Category: music

Berlin police say a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo can resume, “weeks after it was cancelled amid fears that its depictions of severed heads of religious figures, including Muhammad, would spur violence.”

The West Australian Symphony Orchestra proudly announced it had snared Edo de Waart as its next music director, announced programs and printed brochures featuring him prominently. Only one problem – they hadn’t signed him yet. Now de Waart has pulled out, and the orchestra is embarrassed.

Tower Records may have been a big corporation, but to many classical music aficionados in New York and other large East and West Coast cities, the chain’s classical department was as close as you could get to a neighborhood record store. “Older record collectors have memories of wonderful, quirky independent stores run by managers who were passionate, if opinionated, about the music they sold. [And Tower’s closing] will have a severe impact on niche markets like classical music. According to one industry insider’s estimate, Tower Records alone accounted for up to 50 percent of sales in the specialty genres.”

André Gremillet, a 39-year-old pianist who has spent the last few years running a pipe organ manufacturing company in Canada, has been tapped as the new president and CEO of the New Jersey Symphony. “Gremillet will inherit an organization that is straining under a mountain of debt and yet growing artistically under the baton of Neeme Järvi, the orchestra’s conductor and music director.”

Donations have been trickling in in the last-ditch campaign to save Ontario’s Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony from bankruptcy (the orchestra needs to raise $2.5m by month’s end,) but corporate support has been largely nonexistent. “Money raised to date includes $782,680 donated by about 900 individuals. It also includes $250,000 from Waterloo Region, $170,000 from Kitchener, $85,000 from Waterloo and $230,000 pledged by 18 symphony board members.”

“Radio orchestras, which continue to play an important role in the musical life of Europe and Asia, were once crucial organizations in the U.S. and Canada. The CBC Radio Orchestra is the last of its breed in North America. Supported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., this is the only surviving radio orchestra on the continent.”

“The Americans were convinced that Nazi Germany had been a cultural desert and that the public needed and appreciated them for supplying the refreshing waters of hitherto unavailable music. What they failed to realize was that much good contemporary music was performed in Hitler’s Germany and that until the war the country was not closed to the works of British or French or other European composers.”

An unknown London singer-songwriter harnessed the power of eBay to auction his words — and it worked. “Jonathan Haselden has spent the last four months marketing his lyrics as a way of raising money to promote himself and his music. The idea is that individuals and companies can buy song lines, use them in any way they wish and, if all goes to plan, get a share of the royalties when the song is successful.”

Violinist Kennedy has broken his arm in a bicycle accident. “Most of Kennedy’s performances, all cancelled through the month of November, were to have been based on his recently issued debut jazz album, Blue Note Sessions,”

“Avid iPod users who wonder if they are putting their hearing at risk may find some relief in a new study that tries to arrive at guidelines for safe listening levels. The key to avoiding hearing damage, the researchers say, appears to be limiting not so much how long one listens to music but how loud it is played.” Full blast, it seems, is an officially unhealthy setting….