Category: music

The Canadian Opera Company is shuffling the cast for its upcoming production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. “Bass-baritone Peteris Eglitis, who held the key role of Wotan/the Wanderer with the COC during recent Ring-opera performances, has been taken off the bill, and soprano Frances Ginzer has been moved into second-cast position as Brunnhilde, the god’s favourite daughter… Eglitis was seen by many as a question mark in the COC’s Ring plans. His appearances in Siegfried and Die Walkure, which the company produced in 2004, showed an artist of great persuasive presence, but also ‘a voice in serious decline,’ as The New York Times’ Bernard Holland put it.”

What makes a great conductor? Musicianship plays a role, certainly, as does effective stick technique. But most musicians will tell you that they form their first (and often their last) impressions of a new conductor inside of a minute, so there’s clearly something else in the mix. “The greatest conductors have an energy that extends beyond the podium to engage the farthest chorister and the last viola player,” and the very best manage to be firmly in charge without ever betraying a shred of personal ego.

“It is called a listening party. It is a loosely directed but passionately devised gathering held purely for the love and discovery of music. New music. Old music. Loud music. Music played at volumes you can’t even enjoy in your car without blowing out the sunroof and messing up your hair and drowning out all the urban sirens. But it is not solely about volume. It is about quality. It is about range. It is, perhaps more than anything else, about surprise.”

Imagine winning a piano competition you had no idea you’d entered. Now imagine that your victory comes with $300,000. The Gilmore Artist Award, presented every four years and won this year by Argentine pianist Ingrid Fliter, might be the most labor-intensive competition in existence, but more for its organizers than the contestants. “Six jury members travel the world, listening to pianists identified by an international panel as exceptionally gifted and deserving of a higher profile. To get an idea of the pianists’ range, the jury members attend orchestra concerts, recitals and chamber music performances, without ever telling the pianists they are being considered for the award.”

Andras Schiff is tired of some people saying they don’t care for Mozart. “Why is it that certain people get such immense pleasure from this kind of iconoclasm? Does attacking the greatest artists in history make them feel better? It’s good to enjoy the benefits of democracy, such as freedom of speech – let’s remember the recent affair with the Danish cartoons and not ever take it for granted. But Mozart’s greatest admirers included Haydn, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Nietzsche, Debussy, and Britten. Putting this list against that of a few detractors, whose side would you like to be on?”

Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was an operatic figure with a very big life. And now there’s to be an opera about him. “Trudeau: Long March/Shining Path is being written by librettist George Elliott Clarke and jazz composer D.D. Jackson. Clarke, a poet acclaimed for his Whylah Falls and author of the novel George and Rue, has written two earlier operas: Beatrice Chancy, about slaves in Nova Scotia, and Québécité, which is the story of interracial lovers.”

Will Edo De Waart be the next music director of the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra? “De Waart, a former music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra and Netherlands Opera, would be quite a catch for a band in such a far-flung town as Perth. (The city is roughly 2,000 miles from Sydney and 2,400 miles from Singapore.) But de Waart’s career has been concentrated in that part of the world lately: in 2004 he finished up a very successful 10-year stint as chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony and went directly to the Hong Kong Philharmonic, where he is now artistic director.”

“Ringtones used to suffer the reputation of music’s annoying little cousin. The frustratingly raw, digitized song sketches often recalled the early days of synthesizers and video game soundtracks. But as the technology has come into its own, so has the range of uses, transforming ringtones into a bona fide cultural phenomenon.”

Experts are surfacing to dispute the authenticity of a photo from 1840 purported to be of Constanze Mozart. “There are no outdoor photographs of groups of people dating from 1840, because the lenses invented by Joseph Petzval, which were to make such portraits possible, were not available yet. It was simply not possible in 1840 to take sharp outdoor pictures of people as long as the necessary exposure time still amounted to about three minutes.”

When Matthias Bamert became music director of the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra, he was touted as the group’s savior. Now he has suddenly departed, and no one’s talking. “The reason Bamert fell out of favour depends on who you ask, although no one can say on the record because players have received written and verbal warnings not to make any public comment. Before the China tour they signed a code of conduct that reminded them that section 70 of the Crimes Act made it an offence to publicly disclose company matters.”