Category: music

“Radiohead, the respected British rock act, said that the band would sell its new album, at least initially, exclusively as a digital download and allow fans to decide how much to pay for it, if anything.” The album, “In Rainbows,” is to “be sold as a download without copy restriction software, known as digital-rights management. In effect, the band is asking fans to establish a monetary value for music, even when widespread piracy means that it would be available free.”

“As director-designate Ms. Alsop reinvigorated the orchestra, institutionally and artistically. A born communicator and effective proselytizer for music, she has led a major community-outreach effort and taken the orchestra back into the recording business for the first time in a decade. Thanks to a $1 million grant, the Baltimore Symphony this season is offering all tickets to subscribers at $25 a concert. (I am continually amazed at the impact that a sum like $1 million, just pocket change in popular culture, can have in classical music.)”

“Orchestras, bands and parlor pickers for two centuries have enjoyed affordable instruments made from the finest tone woods cut from old-growth forests. No more. The best tone woods are becoming unavailable or prohibitively expensive as the world’s forests succumb to overharvesting, illegal logging and pollution.”

“Labels can fight the unauthorized release of their music as they have in the past with nasty court battles that tarnished the industry’s reputation. Or they can go with the flow, staying one step ahead of the leakers. Common sense suggests that album leaks can benefit both the label and the artist by providing exposure to the music, building good buzz for an upcoming release (assuming it doesn’t suck).”

The San Diego Symphony makes it possible for patrons to buy a recording of the orchestra’s performance as it concludes. The orchestra “expects to have as many as 30 programs online by the end of the year. Streaming is also being planned, and the San Diego Symphony continues to generate podcasts, video and online program notes.”

Theatre people, with their trembling at the title of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, aren’t the only superstitious ones in the bunch. “There’s even a bad-luck equivalent to Macbeth – Verdi’s La forza del destino, a great, eventful, melody-rich work…. It’s hard to pinpoint where the reputation for trouble started, but a lot of opera types refer to Forza and bad luck in the same breath as if it were a firmly established fact.”

“Soprano Angela Gheorghiu, scheduled to sing Mimi in Puccini’s “La boheme” at Lyric Opera of Chicago, was dismissed Friday for missing rehearsals, said general director William Mason. The action marks the first time that Lyric has taken such a drastic action since 1989, when supertenor Luciano Pavarotti was banished from the Civic Opera House.”

The Lucerne Festival Orchestra is “perhaps the greatest orchestra almost nobody has heard of, an ensemble of all-star musicians that blooms once a year for two weeks by the side of Lake Lucerne. It may well be one of the finest pickup bands ever assembled.”

“Like Venice, the city in which he lived and died, Luigi Nono is complex and contradictory. He was at the heart of developments in European modernist music after the second world war, yet his work was rooted in the Renaissance, baroque and classical periods.”

Lyric Opera of Chicago reached a tentative contract settlement Friday with the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA), the union representing Lyric’s chorus, dancers, actors and some of its solo singers and production staff.