Category: music

“Washington National Opera will present the North American premiere of Nicholas Maw’s “Sophie’s Choice,” based on the best-selling novel by William Styron, as part of the company’s 2006-07 season.”

“The sheer complexity of running a major opera house puts opera companies on the cutting edge of operations, with every step of the process scrutinized to maximize time and money, both precious elements in eternally short supply. Logistics, originally a military concept, is the science (and art) of getting the right people and equipment in the right place at exactly the right time. Since opera is a real-time performance, that means getting musicians into the pit, the audience seated, the lights down, the sets ready and the singers on and offstage at show time.”

“Piracy is clearly here to stay, but as iTunes has shown, the record companies’ best strategy is to provide an easy-to-use service that offers music downloads at a fair price. But what price is “fair”? Apple says it is 99 cents a song. Of this, Apple gets a sliver—4 cents—while the music publishers snag 8 cents and the record companies pocket most of the rest. Even though record companies earn more per track from downloads than CD sales, industry execs have been pushing for more.”

Denver’s Ellie Caulkins Opera House opened to lots of praise this fall. “But it didn’t take long for the positive to turn negative. Suddenly, according to certain music critics and members of the public, this, that or something else is wrong with the same building that was so effusively extolled just weeks earlier. Everything from the angle of the seats to the shortage of drinking fountains to even the positioning of the Dale Chihuly chandelier came under attack.”

Martin Bernheimer writes that Tobias Picker’s “American Tragedy” gets a good production at the Met. But “Picker’s score is undeniably crafty, also cautious and well-mannered to a fault. It deals knowingly in second-hand operatic devices, cranking out good mood music and gutsy cliches at every turn. There are no surprises here, no shocks, and very few dissonances. The first-nighters seemed grateful. An American Tragedy may be the perfect modern opera for people who hate modern opera.”

Did the popular music magazine NME manipulate the results of its top 50 albums poll? “The allegations, first published by the blog Londonist.com on Wednesday, suggested that an early version of the poll, which is compiled each year by the magazine’s editors and writers, had been radically overhauled prior to publication. It was alleged that artists including Beck and Patrick Wolf had disappeared from the top 50 entirely, while others, among them high-profile names such as Babyshambles, Oasis and Kate Bush, had seen their ratings significantly boosted.”

“Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say that jazz is in crisis. It tootles along perfectly respectably, but inevitably lacks the resonance of its pioneering days. The same thing has been happening, for a couple of decades, to pop music too. The early 21st century has other wonders, so we should not worry unduly. An appreciation society is as good a way of saying it as any: this music is a magnificent part of our cultural history. Let us not be ashamed of looking back, and revelling in it.”

“Klaus Heymann runs a lean global empire that in some countries has gobbled up half the retail market for classical CDs in numbers of discs sold. The catalogue for his Naxos label now lists about 3,000 recordings, many of unusual repertoire, all still available at prices well below those charged by classical labels at EMI, Sony/BMG and Universal. Naxos also seems to have outrun its rivals on the Internet. Last month, Naxos’s entire recorded output of 75,000 tracks went on sale on eMusic, a U.S. subscription service that claims to shift 2.4 million downloads per month.”

“Those looking for proof of Robert Conquest’s maxim that any major institution always seems to be run by secret agents employed by its enemies need only examine ENO’s recent history. What next for the house? Well, come back after your interval G and T for more in this unmistakable vein of grand guignol. All this is very well and good, but it’s obviously impacting on the artistic achievements of the house. For a long time now, it’s been incredibly patchy.”

The Minnesota Orchestra posts a $1.19 million deficit. “In most respects, the report Friday was upbeat, even turning a bit zany at one point when music director Osmo Vänskä and orchestra president Tony Woodcock played “If I Were a Rich Man” on clarinet and piano. Expenses were cut by $2 million during 2004-05, which brought on a rare occurrence in the orchestra world: a budget actually being less than it was the year before, $27 million, down from $28.6 million. A key cost-cutting measure came when the musicians agreed to a one-year wage freeze.”