Category: music

Peter Dobrin says that the success or failure of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s decision to appoint Charles Dutoit as interim chief conductor will depend on which Dutoit shows up for work. “Will it be the slightly jaded Dutoit, who in recent years sometimes turned in disengaged, glib interpretations? Or will it be the harder-working Dutoit, who carefully cultivates the orchestra’s sound and programs repertoire that is both meaningful and entertaining?”

Scott Cantrell complains that the Dallas Symphony’s newly unveiled 2007-08 season deliberately ignores the late 20th century. And that’s not all: “Even earlier composers such as Bartók, Nielsen, Bohuslav Martinu and neoclassical-period Stravinsky have gotten short shrift here, not to mention the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg… One doesn’t want to belabor political correctness, but in a city that’s a gateway to and from Latin America, shouldn’t the DSO feel a little guilty about not programming a single composer from south of the Rio Grande? And can it really be going a whole season without a single work composed by a woman?”

John Adams has a new opera ready for its U.S. premiere, and careful listeners will note a distinctly un-Adams-like influence lurking behind the score. “The libretto, which Adams crafted with his longtime collaborator Peter Sellars, is based on an American Indian folk legend. But the original impetus behind the work, Adams says, is ‘The Magic Flute,’ that miraculous blend of subtle craftsmanship and pop accessibility that Mozart wrote just months before he died.”

The Metropolitan Opera’s experiment with simulcasting its Saturday matinees at movie theatres across North America has so far been a rousing success, and David Patrick Stearns points out that there are some interesting bits of information trickling out of the sales numbers. “Just for fun, guess which opera had the largest single audience. The high-style Julie Taymor production of The Magic Flute? The lovely Anna Netrebko in I Puritani? No, it’s the brand new Tan Dun opera The First Emperor.”

The Met movie theatre simulcasts have created a new, hybrid form of entertainment, says Philip Kennicott, and opera fans long since abandoned by the mass media finally have a way to recreate the days when companies like the Met used to tour across the country. “And so the scattered but substantial audience for a very old and elite art form is suddenly made manifest, to itself and to the rest of the world, by gathering in theaters designed for mass entertainment.”

Two Los Angeles radio stations are trading frequencies and formats, with the result that the city will now have both a country station and a classical station, something that hasn’t been true for a while. But here’s the catch: the classical station is to switch its broadcasts to the acoustically inferior AM band, where, presumably, no one living in the age of digital audio will have the slightest interest in listening to it.

The musicians’ union gets a ton of credit for vastly improving the lot of players who used to toil for low pay under dictatorial conductors. But in the early days, the union was almost universally segregated by race, with blacks forced to join separate locals from their white colleagues, even in supposedly enlightened Northern cities.

The company has just started performing in the new Carnival Center. “Faced with lower-than-projected ticket sales and higher operating costs at the Carnival Center, Florida Grand Opera has substantially overhauled its 2007-2008 season, cutting back to five operas, dropping its most ambitious productions, and jettisoning the new opera, Cyrano, announced just last month.”

Charles Dutoit has been appointed chief conductor and artistic adviser to the Philadelphia Orchestra. “Dutoit will not have the title of music director, and as interim leader will have many but not all of of the same responsibilities as music director for four years as the orchestra searches for an eighth music director. Dutoit has a long and somewhat complex relationship with the musicians, administration and board of the orchestra.”

A San Diego court made the judgment after a company contended the computer company had infringed on a patent for MP3 technology. “Companies have long been worried that there are patents out there that they may not know about that someone could bring back and sue them over, over some kind of foundational technology that everybody uses,” Urban said. “Microsoft has had that worry made real to them to the tune of $1.52 billion.”