The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has become the latest classical ensemble to embrace the digital age, forming a partnership with online retailer Classical World to offer downloadable versions of almost 60,000 recordings. “Live streaming of concerts and new recordings may also be added soon to the service, which costs around £8 per month. The price includes unlimited streaming of all audio tracks and up to eight downloads per month.”
Category: music
Metropolitan Opera’s New Era Begins
“The Metropolitan Opera embarked on a new era with a season-opening gala last night that dripped wealth and celebrity but also included an unprecedented dose of populism: a simulcast in Times Square, where the giant Panasonic, Nasdaq and Reuters screens beamed Puccini’s tale of love and abandonment north to a blocked-off section of Broadway.”
Cheering For New Met Opera’s Debut
“People certainly turned out for this opening night. It was quite a sight to leave the Met during the curtain calls and encounter a cheering crowd in Lincoln Center Plaza who had watched the simulcast performance on an outdoor screen. The Met is starting its own digital radio network and soon will be televising productions to movie theaters in America and overseas. You want to say to Mr. Gelb, ‘More power to you’.”
Toronto’s Back-To-Basics Opera House
Toronto’s new opera house is a plain Jane. It was also a bargain. “How did the COC come up with so satisfactory a facility for so little money? For one thing it chose to forgo, at least for now, what other theatres clamour for: state-of-the art stage equipment. Everything is manually operated – one reason, the company notes, it opened on time.”
Peter Gelb’s New Met – A Hit?
“The 52-year-old Met general manager arrived just in time to lead a bloated, tired and tiresome outfit that was drifting toward obsolescence with its creaky board, senior-citizen audience and slumping ticket sales. His appointment, while odd – -he had never run a theater and had toiled, not always happily, as president of Sony Classical — appears to be energizing a company whose previous director, Joseph Volpe, was too pleased with himself and the status quo.”
Met Opener – Buzz Over Opera
The buzz about the new Metropolitan Opera is high. But, writes Martin Bernheimer, the company’s opening night suffered a bit. “The result looks undeniably clever and endlessly artsy. Unfortunately, Minghella blurs many a narrative turn and seems embarrassed by the composer’s unabashed emotionalism.”
Fearing Security Risk, Deutsche Oper Cancels Production
“Berlin’s Deutsche Oper canceled four planned November performances of Mozart’s ‘Idomeneo’ out of concern that the production’s reference to world religions, including Islam, raises an ‘incalculable security risk.’ “
Cantrell: Toronto Opera House Gets It Right
Toonto’s new opera house is a gem, writes Scott Cantrell. “Architecturally, the Four Seasons is generic modernism understated to a fault. But an inaugural Canadian Opera Company production of Wagner’s complete Ring of the Nibelung this month showed off well-nigh ideal acoustics for opera: almost eerily transparent but also spacious, with an even frequency response and a good balance between stage and pit.”
Warning: UK Could Lose Historic Music Recordings
The UK Music Archive warns that with a proposed copyright extension, some of the country’s valuable historic recorded music archives could be lost. “The library’s Sound Archive cannot copy audio from fragile or obsolete formats for posterity until copyright runs out. The library said a ‘significant’ part of the collection could ‘decay and be unavailable for future generations’.”
Performances – Live And On Computer?
Computer software can now recreate a recorded performance live on a piano. “The concept of a dead pianist somehow giving a ‘live’ performance opens up a Pandora’s box of issues. Who owns copyright on a pianist’s keystrokes? Is it appropriate, using this technology, to improve on a recorded performance? How are today’s young pianists to compete in a world that can hear concerts by the greatest interpreters of the 20th century? And in a classical-music culture that already suffers from a chronic lack of newness, isn’t this just fetishizing the past?”