Category: music

The lease on London’s Wigmore Hall has been renewed for 300 years. “The previous lease was to expire in 2012 and there were fears that rising rents could reduce the hall’s activities. Of the £3.1m cost of the lease, £500,000 has already been raised.”

In the ten days before Christmas BBC Radio 3 broadcast the complete works of JS Bach. It was a hit. The BBC “website received a record number of hits in December, with 3.1m page impressions during the season itself and 2.4m in the runup to it. Precise listener figures will not surface, however, because Rajar, which measures radio audiences, does not monitor the period around Christmas.”

“After more than a decade based at a public school at Madison Avenue and 127th Street, where it helps run the Choir Academy of Harlem, the Boys Choir and its lesser-known sister chorale are being evicted by the city’s Department of Education for what the agency describes as a host of financial and managerial improprieties. Although it has always had difficulty raising funds, the choir now faces its most serious crisis since it was founded in the basement of a Harlem church nearly four decades ago.”

Boston’s Berklee College of Music has long reigned as America’s preeminent conservatory for non-classical musicians. Jazzers and rockers alike have emerged from Berklee, which has always cultivated an image that falls somewhere between the sophistication of Wynton Marsalis and the populist appeal of Sting. Now, the school is branching out to include a genre it has long disdained – bluegrass. “Berklee administrators credit interest in bluegrass to a growing appetite among students for a range of musical styles, spurred by the Internet. It also parallels the growing popularity of the style nationally.” Appointing a new president with a Deep South upbringing didn’t hurt, either.

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s music director search is in full swing, and Scott Cantrell believes he has a handle on who might be a front-runner and who definitely isn’t: “Philippe Jordan, a Swiss-born 31-year-old with movie-star good looks, made his Dallas debut with richly expressive performances of Brahms and Strauss… having his mug on billboards wouldn’t hurt ticket sales. Claus Peter Flor, the DSO’s principal guest conductor since 1999, keeps molding one stunning performance after another… Yan Pascal Tortelier got finely finished playing from the orchestra, in spite of a strange baton technique.” And the up-and-coming Andrei Boreyko is making his Dallas debut later this year.

“We think of concerts as fixed entities. In our age of mechanical reproduction, live performance has become – like a book, a movie, a painting – an object that can be recorded, examined and stamped with approval (or disapproval). So we tend to think that everyone who attends the same performance is hearing the same thing. But that’s not true, and not only because of vagaries of taste or hearing. It makes a big difference where you sit.”

“File-sharing barons are facing their own day of reckoning after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last summer. Over the last four months, several Napster heirs have shut down and others are contemplating what they once couldn’t abide — doing business by the entertainment industry’s rules to survive.”

Scientists have been testing a skull found in an Austrian basement to see whether it belonged to Mozart. “Researchers said yesterday they would broadcast their findings on Sunday as part of a year of celebratory events marking the composer’s 250th birthday.”

Members of the quartet have been given more time before they have to turn over their instruments to the musician who sued them. “The extension came as progress was being made in negotiations with David Ehrlich, the violinist who sued Clyde Shaw, Doris Lederer and violinist Akemi Takayama after they ejected him from the quartet in 2000.”

Mozart was a genius, right? Well, “as the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth approaches this month, one film-maker is setting out to prove that such astounding achievements were a product more of hard graft than genius, as has often been assumed.”