Category: music

Nine years ago the Sacramento Symphony went out of business. Now there are two orchestras competing for the affections of the city. The question: will competition be good for the orchestras, or will it dilute resources?

“After 40 years, the Lindsays, the most successful British string quartet of their generation, have given their final concert…”

Chu-Fang Huang, a 23-year-old Chinese pianist who studied at the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music, was named first-prize winner of the 2005 Cleveland International Piano Competition…

Why are recording company execs paying radio stations for airplay? “After congressional hearings revealed the extent of payments to DJs by record companies and distributors in the early 1960s, authority over what music gets on the air was taken out of disc jockeys’ hands and vested in radio station executives. But both executives and DJs continued to receive gifts from record companies, and large payments to stations by supposedly independent promoters hired by the record companies still make up an important part of radio station revenues.”

“The competition for spots in major orchestras is fierce, and the path for women has its bumpy patches. Female orchestral players tend to be clustered in string sections, and brass sections are still largely a male preserve. Female conductors are still a tiny minority. But ambitious, talented female musicians just keep coming. Like their counterparts in the business world, some of them are now reaching the profession’s top ranks.”

Is there a German school of cello-playing? Yes, in a way. Some prominent young German cellists are attracting attention. But “the classical music world is less like soccer than like bicycle racing: allegiances and teams are formed without much regard for national boundaries. And like bicycle racing, the pack is a group of fiercely competitive individuals. These German cellists acknowledge one another’s existence but are not exactly pals.”

The online music business is changing. Now you have the option to buy, rent or subscribe. But there are drawbacks to each of them: “the rental outfits look more attractive if you think of them as services, like cable TV or satellite radio, rather than stores. Like satellite radio, you get music only while you’re still a subscriber. You pay $3 more per month than satellite radio costs, but you get to pick the songs.”

What is it about Itzhak Perlman that inspires such devoted fans, asks Peter Dobrin. Surely not his music-making alone. “A blindfold test in the first movement would have revealed an often-dull player with moments of difficulty with intonation. I’m not saying that in total the Perlman experience was a bad one, or even that his shortcomings outweighed his assets. But would a fresh-faced recent Juilliard School graduate have gotten the same response from this audience with exactly the same performance? Hardly. It’s a point worth considering if only because perpetuation of the art form will require cultivating love for the next one or two Itzhak Perlmans – or dozen.”

At the age of 64, tenor Placido Domingo says he’s close to retiring from singing. “The day is close that I quit singing. I really don’t know how to do it – a tour or a concert or if I just say, that’s it, that’s the last night.”

Boston Mayor Tom Menino is trying to block the city’s historic opera house from slapping a new corporate name on its facade. Citizens Bank paid $4 million to buy the naming rights to the recently reopened venue, but the mayor and several other elected officials have objected, saying that the theatre should continue to be known simply as the Opera House. Furthermore, Clear Channel, which bought and renovated the venue with considerable assistance from Menino, says that it “owes” the mayor, and may be amenable to squelching the naming deal.