Category: music

Minsoo Sohn was awarded the Canadian prize, which comes with a cash award of $35,000. The competition is eccentric, perhaps. “But the encores and lack of bloodsport help demonstrate what sort of personalities the musicians have onstage and how they might contribute to the overall audience experience.”

The Cleveland Orchestra is spending an awful lot of time in cities other than Cleveland these days, and it didn’t take long for rumors to fly that the orchestra, unable to sustain itself financially in economically depressed Cleveland, would shortly be pulling up stakes for months at a time or even abandoning the city completely. But Donald Rosenberg says that “for many reasons, it is nonsensical to consider that the Cleveland Orchestra would leave town.”

Dallas Opera is three years away from the planned opening of its new home in the city’s entertainment district, and this season’s opening is in jeopardy from a potential work stoppage. But the company is eagerly looking forward to a time when it “finally will have the right-sized, properly equipped and acoustically supportive home it’s craved for decades.”

The gulf between what rock critics like and what the average radio listener hears on a daily basis has never been wider, and the frustration has caused many writers to adopt a bunker mentality. “We in the music press are, perhaps, sometimes guilty of making the bands we support appear to be bigger than they actually are. At the same time, we have a habit of ignoring the acts sprung from our midst that really do achieve massive numbers in radio and retail.”

It’s getting very hard to tell what constitutes a Christian band anymore. “Much of Christian music’s integration into the pop culture mainstream comes via the rockers who happen to be Christian – as opposed to the Christian rockers who wear their faiths on their sleeves and crosses around their necks. Each group of musicians is writing about what makes them tick, but one crafts its art with more subtlety, yet its intentions are never fully hidden by metaphor.”

“In this decade more and more musicians under the age of 30 have picked up banjos and fiddles and hit a burgeoning circuit of festivals, small-town theaters and big-city nightclubs. They don’t want to play their parents’ music, but they do long for a tradition older than themselves, one with memorable melodies, deep stories and a boisterous beat.”

Director Bart Sher doesn’t read music, and he doesn’t speak Italian. So he’s directing Italian opera at the Met. “Plays are harder to stage than operas, because in opera the musical form determines so much. If I were doing a play, I would work with the actors layer by layer, taking it slowly. You know, we’d go through a passage to show how Rosina is being evasive. Then to show how she’s being a bitch. Then we’d look at how the language moves and how it picks up. We wouldn’t get up to speed for three or four rehearsals. We don’t have that kind of time here.”

“The field of classical music has long been waiting for some musician to come along who could use television with Leonard Bernstein’s galvanizing impact. The closest, it seemed, has been the dynamic maestro Michael Tilson Thomas, a natural who has masterminded some impressive shows. Until recently, though, TV had not been a central component of Mr. Thomas’s work. That has now changed.”

“International Creative Management, one of the world’s largest talent agencies representing actors, writers and musicians, said it will sell its classical music division to focus on its core entertainment business.”

Prokofiev’s diaries have been published for the first time. “The diaries, translated by Anthony Phillips, were written by Prokofiev between 1907 and 1914.”