Category: music

The Classical Bit Awards are back, and Placido Domingo picks up two awards. “Domingo received a lifetime achievement award and shared the critics’ prize for his part in the Royal Opera House’s production of Tristan and Isolde. Katherine Jenkins won album of the year for Living A Dream while Andreas Scholl beat Bryn Terfel and Renee Fleming to the singer of the year crown.”

“New York has few intimate and acoustically appealing halls in the 250-seat range. The Morgan is hoping that its handsome space — designed, like the pavilion, by the architect Renzo Piano — will become a valuable resource. It usually takes concertgoers (this one, at least) time to assess the acoustics and qualities of a new hall. But it’s clear from the get-go that this one will be welcomed by the music lovers in the city.”

Conductor Toshiyuki Shimada gives his final concert as music director of the Portland (Maine) Symphony. He led the orchestra for 20 years. “The crowd filled the hall with applause and roars of approval. Audience members, whom Shimada always has viewed as an extended family, stood and cheered for nearly 10 minutes.”

The recording giant is trying again. “The negotiations are the latest in a series of on-and-off talks between the companies that have unfolded over several years. EMI unsuccessfully bid to buy Warner from its previous parent, Time Warner, in late 2003 before losing out to an investment group led by Mr. Bronfman. Before that, European regulators blocked a proposed merger of the two giants.”

What makes Stradivari violins so good? “One scientist thinks he has finally solved the mystery, and he gives the credit not to famed maker Antonio Stradivari but to a nameless 18th Century drugstore chemist from a small town in Italy. Joseph Nagyvary, an emeritus professor of biochemistry and biophysics at Texas A&M University, said several things set a Strad apart, but none more so than the chemicals that hardened the wood and gave each instrument its fiery appearance.”

Listeners to the UK’s Classic FM radio station have voted Vaughan Williams’s work Lark Ascending the most popular piece of British classical music. “Edward Elgar came second and third with Cello Concerto in E minor and then Variations on an Original Theme. Welshman Karl Jenkins – the only living composer in the top 10 – was fourth with The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace.”

“It’s a bit of a mystery why Handel has become so crucial for early-twenty-first-century listeners. The prior century made a cult of Bach, whose music takes the form of an endless contrapuntal quest. Perhaps, in an age of information overload and ambient fear, we have more need for Handel’s gentler, steadier art. At the same time, though, this composer appeals to the permanent hunger for high-class melodrama and psychological theatre.”

“The COC isn’t interested in monuments so much as a building that can flatter the company’s talents, nurture its growth, and give pleasure to performers and audiences. In that sense, attending these concerts (including a school matinee on Wednesday) was like witnessing the first meetings of the parties to an arranged marriage. You knew it would be made to work. The question was: how, and how well?”

Peter G. Davis detects a change in Deborah Voigt’s voice since she lost weight. “A change has also come over Voigt’s voice lately, though it’s hard to tell if it’s from weight loss or normal aging—controversy still rages over whether Maria Callas’s drastic diets contributed to her rapid vocal decline.”

“Many of the performers at the three-day Trinity International Hip-Hop Festival in Hartford, Connecticut, were critical of the way that US rap – which is by far the best-selling – appears concerned mostly with money, drugs and sex, and has little to do with its roots in the angry political expression of groups like Public Enemy or KRS One.”