Category: music

Mark Stryker says that the evolution of American entertainment has been a disaster for the one-vibrant jazz world. “It’s hard to think of a time other than our own in which jazz has been so marginalized; it no longer seems part of the cultural dialogue. The fabric that once supported jazz musicians, fans, the club scene and recording industry has been torn apart. The challenge facing jazz today is to repair the cloth, to create a new infrastructure, to weave a new fabric.”

One day after she was quoted in the New York Times saying that Metropolitan Opera director Peter Gelb was “phasing her out,” soprano Ruth Ann Swenson received a warm ovation from the Met crowd attending her performance in a Handel opera. “But if she looked at the back of the orchestra, Swenson might have seen a possible cause for the Met’s reduced commitment: several rows of mostly empty seats. She doesn’t have a big recording company advertising her heavily, and other sopranos are better box office.”

Classical doomsayer (and AJ blogger) Norman Lebrecht is out with a new book, in which he blames classical music’s decline in popularity on the overblown marketing machine that makes superstars out of crossover musicians of dubious ability. “In the Nineties, the classical side of the record industry suffered a fatal loss of nerve and substituted real classics with synthetics. These synthetics have finally sunk the ship.”

Mark Swed has been taking in “The MTT Files,” Michael Tilson Thomas’s new radio program that promises to bring the general public back into the classical music fold. “The series is personal. It recognizes that music demands paying attention, not multi-tasking. It takes great leaps of imagination, which can be accomplished much more effectively on radio than on television. And given that MTT is an inspired mimic, his voice brings to life the likes of Stravinsky and Heifetz. He can also be very funny.”

Little more than a month after the New Hampshire Symphony announced that it was canceling the remainder of its season, Opera New Hampshire is canceling its lone spring production, citing “lower than anticipated funding from subscriptions, ticket sales, sponsorships and other sources.”

The Montreal Symphony is moving a summer series of concerts out of the cathedral that has housed it since 1980, and into the same concert hall it uses for its winter season. Arthur Kaptainis is left wondering why: “It is hard to create an aura of specialness around summer concerts given in the same room where the regular season happens. Whatever the weather, it always feels like February in dark, womb-like Salle Wilfrid Pelletier.”

Architect Jean Nouvel has been tapped to design a new €200 million concert hall in Paris. The hall, which will be home to the Orchestre de Paris as well as several other groups, will seat 2,400, and is expected to be completed by 2012.

The success of the Metropolitan Opera’s high-definition movie theatre simulcasts notwithstanding, William Littler says that there’s just no substitute for the power of a live Met performance. “The deadliest criticism of opera has long been that it is too expensive to be anything but caviar for the elite… [But] the reason people are gladly buying tickets at such prices is that they are not just watching a movie, they are participating vicariously in a live event.”

The architect behind the Sydney Opera House has proposed an extensive gutting and rebuilding of the interior of the facility, which has been plagued by acoustical issues and space problems since it opened forty years ago. “At the moment there is so little space in the wings that ballerinas coming off stage have to have someone to catch them so they don’t hit the concrete walls. Some members of the orchestra are sitting up to 12 metres under the stage… The Utzon solution involves dropping the theatre floor into the offices and utility rooms, and cutting space into the surrounding sandstone, allowing the backstage area to be enlarged and sound quality improved.”

“Today, Handel’s operas are better business than they ever were in his lifetime. They’re good box-office and relatively cheap to produce. All one needs is a handful of singers and an orchestra that, with a bit of a squeeze, can be fitted into the back of a van. But don’t the devout Handel fans ever yearn for a chorus or a vocal ensemble? Wouldn’t they enjoy a bit more orchestral colour? Or even some dancing now and then?”