Category: music

“Women have yet to attain the power, prestige and astronomical pay scale of baton-wielding superstars at the Big Five orchestras in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago. They’re not exactly flourishing at a variety of other ensembles, either. Why is it that in our supposedly enlightened age, when so many gender barriers have been broken, female conductors still have difficulty reaching the top of the profession? What needs to change in order for that to happen?”

So we’ve seen the last of the great studio opera recordings. But maybe there’s something new to be made of the live recording. “Think of all those bootlegged accounts of Maria Callas that once surreptitiously circulated among fanatics. More recently, EMI has been legitimizing those recordings and releasing them, sonically cleaned up as much as possible, in its comprehensive Callas Edition. But through the years there have been many distinguished, well-engineered and perfectly legal live recordings of operas.”

The Washington Opera plans to simulcast a performance of “Porgy and Bess” on the National Mall. “The 2 p.m. performance will be transmitted live from the Kennedy Center Opera House and shown on a gigantic video screen, 18 by 32 feet, that will be located near the Capitol, with speakers set up for sound. Although large screens have been used to let audiences view close-ups of musicians while they were playing on the Mall, this is believed to be the first time that a performance originating elsewhere will have been transmitted there live.”

How did a manuscript of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge end up in Philadelphia? “The more immediate question is how such a manuscript ended up at Palmer, previously known as Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Though important manuscripts are scattered over the globe by world wars, this one had a more genteel route, arriving in 1950 among a collection of hymns donated by philanthropist Marguerite Treat Doane.”

British jazz of the 1970s was vibrant, but by the 90s it had lost steam. “If there was an identity crisis in young British jazz just 10 years ago, it is now subsiding, and a lot of that is thanks to the work of F-ire. The measure of inspiration presented in the collective’s work reminds me of the very best of British jazz.”

Critics assail the UK’s Classic FM as lightweight and useless in clutivating new audiences for classical music. But a new study reports that Classic FM is a potent audience-builder. “The study, conducted between May and October last year, compared concerts supported by Classic FM with those that were not. The Philharmonia Orchestra reported three times the number of first-time concert-goers at their Classic FM-supported events, and figures for the Barbican’s Classic-backed Mostly Mozart festival were even more impressive, with a massive 38 per cent of the audience attending a classical concert for the very first time.”

Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has ha an enormous influence on contemporary music. Personally, he’s enigmatic: “This 77-year-old musical pioneer has claimed that he comes not from Burg Mödrath, near Cologne (listed as his birthplace on his biography), but rather from a planet orbiting the star Sirius, and that he was put on earth to give voice to a cosmic music that will change the world. He is, to put it mildly, a one-off.”

Cecilia Bartoli has made a specialty of singing repertoire off the beaten path. “She is not diva-ish in the old-fashioned sense – she doesn’t intimidate and, by all accounts, is an easy-going colleague when part of an opera cast. Her widely quoted falling out with Jonathan Miller at the Met in 1996 during a production of The Marriage of Figaro was untypical: in any case, she was standing up for a musical principle, not refusing a directorial command. She is tough, demanding, but no termagant. Yet there remain questions about the trajectory of her career…”

A Beethoven manuscript missing for 115 years has resurfaced. “It was a working manuscript score for a piano version of Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” a monument of classical music. And it was in the composer’s own hand, according to Sotheby’s auction house. The 80-page manuscript in mainly brown ink – a furious scattering of notes across the page, with many changes and cross-outs, some so deep that the paper is punctured – dates from the final months of Beethoven’s life.”

UK recording executives are angry at the BBC for offering free downloads of Beethoven symphonies last summer. The music was downloaded 1.4 million times. “Critics say the corporation is failing to take into account the market impact of its online and digital expansion, in spite of the new service licences introduced by the BBC chairman, Michael Grade, which were supposed to address this issue.”