Category: music

“The public has been invited to take part in what has been described as the first virtual orchestra. Plastic cubes, attached to a light and a speaker, have been laid out on a full size orchestra stage outside the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. Sitting on a cube activates a musical note and as more people sit down, more of the score is revealed.”

The Metropolitan Opera has commissioned an opera from Wynton Marsalis. “The opera, which will feature a libretto by American playwright John Guare, has no working title, nor an estimated time of arrival.”

Why are symphony orchestras in so many cities bound and determined to start every evening concert at 8pm? Doesn’t the reality of modern life suggest that concertgoers might want a range of options as to start time? Late-night concerts have been a major success at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, and early start times have been embraced in some other cities. “The bigger challenge is finding ways for music lovers to fit a concert or opera into a workday with time to spare for dinner.”

Leonard Slatkin seems to have become the go-to conductor for orchestras in a tight scheduling spot. Twice this season alone, he has stepped in to lead the Pittsburgh Symphony when other conductors took ill at the last minute, and next week, he’ll lead the first half of the PSO’s European tour. Most conductors hate being pressed for time, but Slatkin claims to actually enjoy these unexpected engagements, even when they mean canceling his vacation.

Miami’s new concert hall is almost ready to open its doors, and while the city doesn’t have a professional symphony orchestra of its own at the moment, it has engaged the very best ensemble it could find to help fine-tune the acoustics of the chamber. The Cleveland Orchestra, which will play a 3-week residency in Miami this winter, will be on hand later this week to give acousticians Russell Johnson and Tateo Nakajima their first taste of the hall’s full sound.

The City of Birmingham Orchestra is posting excerpts of music it will be performing this year on the orchestra’s website. It’s a try-before-you-buy offer. “Many of the excerpts featured were specifically recorded for the website to provide an accurate representation of the concert-hall experience.”

Following two years of million-dollar deficits, the Oregon Symphony has to take action. “To stem a continuing deficit, the Oregon Symphony cut 10 positions from its administrative staff of 55 on Tuesday. The layoffs, the largest in the orchestra’s history, affected employees in the orchestra’s marketing, development and education departments, but did not affect the musicians or conducting staff.”

An Italian Baroque orchestra had to fly to Canada without their instruments over the weekend because of increased airline security. “Scouring the city and calling out to performers across B.C., Festival Vancouver promoters found baroque-era replacements — made of 18th-century wood and strung with catgut rather than modern steel for a ‘warmer’ tone — for all 16 of the missed instruments for the musicians from Turin.”

“When peddling Provençal sea salt — or deterring crime, or boosting efficiency in a hospital’s operating room — classical music seems to be played as much for its psychological properties as for the art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic of the concert hall.”

Not all is well this summer between the American Friends of the Salzburg Festival and the festival itself. “Festival officials are miffed with the Friends over that group’s decision to present ‘The Salzburg Festival: A Short History,’ a new documentary by the British filmmaker Tony Palmer. The festival has disavowed the film, partly because of what festival directors consider Mr. Palmer’s overemphasized and sometimes inaccurate account of the festival’s intertwined relationship with the Nazis.”