Category: music

“Will Gerard Mortier, who once scandalized the diamonds-and-dirndl set at the Salzburg Festival with an operetta staging featuring cocaine-snorting, scalping, slaughter, incest, Jew-bashing and child abuse, take over the New York City Opera, a company in need of new leadership? Mortier, a Belgian-born baker’s son who is 63, is said to be a top candidate to run the company, a rival of the grander Metropolitan Opera, also at Lincoln Center. He is currently the general manager of the Opera de Paris….”

“The Metropolitan Opera, hoping to tour China for the first time, is negotiating to perform Tan Dun’s ‘The First Emperor’ with tenor Placido Domingo there to coincide with the 2008 Beijing Olympics.”

Now that Joyce Hatto’s widower has admitted he was behind the plagiarized recordings bearing her name, former Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer wonders about the pianists whose work won attention for her. “‘The best ones are really superb,’ Dyer said by phone yesterday. ‘Which is why I’m still interested in them. I want to know who really made them now.'”

“De la Rey,” a hit South African rock song about an Afrikaner general in the Second Boer War, has inspired some white fans to wave the old, apartheid-era South African flag. “A dozen years after the end of an Afrikaner government that invented apartheid, the mere concept of Afrikaner pride remains an exquisitely sensitive issue among whites and blacks alike. … ‘De la Rey’ has become a vessel for those aspirations and fears and, for the last month, the object of a caustic, often racially tinged national debate.”

The next round of the ongoing war over free (and illegal) music online may not have anything to do with MP3s. The distribution of sheet music and guitar tablatures over the internet has become a widespread practice, and “a concerted legal effort in the United States, which is about to gather pace, could spell the beginning of the end for free music on the Web.”

After initially denying involvement, the widower of pianist Joyce Hatto has admitted to passing off recordings of other pianists as hers in the years leading up to her death. “He said he wanted to give her the illusion of a great end to an ‘unfairly overlooked career.'”

Denis Dutton says that the scandal over Joyce Hatto’s years of plagiarized piano recordings reveals much about the problems of objective music criticism. “Music isn’t just about sound; it is about achievement in a larger human sense. If you think an interpretation is by a 74-year-old pianist at the end of her life, it won’t sound quite the same to you as if you think it’s by a 24-year-old piano-competition winner who is just starting out. Beyond all the pretty notes, we want creative engagement and communication from music, we want music to be a bridge to another personality.”

“The Metropolitan Opera will present seven new productions next season, the most since it moved into Lincoln Center in 1966, and intensify its campaign to make opera hot — or at least mildly picante in a media-saturated world… The Met [will also] expand its increasingly popular live broadcasts in movie theaters, which started this season, to at least eight from six, and beam them into a handful of New York schools.”

“The most annoying thing about classical crossover is the pretensions, both upmarket and down. Now, what used to be crossover is a variation on remixing, reloading and mash-upping.”

He’s only just arrived as the company’s music director. So “right now, it’s a bit early in Conlon’s tenure for him to be willing to go beyond generalities, but the conductor does have a vision of the future. He wants to make Los Angeles a center for Wagner (an L.A. Opera “Ring” has been scheduled since he came aboard) as well as the launching pad for his “Recovered Voices” project — reviving music suppressed during the Third Reich.”