Category: music

“On balance, this is beyond measure a better hall than it used to be, better than my fondest expectations for the refurbishment and better than London has heard since Queens Hall was bombed in May 1941. It is good enough to show up the limitations of resident orchestras and challenge their London swagger. It is also good enough to command admiration and renewed public affection. What it is not, and never will be, is the equal of classic shoebox-shaped halls in Vienna, Amsterdam and Boston, or of modern marvels in Birmingham, Lucerne and Los Angeles.”

After 45 years performing, the Guarneri Quartet is packing it in. “Founded in 1964 at the Marlboro Music Festival, the quartet is noted for its stellar interpretations of repertoire ranging from 18th- and 19th-century standards to Bartók, Stravinsky and Walton. The group’s award-winning recordings of Beethoven’s middle-period quartets were followed by an Edison Award in 1971 and premieres of works by Hans Werner Henze and Ned Rorem in the ’90s.”

“Audience acknowledgement, both positive and negative, is a weird form of public communication that is largely guided by acculturation. How often have you clapped at the end of a performance you didn’t like? Why did you? The de rigeur standing ovation at the end of a concert is fast becoming a similar form of groupspeak. But giving every performance a standing ovation totally destroys the impact the ovation once had.”

after budget cuts at the orchestra’s main funder. “Four years ago the JSO was put into receivership due to mismanagement and was in danger of being liquidated. It was saved by Leon Botstein, who accepted the position of music director and formed the American Friends of the JSO to raise funds. Botstein worked for free because the salary he was offered wouldn’t have even covered his traveling expenses, he said. As part of the JSO’s recovery program, orchestra members accepted a voluntary 20% pay cut.”

Arts consultant extraordinaire Adrian Ellis has been appointed executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. “Ellis will become the center’s third top executive in three years. Brown, the center’s former head of development, became executive director in February 2005, succeeding Derek Gordon, a former senior vice president at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.”

“The 1960 centennial of the birth of Gustav Mahler began the worldwide interest that has made his music today as popular as that of any Romantic composer. This year’s sesquicentennial of the birth of Edward Elgar may do the same for him. But nobody is counting on it.”

“Having licensed their names and images for everything from hats and wine labels to tote bags and even dog accessories, rock bands and other musicians would seem to be running out of new merchandising opportunities. But with recorded-music sales plummeting, merchandise is one of the most important new revenue streams to everyone in the music food chain — including record labels and music publishers.”

The Indianapolis Symphony recently appointed a new young concertmaster with a burgeoning solo career. That could make for some regular absences from Indy, and rather than merely bump the next violinist in line up to the top chair, the ISO is taking the unusual step of appointing a principal guest concertmaster.

When the Concert Association of Florida forced out its longtime head, Judy Drucker, last week, the Miami cultural scene was stunned. But Lawrence Johnson says that the board’s decision to move past Drucker was probably the right move. “While Drucker’s achievements and vast contribution to the region’s arts scene are unassailable… her propensity for foisting herself aggressively into the limelight alongside her artists, most evident in her cringe-inducing curtain speeches, struck many as gauche and provincial. She could be abrasive, self-aggrandizing and selective with the truth.”

The question of audience decorum is always a touchy subject among orchestra musicians and concertgoers, and when the orchestra is playing a difficult piece of new music that a chunk of the audience visibly hates, the atmosphere can deteriorate quickly. But should audience members really be required to just sit and take whatever is played at them? Is booing out of line? Refusing to applaud? Making remarks to those in the immediate area? The rules aren’t well defined…