Category: music

“Mozart has come not just to represent musical beauty but, in a way, to define it.” But what about in the composer’s own time? Certainly, many of the legends about poverty and despair have been overblown, but Mozart was a complicated figure in 18th-century Vienna, and his professional fortunes reflected that. Still, “the people in the streets never abandoned him.”

James Levine’s shoulder injury will require surgery, forcing the maestro to cancel the remainder of this season’s engagements with the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony. He hopes to be fully recovered in time for the BSO’s summer season at Tanglewood. Both organizations are scrambling to find replacements.

What is it this year with the conductors? If they’re not falling off the podium (James Levine) or losing their sense of balance (Daniel Barenboim), they’re coming down with shingles (Seiji Ozawa) or bronchitis (Christoph von Dohnanyi). “Have the terrorists (or maybe a cabal of ambitious assistant conductors) launched a stealth attack against Western classical music?”

James Levine’s absence from the touring podium of the Boston Symphony is, of course, eminently noticable as the orchestra works its way down the East Coast under fill-in David Robertson. But Philip Kennicott says that Levine’s most important work has never been what he does in concert, anyway, and as a result, his actual physical presence isn’t required for his influence to be heard.

It’s John Adams’ “Naive and Sentimental Music” (note it doesn’t say “symphony” in the title). “This three-movement, 45-minute ’emphatically tonal’ piece can’t escape its own nature though, though. ‘It sounds like a symphony and it behaves like one, so it probably is,’ admits Adams. Nor can its modest author escape the accolades that have followed his work.”

Arturo Toscanini was already in his eighties when NBC began a seven-year series of live telecasts of the maestro and his NBC Symphony Orchestra. “This was the first major attempt to bring symphonic music to television; the Leonard Bernstein ‘Young People’s Concerts’ began in the late ’50s. Now virtually all of Toscanini’s television work has been reissued on five DVDs by the enterprising Testament label, and it provides a terrific answer to that perpetual question: ‘What is it that a conductor does, exactly?'”

The Los Angeles Philharmonic mounts the first retrospective survey of Minimalism by a major orchestra. Minimalism now seems old hat, but back in the late 60s, writes Mark Swed, it was something to capture the imagination…

Why do the parts for classical musicians contain only the individual’s part and not those for other instruments? “Imagine being an actor and being given a copy of a script that only contained your lines. Being an effective ensemble requires a fundamental understanding of what everyone else is doing in addition to what you’re doing. In fact, in that sense, ensembles in theatre, dance, and music are art’s most poignant metaphor for how individuals coexist in a society.”

In December 458 staff of the English National Opera sent a letter to Arts Council England protesting the appointment of John Berry as the company’s artistic director. “The lack of intention to recruit a leading artistic director is, in our view, very shortsighted … and is not what is required to move the company forward. We invited you to explain … what you intend to do.” The reply from ACE’s chairman, Sir Christopher Frayling, accepted the staff’s criticism, but said: “It is not the Arts Council’s job to intervene in the running of ENO or any other arts organisation … To do so would be to act as a shadow director.

John Berry gives his first interview since being named to the top artistic job at the troubled English National Opera. “I think you can only do this job in a major house,” he says, “if the artists trust you and are willing to go on a journey with you, and they feel you are willing to go on a journey with them. I’ve worked with 70 or 80 of the world’s leading directors. My life has really been as a producer; that’s what I do. It’s all been about trying to get the best out of people and working in a collaborative way.”