Category: music

It isn’t often that principal positions come open in a major orchestra, so when the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal violist, Roberto Diaz, announced that he was leaving to accept a position as head of the prestigious Curtis Institute, there was no shortage of interest in succeeding him. Auditions for the plum spot were held this week, and when the dust cleared, the Philadelphians promoted longtime associate principal Choong-Jin Chang to the top chair.

Did the world really need an opera about Libyan dictator Muammar Gadafy? Perhaps not, but English National Opera is preparing to stage one anyway. “The opera is a huge gamble for [ENO] – not just because of its incendiary subject matter, but also because of the experimental nature of the music. It’s not often the venerable opera house plays host to an alternative electronica collective like Asian Dub Foundation, who specialise in breakbeat, dub, bangla and ragga. More challengingly, the opera will feature Egyptian and Libyan musicians alongside the ENO orchestra”

“The New York Philharmonic is stepping up efforts to create an outdoor concert venue for summer concerts… Public relations consultant Howard Rubenstein is working on behalf of the orchestra to enlist New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s support for a new venue within the city limits… The Philharmonic currently plays summer concerts in Central Park and other parks around the metropolitan area, but the city has no permanent outdoor music venue along the lines of suburban Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, Cleveland’s Blossom Festival, or Los Angeles’s Hollywood Bowl.”

Scottish Opera is performing again after its forced 1-year hiatus (imposed when the Scottish government refused to fund the company until an accumulated debt was paid off,) but the company has clearly been decimated. “The spiral of decline into which Scottish Opera has fallen in recent years has reached the make-or-break stage. Funding may have been guaranteed till mid-2008, but the next 12 months will decide whether the company continues as a main-stage entity or shrivels into a touring outfit. Scotland’s political class would tolerate the latter, and even encourage it.”

How can an octogenarian folk singer enjoy a career resurgence without singing a note? Just ask Pete Seeger, whose already impressive legacy is getting a major boost with the release of a new CD by rocker Bruce Springsteen.

The plane crash that killed five students at the University of Indiana’s School of Music has rocked the Bloomington campus, and students and faculty are just beginning to assess the impact of the disaster on the school.

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra has unveiled a new media agreement with Minnesota Public Radio which will allow online listeners to hear a large percentage of the orchestra’s 35-year archive of radio broadcasts. Still undecided is whether the programs will be free to consumers, but the agreement is likely to get plenty of scrutiny from orchestras and musicians around the country, as the industry continues to debate how best to use new technologies, and how (if at all) musicians should be paid for such distribution.

“The characters and life stories of composers are as varied as those of any other group – schoolteachers or greengrocers, farmers or soccer managers. It is true that some lived flamboyant bohemian lives, but just as many carried on like accountants… Does knowing about the composers help us to understand their music? It is tempting to think that there is an obvious connection between the way a composer lived and the music he wrote (and most of them were ‘he’). Sadly, this isn’t the case.”

In Australia, some devotees of classical music are worried that some of the world’s greatest art is being reduced to the level of a pop song, and that those intending to broaden the audience are, in fact, insulting its intelligence. “To be sure, classical music needs to reach out to new audiences if it is to survive in this country… But we are not going the right way about fixing the problem. Instead, we are dumbing down classical music through the constant release of ‘best of’ CD compilations and with programming that replaces quality with quantity. The main culprit is none other than the traditional champion of classical music in this country, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.”

“A study by an academic who has spent more than 30 years looking at Bach’s work claims that Anna Magdalena Bach, traditionally believed to be Bach’s musical copyist, actually wrote some of his best-loved works, including his Six Cello Suites… He points to what he regards as the uniquely symmetrical nature of the work, and to the fact that the manuscripts included many corrections and adjustments, suggesting that they were original composing scores.” Scholars are intrigued, but several prominent performers are skeptical.