Category: music

When it comes to pop music, guitars rock, basses thump, drums smash, and violins… um, sweeten? “For years, the strings have been marginalised in the world of pop – sidelined to the slushy world of ballads, lazily used to suggest drama or sophistication. To all intents and purposes, strings had become the sonic equivalent of the highlighter pen. Until now.”

The Oregon Bach Festival is bound up almost entirely in the identity of its artistic director, the legendary Helmuth Rilling. But Rilling, while he shows few signs of slowing down, is getting on in years, and the festival will eventually have to find a successor. “Make no mistake on stature and charisma. You can’t replace a dynamic figure like Helmuth Rilling with someone who is merely an excellent musician.”

The Norwegian preoccupation with the music of Edvard Grieg is easy to understand on a basic level – most countries naturally embrace the work of their most successful exports. But Grieg’s history and Norway’s are inextricably intertwined, and the connection runs deeper than mere flag-waving.

Alex Ross isn’t so sure that the discovery of Hitler’s personal record collection really proves that the Führer was a big fan of Russian music. “The fact that Hitler owned such records does not mean that he enjoyed them,” and there’s simply too much evidence that Hitler believed strongly in his own propaganda regarding the superiority of German music to draw the conclusion that he was secretly reveling in the pleasures of Tchaikovsky.

The upstate New York farm that hosted the original Woodstock is up for sale, 38 years after it was overrun by 400,000 people in a three-day orgy of sex, drugs, and rock. “Roy Howard, the current owner, is packing it in after years of tangling with local officials over permits for reunion gatherings to mark the 1969, three-day Woodstock music festival that helped ignite a generation.” The farm can be yours for a tidy $8m.

“The Metropolitan Opera plans to expand still further its live high-definition simulcasts into movie theaters around the world for the 2007-8 season, potentially tripling the audience for these broadcasts to an estimated one million viewers… The total includes more than 300 screens in the United States, up from 113 last season.”

American record label Warner Music lost $17m in the third quarter despite several hit albums, and analysts are attributing the decline to continued consumer embrace of music downloads. “Digital revenue jumped 27% to $112m, although this was not sufficient to make up for a fall in CD sales.”

The general director of the Dallas Opera has stepped down unexpectedly, prompting a fast-tracked search for a successor as the company prepares to make a big move to a new home in 2009. There are few clues as to why Karen Stone decided to depart early, except for a prepared statement in which she said that she was a bit fatigued with the fund-raising aspect of her job.

Is the age of the MP3 ruining our appreciation of good-quality recorded sound? Consider: the average MP3 file contains only 10% of the sound actually recorded on the original CD it came from. That CD, in turn, contains less than half of what engineers captured on-site when the recording was made. “Compressed MP3s represent a minuscule fraction of the actual recording. For purists, it’s the dark ages of recorded sound.”

“Virtuoso trumpeter Hugh Masekela claims that many of the talented musicians whose voices became symbols of protest against white domination are finding it hard to get bookings in South Africa because the ruling ANC is ‘terrified’ of music as an agent of change. “