Category: music

James Levine said he wouldn’t be making big changes in his first summer leading Tanglewood. But he did. “No music director since Tanglewood founder Serge Koussevitzky has spent more time with the students.”

The Baltimore Symphony fiasco in hiring a music director is mostly about power. “In the end, this month’s crisis over a new music director begs a tough, fundamental question: Whose orchestra is it, anyway? The board and administration apparently believe they own it, lock, stock and Beethoven. And they’re not about to let any pesky musicians tell them otherwise.”

“Critics of today’s pop music falsely equate the corporate admission that millions were spent trying to alter radio station playlists as a sign that the sounds now dominating radio are being forced on us. It’s as if big, bad Sony BMG used its vast resources to keep “real” music (rock ‘n’ roll, adult pop, jazz, what have you) off the air. Trust me, Sony and other major labels aren’t interested in keeping anything off the air. They are interested in selling records. They’d release an album of dog howls if they thought it would go platinum. To think otherwise is as misguided as believing that all those heavy metal albums years ago really had satanic messages woven into the music.”

Ivan Hewett meets Unsuk Chin, who last year won the Grawemeyer Award, the musical world’s richest prize for composers. Never before had a Korean composer made it so big in the West, and back home it was headline news. I suggest that after her long exile in Berlin, where she went in 1986 to study on a German government scholarship, she could now return to her roots and enjoy her celebrity status. The idea horrifies her.”

Pop singer Robbie Williams has “signed an exclusive deal with the global telecom giant T-Mobile that will allow customers to download songs, exclusive live tracks and concert footage to their mobile phones. The 18-month deal is the biggest tie-up yet between a big artist and a phone company and will be watched with interest by others convinced that mobile music delivery will become an important factor in boosting flagging record sales over the next few years.”

Is payola rampant in the radio business? Apparently, and there are the incriminating emails to prove it. “This week Sony BMG, a leading record label, apologised and agreed to pay a fine of $10m for bribing radio stations. New York’s hyperactive attorney-general, Eliot Spitzer, said that bribes are pervasive in the industry, and that he is continuing his investigation into the other big record labels—Universal, EMI and Warner Music—as well as the radio business.”

Three years ago, exoperts were predicting the death of Canadian symphony orchestras. That has changed dramatically. “After more than a half-century of resolutely resisting change in the name of purism, our symphonies, with nothing to lose, began experimenting, and have largely succeeded in bulking up their audiences and making a start at balancing their books. Insiders remain edgy, worried about the future. They voice concerns about the efficacy of subscriptions (younger people tend not to book in advance) and the increasing scarcity of patrons willing to donate money and time to orchestras. But overall, the mood has become markedly more bullish in the orchestral world.”

Norman Lebrecht says that Marin Alsop handled the Baltimore dust-up with all the aplomb, dignity, and compassion one would expect from her. “This seemed to be just another of those occasions when musicians pick the worst possible moment to air unrelated internal grievances,” but Alsop responded by quietly asking to meet with the musicians directly, and then asking what she could do to help them. “That’s Marin Alsop, through and through. Of all current conductors, she is probably the best facilitator, the one who gets things done.”

The Houston Symphony, which has been struggling with deficits for several years, has cancelled plans for a concert version of Richard Strauss’s opera, Elektra, and replaced it with a program of operatic excerpts, which will be considerably cheaper to put on. The orchestra has also cancelled a planned new series of concerts designed to draw new audiences with theme concerts and onstage commentary.

Rupert Christiansen has plowed through Blair Tindall’s supposedly scandalous new book, and is most intrigued with the author’s assessment of the state of the classical music industry. “A glut of young musicians were groomed to enter a profession that was both puffed up and weighed down with its own status and restrictive practices… [But] too much of the recent debate about classical music has focused on the decline in the quantity of performance or the size of audience, compared with the levels achieved in that brief post-war boom. Yet the quality of music-making should also be considered, and surely nobody who heard the Royal Opera’s Die Walküre or John Eliot Gardiner’s Nelson Mass at the Proms last week could come away worrying about a decline in standards.”