Category: music

“The tragic fact of the matter is that giant media players are pulling out of minority art, a myopic strategy that gives them no chance of tapping the next quirk in public taste or contributing to cultural evolution. Warner bought its way into classics just ahead of the Three Tenors 1990 boom and scored an eight-million follow-up CD at the Los Angeles World Cup. It gobbled up one independent after another – Erato in France, Teldec in Germany, Finlandia, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi – and went into overproduction along with all the others in the 1990s until the roof fell in and the outlet was slimmed down to a single stream of mainstream classics. That, too, ha now been deemed surplus to requirements.”

“Pundits have been yammering away for years about a ‘celestial jukebox’ that will give everyone the ability to access all content ever created, from anywhere, at any time. This long-discussed concept is finally becoming a reality, at least as far as music goes.”

The New York Philharmonic faces big challenges – looking for a new music director as well as an extended exile from Lincoln center while its home is renovated. Might this lead to changes? “Imagine if the status quo were shaken up. For a month or so an orchestra would present varied weekly programs, like those today. This could be followed by, say, a minifestival focused on a single composer or an overall theme, with a different program for each concert. Then the musicians might subdivide into chamber orchestras and perform in high school auditoriums and smaller halls before reassembling at the homestead for another installment of weekly programs.”

“Nearly two decades in the making, this opera conceived by Goldenthal and director Julie Taymor finally — after a 12-day delay due to finicky computer technology — had its premiere Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. And this much can be said without qualification: It is the most ambitious, spectacular and successful new opera yet from Los Angeles Opera.”

After 15 years, Wynne Delacoma packs it in as music critic of the Chicago Sun-Times. “I joined the Sun-Times just before Halloween in 1990 and inherited the critic’s post the following April Fool’s Day. Goblins and tricksters, not the most auspicious omens for major career changes. But on my watch, benevolent forces far outweighed evil influences on Chicago’s classical music scene.”

Toronto’s glittering new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts opens this weekend, and the $150 million venue is aiming high, as is the primary tenant, the Canadian Opera Company. “Architect Jack Diamond’s spare, modernist structure is first and foremost an ideal place to experience the powerful blend of words, music and drama that is opera. If the opera company and its associated Canadian Opera House Corporation can continue to pay their way, the new structure heralds a bigger dot for Toronto on the world’s cultural map.” The Four Seasons Centre opens just in time to play host to COC’s upcoming production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

So Toronto’s opera lovers have a new palace. That’s nice and all, “but why should anyone who doesn’t know Parsifal from Pagliacci give two hoots? The answer, I think, has something to do with the importance and the wonder of cities… Cities stretch us, challenge us, broaden us. Cities, like magazines in their glory years, can pique our curiosity with an almost unlimited table of contents. And we become intrigued. About hockey, perhaps; about graffiti, perhaps; about commodities, perhaps; about Verdi.”

“Like most of modern life, surgery has acquired a soundtrack, whether it be Sinatra or Vivaldi, Mozart or Bob Marley, ‘La Bohème’ or the Beatles. Surgeons say it relaxes them, focuses their attention and helps pass the time… Music can become a subtle bone of contention among the members of the surgical team or a practical aid. Loud rock ‘n’ roll is good for routine operations, they say, Mozart for trickier ones. There is even a genre called “closing music”: raucous sounds to suture by.”

The Baltimore Symphony, which has lately been plowing through controversies like most orchestras go through Beethoven, is expected to select a self-made millionaire and venture capitalist as its next chairman of the board. The hope is that Michael Bronfein can help right the BSO’s financial ship as the organization attempts to put behind it the controversy generated when conductor Marin Alsop was appointed music director without the approval of the musicians.

Scotland’s national orchestra is making a push to choose a new national anthem for the region, to supplement the UK-wide anthem, “God Save The Queen,” which doesn’t have a great deal of resonance with Scots. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has recorded renditions of five contending songs (not surprisingly, two are based on poems by Robert Burns, and a third is a bagpipe tune,) and is inviting Scots around the world to vote on its website over the next month.