Category: music

“Switch on the radio, grab a glance at MTV. Because something odd is happening, and it’s been going on for a while now. Here, it appears that there are few women or men anywhere to be heard. There are the breathy voices of ingenues; the mewling of babies; the shouts of a teenage tantrum; the whines of adolescent boys. BoyzIIMen? Please.”

If the retirement goes up in Britain, there will be an awful lot of unhappy musicians. “Just imagine a 70-year-old footballer! Nobody expects sportsmen to go on and on. But that’s what we have to do night after night, to international standards, having our work picked over in the press, while we struggle against tendonitis. We’re athletes, too, but there’s no way our careers can be cut short unless we get injured.”

Chamber music is hot in Australia. “Melbourne is at the heart of an explosion of interest in the art form, based on the city’s international chamber music competition, which attracted 3.75 million radio listeners when last staged two years ago. This year, eight Australian groups and four from the region will compete for prizes worth $50,000 and concert engagements. There are two streams: string quartets and piano trios.”

As the battle over intellectual property shapes up as one of the most important of the 21st century, classical music aficionados are increasingly finding it difficult to access classic recordings. “Now that the boom years of the compact disc are over, classical music discs often don’t make back their costs. No matter that the discs contain work by some of the century’s great artists – often in live performances never recorded in the studio. Their appeal is often so specialized that purchasers are more likely to find them on specialized international Web sites than in Tower Records.” But those recordings still belong to someone, and that someone has to be paid if someone else wants to listen, and that puts everyone in a difficult position.

Upstate New York’s famed Glimmerglass Opera has a new general director: Michael MacLeod, who has been the executive director of the New Haven (CT) Symphony since late 2001, will take over the Cooperstown-based company this fall. MacLeod is credited with bringing New Haven’s finances into balance in the tough years following the 9/11 attacks.

Seiji Ozawa’s contract as music director of the Vienna State Opera has been extended through 2010, when the conductor will be 74…

The fledgling Symphony Silicon Valley declared its just-completed third season a success this week, with a balanced budget and a newly created endowment to show for its efforts. “Symphony Silicon Valley formed after the collapse of the 123-year-old San Jose Symphony in 2001. The new symphony has started slowly — 17 performances last year compared with 50 a year for the old symphony — and has survived mostly without city or corporate funding, depending on private donors and ticket sales.” The new endowment will pump $50,000 a year into the budget, and adinistrators hope it will encourage private support for the ensemble.

Several orchestras have had success this year programming music from the popular video game, Final Fantasy, and now, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is taking the concept a step further. The Phil is putting on a full concert of music featuring the music from such classic games as Donkey Kong and Frogger as well as from contemporary hits like Halo, and “for a portion of the two-hour video game music concert, the actions of two gamers playing live on stage will actually direct the 105-piece orchestra… It’s a carefully choreographed tribute highlighting the best games and their best features, whether it’s the full choir accompanying Halo or the light show complementing Tron or the montage of archival and future video clips for Zelda.”

The Frick Museum starts charging $20 for its concerts which have been freefor decades. “The Frick, which has an endowment in excess of $200 million, said it can no longer afford to subsidize the concerts completely. In the past, the series of about a dozen concerts a year has featured major names like Wanda Landowska and Kiri Te Kanawa. In recent years, new stars like Ian Bostridge and Matthias Goerne have made their New York recital debuts there.”

Tickets to see the world’s great orchestras on tour in South Korea are becoming ridiculously expensive. A ticket to the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert in Seoul, for instance, will run you between $87 and $450, which the promoter insists is necessary to recoup the fees paid to engage the orchestra. But the public complaints are getting louder…