Category: music

“Conventional wisdom holds that no one writes good operas anymore — not, at least, operas that anyone wants to hear. Yet in the United States, this view is yielding to the idea among presenters that new American opera — pieces by American composers based on American stories — may be the future of a field fighting the perception that it is static, Eurocentric and outdated.”

“As the major-label recording business struggles with ungovernable competition online, many musicians have decided that the way to make a career is in the mode of troubadours from time immemorial: performing live and hitting the road. But where troubadours depended on word of mouth, now musicians can spread their own reputations online; at SXSW, as the event is known, many seek the next link.”

“The castrati – or evirati, as they were politely called – are perhaps the most freakish phenomenon in Western musical history. Eunuchs had been a common feature of the courts of the Islamic world long before they appeared in 17th-century Italy, which seems to be the only Western country where castration was widely performed – the operation was illegal, but parents of the victims just mumbled about unfortunate encounters with wild boars, and prosecutions were rare.”

“A certain culture has grown around the presentation of orchestral music. Because something in the programme requires the full might of a symphony orchestra, it has tended to dictate the scale of everything else on the programme. Because of the inherent and intrinsic tendency of symphony orchestras to programme concerts featuring pretty exclusively their total playing resources, the repertoire (and audiences) have, over a very long stretch of time, been thus starved of seriously interesting music that requires fewer musicians to perform, and has therefore become sidelined and neglected.”

Stravinsky was one of the greatest composers of the 20th Century. And yet, he is not revered by audiences. Why, asks Anthony Tommasini: “One simple reason that Stravinsky, who died at 88 in 1971, is still waiting for his due is that audiences seldom get to hear the full range of his work.”

The troubled Louisville Orchestra has reached an agreement on a new five year contract with musicians that averts the Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing that was threatened for early next month.

“Curators at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Donald C. Davidson Library have digitized 6,000 late 19th-century and early 20th-century wax and plastic cylinder recordings — precursors to the flat record. The audio, which includes ragtime hits, vaudeville routines and presidential speeches, encapsulates history with crackles and hisses, but archivists say preserving the sounds now is vital because the cylinders are deteriorating.”

When Leeds band Four Day Hombre went looking for a record deal, they were unable to get the creative and financial control they were looking for. So they turned to their fans and recruited 30 investors to fund their debut album, which is out on Monday. The investment could be about to pay off, with the band being described as “somewhere on the radar between Coldplay and Radiohead.”

Glyndebourne is staging a hip hop version of Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutti. “In putting on School 4 Lovers, organisers at the venue in Sussex, South England hope to attract more young people to Mozart’s work – and opera in general – in the 250th anniversary year of his birth.”

David Robertson has been awarded Columbia University’s 2006 Ditson Conductor’s Award for his championing of American music. The St. Louis Symphony music director gets $5,000 for the honor.