Category: music

“When is the Philadelphia Orchestra not the Philadelphia Orchestra? It’s no riddle, but a question of artistic integrity tested by the orchestra’s Sunday night New Year’s Eve concert in which a quarter or more of the musicians on stage at Verizon Hall were substitutes. It might not be worth noting had the members of the orchestra been less righteous about such matters in the past.”

In Buenos Aires, “Israeli and Palestinian ambassadors sat side by side in the final hours of 2006 in a show of unity at a concert led by the renowned Argentine-born conductor Daniel Barenboim, a prominent advocate for peace in the Middle East. On Sunday night, Barenboim departed from his usual repertoire of classical music, and instead focused on Buenos Aires’ signature genre: tango.”

The Metropolitan Opera’s first broadcast to movie theatres goes off. Mostly. “According to the Met, the broadcasts aired successfully to nearly 30,000 people around the world except in Burbank and in Jacksonville, Fla., where nothing showed up on the screen.”

“Most memories degrade and distort with time; why would pop music memories be so sharply encoded? Perhaps because music triggers the reward centers in our brains. In a study published last year Dr. Levitin and group of neuroscientists mapped out precisely how.”

“The Rolling Stones and Barbra Streisand topped the list, and the Top 20 was littered with old-timers, including Elton John, Billy Joel, the Who, Def Leppard, Journey and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. And the biggest thing on the 2007 horizon? A reunion of Genesis, featuring Phil Collins.”

“It is a truism in opera that you’re only as good as your last performance. Human variability is supposed to be one of the exciting things about live music, making it like a high-wire act. Will the tenor successfully negotiate the course? Or will he fall spectacularly, in plain sight of everyone, cracking on a high note. This mutability has given even superstar singers screaming cases of stage fright.”

“Maybe the album’s dead; but then, maybe it isn’t. It’s become a commonplace that albums are losing their authority as artistic entities as an increasing number of people buy music song by song via services like iTunes. So playing an album live helps artists regain a modicum of creative control. The experience is like listening to a playlist, but this time (as earlier) it’s the musicians and producers themselves who are devising it.”

“There were openings (a good half-dozen new or renovated performance venues) and closings (Tower Records), arrivals (Peter Gelb at the Metropolitan Opera, Kent Nagano in Montreal and Munich, James Conlon in Los Angeles) and departures announced (Eschenbach from Philadelphia, Gatti from Bologna). And, of course, there was lots and lots of Mozart.”

La Scala opera house has canceled a production of Bernstein’s “Candide” that features a scene with actors dancing in underwear while wearing masks of world leaders including President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

It’s a short two-minute keyboard work. “Experts think Mozart wrote the piece when he was aged between six and 10. It bears the title Allegro di Wolfgango Mozart and was contained in a volume of anonymous manuscripts.”