Category: music

A new documentary film featuring the musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra takes a decidedly personal view of music and the people who play it. “The paradox of performing in an orchestra is that it is an intensely private experience in a public arena,” and the aloofness with which orchestral musicians (and orchestras as a whole) are usually portrayed stands at stark odds with the film’s exploration of the emotions and contrasting inspirations of the Philadelphians. “The musicians… are presented as regular people who have been anointed with a gift they do not fully comprehend, or want to. The ineffability of their musicmaking is central to their passion.”

The London bus and subway bombings barely made a dent in ticket sales at the BBC Proms. After an initial dip at the beginning of the festival (which occurred between the July 7 bombings and the second attempted attack on July 21), sales were robust throughout August, and the final tally will likely be down only 2% on last year. More than 20 concerts in the massive Royal Albert Hall sold out, and overall capacity was better than 80%, a big success in a venue more than twice the size of the average concert hall.

London’s Wigmore Hall, prized for its good acoustics, has started its own recording label.

New Orleans is, of course, an important place in the history of American music. But what many Americans don’t know is that there is far more to the Big Easy than jazz funerals and Dixieland. “New Orleans is a jazz town, but also a funk town, a brass-band town, a hip-hop town and a jam-band town. It has international jazz musicians and hip-hop superstars, but also a true, subsistence-level street culture. Much of its music is tied to geography and neighborhoods, and crowds.” Because of that reliance on neighborhood identity, many are asking whether the New Orleans scene can ever be rebuilt. After all, if the Lower Ninth Ward has ceased to exist, what happens to the sound cultivated by its residents for so many decades?

The weekly broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, under threat ever since ChevronTexaco quit as principal sponsor in 2003, have found a new benefactor in an unlikely place. Toll Brothers, a home building company based in suburban Philadelphia, has agreed to sponsor the broadcasts for the next four seasons. The broadcasts cost $6 million per year, and the Met says that Toll Brothers has agreed to pay a “major” portion of that cost. The company, which specializes in high-end luxury housing (its average home sells for $600,000 or more) is hoping that the association with the Met will add an element of class to its image in the eyes of prospective clients.

Kansas’s Wichita Symphony and Wichita Grand Opera are offering to hire one member of the New Orleans-based Louisiana Philharmonic for each performance scheduled in 2005-06, with no audition required. The chair could be filled by the same musician for the entire season, or by a rotating series of players. The musicians’ union has put out a call for orchestras across the country to offer work to the New Orleans musicians.

According to a new study commissioned by the UK’s musicians’ union, 90% of professional orchestra players in Britain have to find extra work outside their orchestra to supplement their income. The union claims that the study proves that UK musicians are underpaid compared with their counterparts in America and on the European continent. “Most rank and file musicians earned between £22,000 and £24,000 despite having been in the profession for an average of 21 years, with salaries failing to keep pace with inflation.”

Sixty years ago next week, Anton Webern stepped outside of his house for a smoke and was accidentally shot dead by an American soldier. Thus ended the remarkable career of one of history’s brilliant and contradictory composers. Norman Lebrecht says that in order to appreciate Webern, it is best to embrace the contradiction. “Inspiration was anathema to Webern. All had to be strictly counted and numerically correct. If pleasure entered the process, it was the solitary satisfaction of making a line read the same forwards, backwards and upside down. Inverted by nature, Webern wrote music that turned in upon itself, rejecting every human value except absolute order. [And yet,] scan the entire canon, Passacaglia to posthumously published piano pieces, and you will not find one weak work of Webern’s, or one that fails immediately to proclaim its authorship. In the history of western music, that statement is true only of Beethoven and Wagner.”

The famed Opéra National de Paris is going the route of companies in Germany and the U.S., offering standing room tickets for its upcoming season, priced at €5 and aimed squarely at young audiences who otherwise might not attend a production. The company will allow 62 standing-room patrons per performance, and the tickets, which will be limited to two per buyer, will go on sale only 45 minutes before curtain.

Beethoven’s lone opera, Fidelio, is a dark tale of imprisonment and devotion, but it probably never seemed as starkly brutal as in a production going on this week in Philadelphia. The Philly Fringe festival has taken Fidelio on location, summoning audiences to the long-shuttered Eastern State Penitentiary, long known as one of America’s more brutal prisons. But does realism really improve opera? “The genre, by nature, is grand, while prisons, by definition, are constricted. Not an easy fit… In effect, Eastern State Penitentiary left little room for audience imagination. Like most art, opera is irrational. Explain it too realistically and you’re left not with an experience, but a mere explanation – and maybe good intermission chatter.”