Category: music

Justin Davidson opines that the real lesson behind Joshua Bell’s anonymous busking experience in the Washington, D.C. subway system is that music is best in places where people expect to hear music. “It’s counterproductive to bring music where people don’t expect and don’t want it to be.”

Musician and writer Ben Sidran is releasing a mammoth 24-CD collection of interviews he conducted for public radio with some of the pivotal jazz musicians of the last four decades. “Sidran’s punctilious research tempers the infectious enthusiasm of his insider status… and these conversations explore creative processes, social backgrounds and musical biographies, revealing a singular mix of the prosaic and the profound.”

The Sydney Symphony has hired Russian-born pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy to be its next chief conductor, beginning in 2009. “Ashkenazy is music director of the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo and the European Union Youth Orchestra,” and has other engagements around the world, leading some to wonder how much time he will be able to spend in Australia.

“The Borromeo String Quartet, violinist Yura Lee and double bassist DaXun Zhang have been named winners of the 2007 Avery Fisher Career Grants, worth $25,000 each… Up to five Career Grants are given each year to U.S. citizens or permanent U.S. residents.”

The concertmaster of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra is retiring after a remarkable 34-year tenure, and on his way out the door, he has a few choice words for those in charge of the ensemble he has called his own for so many years. “Paling’s criticisms, which sound like an indictment of the organisation, boil down to this: successive principal conductors were interested only in their own concerts, in what was going on in their own backyard… Matters of artistic policy and the direction of orchestral development were of no interest to them. Everything became, in that sense, short term. Therefore, any long-range strategy or structure was scarcely tenable. There was no artistic head of the RSNO.”

Lost in the considerable buzz surrounding Gustavo Dudamel’s ascension to the music directorship of the LA Philharmonic is the story behind the maestro’s stunningly rapid ascent to the top of his profession. His appointment in California “marked another success for a pioneering programme in Venezuela that offers children from the slums a route out of poverty and crime through a classical music education.”

A horn player in New Zealand’s Christchurch Symphony has been arrested and charged with possession of illegal military-grade explosives. “Police say the cache included five military flares, two anti-personnel mines, eight sticks of Powergel and two cans of black powder.”

In Solesmes, a village in western France, it falls to the mayor “to console misguided tourists who want to hear the monks in its 11th-century monastery singing in Gregorian chant. ‘People come and ask, “Can you visit the concerts?” ‘ Tourists are restricted to the back of the church, he said, shaking his white hair in mock exasperation. ‘I tell them: “You can visit at the offices. You can admire the sculptures in the church.” But the monks say, “We’re not here to receive tourists; we’re contemplatives.” ‘ “

“Sibelius was once the world’s favourite composer but, thanks to German fascist admirers, his star waned after his death.” In recent years, the Finnish composer’s reputation has had much of its luster restored, thanks largely to a series of Nordic conductors specializing in his work, but Sibelius is still rarely placed alongside masters like Beethoven and Mozart in the musical canon. Some believe it’s time for that to change.

Upstate New York’s Rochester Philharmonic is finally closing the books on an 8-year, $10 million endowment drive designed to keep the ensemble fiscally solvent for the indefinite future. “The orchestra’s 2005-06 operating budget was $9 million.”