Category: music

Canada has given the world countless great artists and musicians, but somehow, it hasn’t yet produced many world-class conductors. William Littler says that it’s a bigger problem than it might appear to be: “However well intentioned, conductors from abroad who direct our orchestras tend to be short-term visitors with less of a commitment to Canadian music… Investing in our own conductors is tantamount to investing in our own music.”

Freelance classical musicians in huge metropolises like New York or L.A. can expect to earn a decent living without much fear of the work drying up. But for freelancers in many mid-sized cities, like St. Louis, staying employed is a major concern, and earning enough to live on can require a lot of creativity, and quite a bit of luck.

“In contrast to the lavish excesses of the music business of the 1970s and 1980s, the new incarnation of CBS Records, to be unveiled today, will start out small. CBS plans to sign a handful of songwriters whose music will be incorporated into shows on the CBS broadcast network, the youth-oriented CW television network and the company’s fledgling digital platforms. … CBS is betting that it can exploit the weakness in the music industry by signing recording artists who are hungry for support and promotion.”

Even before he got onstage at La Scala last weekend, Roberto Alagna had reason to be nervous about the evening’s pformance. “From comments he made in interviews, Alagna gave indications he was well aware about what was being said about him online as well as in the press. So when he made his entrance Sunday night, he looked wary and nervous, very much like someone who wished he were somewhere else…”

Roberto Alagna should have known that you can’t win when you take on the La Scala loggionisti, says Neil Fisher. “If you venture into the lions’ den, prepare to get bitten. For all Alagna’s sad back-pedalling since the explosion — “my throat was closed off . . . I couldn’t even speak a sound” — the overriding impression is that he just couldn’t cope with the criticism. And so he did the unforgivable: he fled.”

“The Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where famous residents such as Molière, Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf and Maria Callas attract 2 million visitors a year, has been the victim of theft. Six bronze busts were stolen last month from its 19th century tombs, including that of Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen.”

Depending on your viewpoint, this time of year is either a musical panacea… or a hellish monthlong sentence of forced caroling and treacly muzak. But assuming that we can all agree that some Christmas music is actually worth hearing, are there any new holiday albums that are actually worth the plastic they’re carved on? Surprisingly, John Harris says that there are.

Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary founder of Atlantic Records, has died following a head injury he sustained at a Rolling Stones concert earlier in the fall. “Ertegun, a jazz fanatic who came to the United States at the age of 11 when his father was named Turkish ambassador… helped make Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin stars and signed the Rolling Stones in the early 70s.”

The Detroit Symphony ended its 2005-06 season in the black, posting a $53,000 surplus despite a modest raise in the base pay for the orchestra’s musicians. “The orchestra is now in the midst of its most sustained run of black ink since a three-year stretch of balanced budgets from 1999 to 2001.”

Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu have managed to make themselves the most unpopular couple in opera with their selfishness and petty demands. “Together, the pair have now achieved an apogee of unpopularity that unites three of the world’s big five opera houses, leaving just Paris and Vienna to pick up the pieces of a couple who appear to be once again on advanced self-destruct.”