Category: music

“Anyone who likes classical music is aware of the changing face, literally, of this Old World art form. Increasingly, its new virtuoso practitioners are coming from Asia, and especially from China, where European art music has entered a golden age.”

Mozart has gotten most of the attention, but this year is Shostakovich’s centenary as well, and John Terauds makes the case that the latter is far more relevant to today’s musical experience than the former. “Mozart conjures up powdered wigs, salons and silk-stockinged aristocrats. Shostakovich evokes mass media and tyranny, peace protests and global war, science and enslavement… This music can chill to the bone and tug at our heartstrings at the same time. It is tonal and rhythmic, bearing familiar sounds supported on a masterful architecture of harmony, dissonance and counterpoint — like the music of Bach.”

The Detroit Symphony has been searching for a new music director for a couple of years now, with no visible frontrunner emerging. But could Andrew Davis, who will shortly leave a leadership post with the Pittsburgh Symphony, be the DSO’s knight in shining armor? “Not that the DSO should act rashly. But 16 minutes into this concert, after a perfectly exquisite, poised, witty, not to say airborne turn through Haydn’s little Symphony No. 22 in E-flat, I would have been pushing a contract into Davis’ hands and filling his ear with honeyed promises.”

People have been predicting the death of chamber music for years. “Three decades later, not only has this apocalyptic view of the genre been averted, the field is flourishing. The industry support organization, Chamber Music America, claims more than 100 quartets as members, and it estimates that many more operate in the United States. While the classical music industry has had its struggles, the quartet genre is booming.”

The university will become Leonard Slatkin’s “academic home.” “The conductor, 61, seems to be putting together his life after the National Symphony Orchestra, which he exits as music director at the end of 2007-’08. In August the Nashville Symphony named him music advisor; last year he took on the titles of Principal Guest Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic and of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl.”

Let’s face facts: “classical” works written by ambitious pop stars always suck. Always. Likewise, attempts by pop singers, no matter how talented in their field, to tackle Schumann lieder (Streisand) and classic English lute music (Sting), nearly always end in disaster. But why? It’s pretty simple (and depressing), actually. “Many rock musicians can’t read music and have what strikes most classical musicians as rather a loose conception of authorship, relying on amanuenses to transform vague ideas into detailed life.”

The musicians who work the pit at Atlanta Ballet will be marking the opening of the 2006-07 season with picket signs. The company disbanded the orchestra in August, preferring recorded music to the cost of maintaining a house band. The musicians have filed an unfair labor practices claim, and plan to protest at the ballet’s performances this week.

Beethoven’s 5th is arguably the most well-known work of classical music in the world. But it’s also probably the work most messed with by conductors. “Some prefer the electricity of [John Eliot] Gardiner, some the grandeur of [Fritz] Reiner and some the nobility of George Szell, still others the compelling manipulation of conductors who interpret the score as if they had composed it themselves, such as Carlos Kleiber.”

“Two weeks before the Dallas Opera is to open its 50th-anniversary season with Verdi’s Nabucco, the opera company and its union orchestra don’t have a contract.” The company is seeking a 5-year deal (long by industry standards) that executives call “flexible” and the musicians call “regressive.”

The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony saga took a turn for the better yesterday, when the beleagured Ontario orchestra announced that it had raised enough money to make this week’s musicians’ payroll. The musicians also voted to agree to a 15% pay cut for the current season, and the symphony has less than a million dollars to go to meet its goal of bringing in CAN$2.5m by month’s end.