Category: music

Venezuela’s dynamic music education system is no longer the well-kept secret it once was, and with the appointment of Gustavo Dudamel as the next music director of the LA Philharmonic, the country is being recognized as a virtual factory of orchestral talent. “So far, the Venezuelan music education system has not produced a generation of young composers on par with Mexico’s. Yet it’s indisputable that its musician training program produces top-notch orchestra players.”

Singing a lead role in a Metropolitan Opera production is a tough job. Replacing a popular lead in the same Met production is flatly terrifying. “How is it possible to maintain integrity in the staging when major roles in the cast change, especially when the changes occur weeks and even months apart?” It’s a delicate balancing act.

Musicians have been decrying the use of “electronic orchestras” in opera and Broadway pits for years. But can even expert listeners really tell the difference between the digitally generated orchestra and the real thing? Can you?

How do you bring classical music to a younger generation unlikely to meet it on its own terms? Combine it with something they already love – something like, oh, maybe… high fashion runway shows? “Our purpose is to expose these top-class artists to a new group of people who are more downtown — trendsetters, fashion people… Classical music is not stuffy. [I]t just needs a different setting.”

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the importance of an orchestra’s music director living in the same city as his orchestra. So it can’t be welcome news for the Hong Kong Philharmonic that music director Edo deWaart is moving his family out of the city, and back to his wife’s family home in Wisconsin. The major reason for the move: Hong Kong’s notorious air pollution is sickening deWaart’s children.

Fundraising for Atlanta’s proposed new symphony hall has stalled. So maybe changing the location might help. “The new location would answer complaints from potential donors that the current site — on 14th Street between Peachtree and West Peachtree — doesn’t have the vistas to show off star architect Santiago Calatrava’s daring winged design, and that it’s not “on campus” with the other Woodruff divisions, including the recently expanded High Museum of Art.”

The ex-Beatle’s choral oratorio wins album of the year. “Sir Paul’s album, released last year and written, in part, as a tribute to his late wife, Linda, gained some harsh reviews from the critics, but others have praised it for reviving the flagging sales of classical music and adding a touch of glamour to the genre. The Album of the Year was chosen by listeners of Classic FM.”

“At a time when classical music in this country continues to be relentlessly sidelined (last Friday’s death of Rostropovich – one of the greatest musicians who ever lived – was deemed unworthy of a single paragraph in all but one of Sunday’s broadsheets), surely we should be uniting as never before? And by ‘we’, I mean all of us who love classical music and are fed up with it being persistently pushed to the periphery.”

“There will always be a demand for music. People are willing to pay for some forms of access, and others they aren’t, at least not directly. It’s learning how to take advantage of this new music world that will allow artists to survive as the digital music revolution evolves. The dilemma in this “can’t pay won’t pay” digital world is: how do record labels and artists find a way to supply their fans with free recorded content, without being deprived of their own livelihood?”

“Working with programmers, a computer vision expert and an adventurous saxophone quartet, [a Georgia composer] is creating a work in which a restless audience is very literally part of the music. Listeners and musicians are encouraged to wander around the performance space during the concert, while digital cameras track their motion. Those movements are fed into a software simulation, and Freeman’s algorithms, using parameters such as distance from performers, speed and ‘sheepiness,’ use the data to dynamically create a score on Pocket PCs attached to the musicians’ instruments.”