Category: music

British newspapers have been full of polemics about the composer Edward Elgar recently, and much of the debate has been over who gets to claim Elgar, and for what purpose. “Great art has a dimension beyond the local, and it is true that Elgar could do with more foreign champions, because his music isn’t as well-known beyond these shores as it should be. But that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate it for what it says to and about us.”

Dallas’s new opera house is beginning to take shape, more than two years before it will officially open, and already, the promise of the new facility is having an impact on the city’s cultural scene. “What’s already striking is how compact the audience chamber will be… Greater intimacy is a big part of the new building’s raison d’être, [and] the success of Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, which opened last fall, reinforces that promise.”

Christoph Eschenbach is now a lame duck in both Paris and Philadelphia, and come 2010, “for the first time in decades, [he] will be without a formal orchestral appointment.” Usually, the orchestra world keeps its internal workings close to the vest, but Eschenbach has been speaking out, blaming poor orchestra management. But in referring to executives in both Paris and Philly as “amateurish,” he may have created an even more uncomfortable situation for himself and his musicians in Philadelphia.

San Francisco Opera has unveiled a highly sophisticated new multimedia setup that will allow it to vastly expand the menu of technological accoutrements it offers with its staged productions. “The company has put together the first high-definition video production facility built into an opera house in the United States. [The setup] provides the Opera with the latest tools to produce simulcasts, radio programs, DVDs, podcasts and other emerging electronic forms. Streaming pay-per-view opera broadcasts may be in the cards.”

There’s been a lot of premature applause at Montreal Symphony concerts recently, which may annoy some seasoned concertgoers, but also signals that the orchestra and its new maestro, Kent Nagano, are attracting a new audience for the first time in years. In fact, ticket sales are up 15% in Nagano’s first season with the MSO, and every concert he conducted sold out.

One of the dirty little secrets of the orchestra world is that the audience for pops concerts is aging faster than the audience for classical, and unless the format changes to accommodate younger concertgoers, its status as a surefire moneymaker will soon be in jeopardy. With that in mind, the Boston Pops is beginning to take steps to shake its image as a light entertainment for stodgy baby boomers.

Christophe Eschenbach was already leaving the Philadelphia Orchestra. But this week also comes word he’s leaving the Orchestre de Paris as well. “For the first time in decades, Eschenbach will be without a formal orchestral appointment. “Orchestras, conductors and management are not working together anymore. The management in both cases [Paris and Philadelphia], I’m sorry to say, is amateurish. I’ve struggled with this quite a long time in Paris. I don’t want to do that anymore . . . I’m a free man.”

“Evidently music by women still needs champions; women remain strikingly underrepresented in the ranks of composers. According the American Symphony Orchestra League, 1 percent of the music American orchestras played in 2004-5 was written by women. That figure jumped to 2 percent in 2005-6, thanks to Ms. Tower, who was the most-played living composer over that season because of the project ‘Made in America,’ a commissioned work played by 65 orchestras around the country.”

“The launch of music tracks free of digital locks on iTunes has been overshadowed by the discovery that they contain data about who bought them. Some fear this data could be used to identify the owner of the tracks if they turn up on file-sharing sites.”

Song lyric websites are wildly popular. “Quite clearly, consumer demand for this kind of information is huge. Which makes it odd that it was not until April this year that US music publishers, with the help of digital media giant Gracenote, launched a legal alternative. Hosted by Yahoo!, the service will allow users to view lyrics from approximately 400,000 songs, and return to publishers a share of advertising revenue.”