Category: music

“Late last week, Sony BMG Music Entertainment underwent a major downsizing. Among the casualties were the key staffers in what has come to be called Sony BMG Masterworks – encompassing Sony Classical, Columbia Masterworks, BMG Classics, RCA Red Seal, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi and pretty much every other classical or classical-related label under the legendary companies once known as CBS Records and RCA Records.”

So another movie about Beethoven lands with a thud. “As one of the titanic figures of Western culture, though, Ludwig surely deserves his own ‘Amadeus.’ Why has no movie captured the imagination of the masses on his behalf? It’s not for lack of trying. But there may be something about the nature of the Beethoven myth, and the bare facts of his biography, that challenges fictionalization in a way the Mozart myth doesn’t.”

“It may be a cliche that music bridges boundaries, but it’s true – and it needs to be true. Music brings people together. Music reaches you on a profound, visceral level. I want to campaign for this art form, locally and nationally.”

Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is joining London’s Philharmonia Orchestra as its principal conductor beginning next year. He will succeed Christoph von Dohnanyi, who has held the post since 1997. Salonen will keep his post as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Orange County’s new Segerstrom concert hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center is working out the kinks in its acoustics. But the hall has some challenges, not the least of which is attracting audiences. At performances by two of the world’s great orchestras – the New York Philharmonic and the Kirov – there were plenty of empty seats. “When that happens, something is wrong. And what is wrong is that prices are too high (a $200 top for the Kirov) and that there is not enough culturally curious elite in Orange County to support an elite showplace.”

“Puppets and all that goes with them have had a place in opera for centuries. But mostly they have inhabited a parallel universe, miming on miniature stages to the voices of unseen singers, live or recorded. Why use them alongside breathing singers on the stage of a regulation opera house?”

Technology has made the “duet” album a big deal. Singers “perform” together, even though they may never have met and the list of live singers recording with dead ones and singers of one genre recording with those of a different one without really collaborating is getting longer…

The general director of the foundation that funds Berlin’s opera companies quit, then recanted. Michael Schindhelm, “in office for only 18 months of his five-year contract, quit in disgust over a mandate by the federal government to cut the foundation’s budget by 16 percent by 2009, from $143.5 million to $127 million.”

“A copyright struggle over some of the finest music to emerge from Cuba ended yesterday after a six-year legal process in which a British judge presided over court hearings in London and Havana. Mr Justice Lindsay, ruling on a wrangle over rights to ‘lively and expressive music’ made famous on the Buena Vista Social Club album, declined to give a declaration sought in the high court by Peer International Corporation, a US publisher, that it owned the rights to 13 songs dating back to the 1930s.”

The Toronto Symphony announced a small surplus for fiscal 2006 this week, the orchestra’s first balanced budget since it nearly succumbed to bankruptcy five years ago. Ticket sales also increased slightly, and subscriptions held steady. But the TSO isn’t completely out of the woods yet – it’s still carrying a CAN$9.5 million accumulated debt, and further internal cost reductions don’t seem feasible.