Category: music

The mess at the English national Opera is the stuff of operatic tragedy. “Since the music director Paul Daniel resigned, with cat-calls from another senior executive ringing in his ears, events have taken on a life of their own. The artistic director has gone, and a Greek chorus of the great and good penned a letter of open revolt aimed at the chairman. He duly resigned in December. Then 94 per cent of the staff voted last week to strike.”

His Clarinet Concerto, according to a poll on the eve of the composer’s 250th anniversary year. “It was followed by his Requiem and the Ave Verum Corpus in the survey of 103,000 Classic FM listeners. Next on the list was the piano concerto No 21 and then The Marriage of Figaro.”

The band is mixed race, even if most of its audiences aren’t. “The racial mix of Freshlyground would draw little notice in Europe or the United States. But in a South Africa still struggling to unite its fractured population after centuries of rigid discrimination, the band has become a sensation, drawing audiences in both traditionally black venues and traditionally white ones.”

“A $175,000 violin that was reported stolen turned up Friday on the steps of a San Bruno church, and San Francisco police said it was never stolen after all.” The student who reported it stolen “admitted that the violin had never been stolen and that she had filed a false police report.”

A rare violin has been stolen from the trunk of a car in San Francisco. “The violin was crafted by Nicolo Gagliano in the 1760s and is valued at more than $175,000 US. Gagliano studied under legendary violin maker Antonio Stradivari. “I’ve always left my violin in the trunk and it has always been fine,” said Sabina Nakajima, 23, a student with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.”

Following the release of two CDs this year, critics are prophesying that Yevgeny Sudbin – who spent part of his childhood in the basement of a refugee hostel – will be one of the greatest pianists of the new century.

More than half of Britons polled do not realise that Elgar was English or that Beethoven was born in Germany, according to a survey for the digital arts and culture channel Artsworld.

Joseph Volpe caps 16 years running the metropolitan Opera. “Through various crises—a singer dying onstage, a bloated supersta cancelling, attendance figures falling in the wake of September 11th, Cuban billionaire patron turning out to be neither a billionaire nor Cuban—Volpe kept the great old house trundling along. Was he visionary? No. Did rival American companies—particularly the Sa Francisco Opera, with its history-making productions of Messiaen’s “Saint Francis” and John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic”—challenge th Met’s preëminence? Yes. But the chaos that has surrounded many bi houses elsewhere has been absent from the Met, and in this busines the absence of chaos is a considerable achievement.”

“Once upon a time, it wasn’t so. Thirty years ago, you just walked into your local music retailer, found the LP you wanted, then went home and cranked up the stereo. No thought was necessary. Thanks to the Internet, those carefree days are gone. To go to the trouble of actually walking into a record store and paying full price for an actual CD is now a transaction that carries with it all kinds of meaning. It signifies that a music lover is making a choice to support a particular group or musician.”

Detroit isteners angry over recent programming changes have gone to court, charging the city’s NPR station with fraud. “The fury in Detroit over program changes at WDET-FM has listeners claiming they were tricked into contributing money to the station during a pledge drive while station operators were secretly planning to junk locally produced programming and replace it with national talk and public affairs shows. In a public radio world known for lowered voices and reasonable behavior, the class-action lawsuit filed in Wayne County Circuit Court last week is nothing short of incendiary.”