Category: music

So Peter Gelb is reinventing the Metropolitan Opera. “Radical as Mr. Gelb’s initiatives might seem to Met-goers who prefer tradition to innovation and opera-as-vocal-display to opera-as-musical-drama, Mr. Gelb’s bold new vision is in fact a version of a bolder old one, as he acknowledges. Mr. Gelb made reference, in the news conference announcing his plans and in a separate interview, to Rudolf Bing, the Met’s legendary general manager from 1950 to 1972. His ambition to focus resources on creating wholly viable theatrical productions echoes one of Sir Rudolf’s top priorities when he took over as general manager at the old Met.”

James Levine has withdrawn from a national tour of the Boston Symphony after taking a fall last week. “The tour, with stops in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, and Washington, D.C., is the orchestra’s first major American tour in several years and is designed to show other important musical centers the excitement Levine has generated with the orchestra.”

What makes a good music teacher? Different approaches will suit different pupils, but the best practitioners are not always the best instructors…

“Where does classical music begin and end? I don’t mean in terms of chronology – whether it starts with Josquin or Monteverdi, or finishes with Schönberg or Stockhausen. I ask the question in relation to generic boundaries, and I want an answer because so much effort has been expended recently on “breaking down the barriers” which supposedly surround classical music that it has become impossible to maintain any focused sense of what those barriers were originally intended to mark.”

“The Pittsburgh Opera and Opera Theater of Pittsburgh yesterday announced they have entered into an artistic and marketing collaboration beginning in the 2006-07 season. But they are not merging, a move that has been tried in the past… A merger has been rumored since Pittsburgh Opera announced that its production next season of The Magic Flute will be directed by Opera Theater’s head, Jonathan Eaton.”

You would never mistake the staid and distinguished Smithsonian Institution for the Rock Hall of Fame, but “at an emotional and at times rowdy news conference yesterday at the Hilton New York, a group of hip-hop pioneers gathered beside the dark-suited, white-gloved Smithsonian staff to announce a plan for a major new collection devoted to the music. Called ‘Hip-Hop Won’t Stop: The Beat, the Rhymes, the Life,’ it is to be a broad sampling of memorabilia, from boomboxes and vinyl albums to handwritten lyrics and painted jeans jackets, as well as multimedia exhibits and oral histories.”

ArtsJournal blogger Drew McManus says that there’s absolutely no reason that the Louisville Orchestra can’t find its way out of the fiscal hole it is in, but “ignorance, inexperience, and financial stress were conspiring to damn the negotiations [on a new musicians’ contract] before they began.” Neither the orchestra’s board chair nor its executive director have ever participated in a collective bargaining process before, and the lack of experience apparently led them to lash out in anger the moment the musicians declined to immediately accept their terms.

Should operas performed in English still have surtitles projected above the stage? It sounds like a silly question, unless, of course, you’ve ever been to an opera ostensibly sung in English. Now, English National Opera, which translates all its operas into English and once had its director declare that he would “bomb the London Coliseum” if surtitles were introduced, has quietly begun using them. Not everyone is happy, but a few diehard surtitle haters have begun to admit that they could be won over.

Opera being the deranged parade of dysfunctionality that it is, there are certain literary characters to which composers find themselves inexorably drawn, and the more licentious and distasteful the rogue, the better. Perhaps the king of all operatic louts is Falstaff, “a fat everyman who gleefully clings to life, despite its often appalling cruelties.”

New York’s Juilliard School has been given a treasure trove of original scores, notes, and manuscripts by some of the greatest composers who ever lived. “Many of the manuscripts have been unavailable for generations and could be a significant source of new insight for scholars and performers.” The 139-piece collection, which is considered priceless and includes an original score for Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, “is so large that Juilliard is building a special room for the manuscripts” as part of a larger renovation to be completed in 2009.