Category: music

Here’s a partial list of the scores and manuscripts included in the Juilliard collection…

Denver’s makeover of its Opera House was accomplished on a modest budget. But “expectations were too high” writes Mark Swed. “Architect Peter Lucking and acoustician Robert Mahoney had boasted that the Ellie would turn out to be one of the 10 best opera houses in the world. Well, it isn’t, and given its myriad requirements and modest budget, was never likely to be.”

The BBC has announced that it will do what no live opera company could ever dream of accomplishing: present Wagner’s entire epic Ring cycle in a single day. BBC Radio 3 will air all four of Wagner’s famous operas over a 15-hour period on the Monday after Easter, using recordings made by conductor Daniel Barenboim at the Bayreuth festival in the early 1990s.

Three days of mediated talks between the musicians and management of the Louisville Orchestra have yielded no breakthroughs, but both sides have agreed to meet again as soon as possible. As things stand, the orchestra’s president is still threatening to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy (that’s the permanent kind) by April 1 if the musicians do not accept a new contract under which the size of the orchestra would be significantly cut back. The musicians continue to believe that the board is ignoring other options for balancing its books in favor of forcing the players into a corner.

“Aaron Copland wanted to make it an opera. So did Leonard Bernstein. But Thornton Wilder, the author of Our Town, turned both composers down. Now, 68 years after it was written and 30 years after Wilder’s death, the play has made it to the opera stage. Our Town, with music by Ned Rorem and a libretto by J. D. McClatchy, received its premiere [in Bloomington, Indiana] on Friday evening.”

Music changes when circumstances change. That’s certainly proving true in New Orleans. “They’re still playing New Orleans standards as the drinks flow. But there’s a changed spirit: the tenacity of holding together bands whose members have been scattered and the determination to maintain the New Orleans style. And in new songs, an open anger coexists with the old good-time New Orleans tone.”

“Traditionally, orchestras organize seasons horizontally because attendance is built on season subscriptions. Seasons often have themes that develop across the entire year, not quite as cohesively as an episodic TV show like “Lost” but designed to have some connection between concerts or to build up to key soloists or symphony works. But the recent explosion in entertainment has challenged that approach. Today’s world is driven by the event; live music must compete with a host of options from Netflix to sports to touring shows.”

Being a concertmaster is a very different job than being a rank-and-file orchestra musician. In most orchestras, the concertmaster must play a double role in the life of the ensemble, consulting with conductors and commanding respect while simultaneously maintaining a collegial connection with the other players, who are unlikely to respond well to dictatorial tactics. It is also a job for which there has never been an official way to train, until now. “The Concertmaster Academy [at the prestigious Cleveland Institute of Music] is intended to groom a person for the specific leadership demands of the job. Unlike performance programs, which one might argue are glutting the marketplace with players, this program has an intentionally tiny enrollment: one per year.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra has hired a new tuba player. Who is twenty years old. And female. And if you think that’s not a major departure from the orchestral norm, you clearly haven’t spent much time scanning the low brass rosters of prominent ensembles. Still, “if brass players have a reputation for macho banter and a certain amount of antics, Carol Jantsch should have no trouble keeping up. She once won a tuba-throwing contest at a tuba conference in Finland, casting an old instrument into a lake, landing first prize in the women’s division.”

Why do American orchestral musicians always look so unhappy onstage? Are they actually that cynical? Is it merely a desire not to show up one’s fellow musicians? Are the players exhausted from what is admittedly a tough schedule of rehearsals and concerts? Or is the music really so difficult that looking happy to be playing it becomes a physical impossibility? “Classical music, it seems, is the only genre that abides and encourages such affectlessness… Well-intentioned though it may be, this stoic style does nothing to bridge the communication chasm between orchestras and audiences.”