s most famous living composer of classical music… Yet Glass’s seventieth birthday, which fell on January 31st of this year, failed to create much hullabaloo in the ordinarily anniversary-addicted classical world.” The problem may be that Glass’s prolific catalog includes as many clunkers as masterpieces, and much of his output does have a tendency to sound the same. “Certainly, no one can deny that Glass possesses an instantly recognizable signature sound; the question now is whether that signature is being produced by automatic pen.”

The world premiere of a violin concerto was given on Sunday at Carnegie Hall with Joshua Bell as soloist and Roberto Abbado leading the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Ordinarily, this might not be an event worthy of national attention, but in this case, the composer was 15-year-old Jay Greenberg, whose 5th symphony was recorded last year by the London Symphony, and who has been compared to Mozart and Mendelssohn. “Greenberg skilfully leads the listener through a gamut of emotions with touches of 21st-century tonality, excitement and lyricism. It’s a compelling addition to the genre.”

“Mark Weinstein, the Pittsburgh Opera’s general director, has accepted the position of executive director at Washington National Opera, where he will work with its general director, the renowned tenor Mr. Domingo, in running the $32 million company… In the fiscal year that ended in June, the Pittsburgh Opera, which has an annual operating budget of $8 million, had a surplus of around $300,000.”