Category: music

How do you get children hooked on classical music? “Much has been written about music’s ability to act as a means of expression and communication in both healthy children and those with difficulties; it frequently gets through where speech fails. Then there are the benefits of taking part in a creative endeavour, the interplay and team spirit of singing in a choir or playing in an orchestra or band.”

“Brigitte Hamann’s new biography of Winifred Wagner, the composer’s English-born daughter-in-law, brings to light fresh evidence of the family’s involvement with Hitler and its complicity in his crimes. It took great ingenuity on the author’s part since the Wagners squirreled away their papers and refuse access to outsiders. But Hamann, a Viennese scholar, laid hands on Winnie’s letters to her best Nazi girlfriend and, with other sources, has assembled a dossier strong enough to have landed several Wagners in the Nuremburg dock.”

“Box-office receipts for the [Charleston-based Spoleto USA music festival] came in at a record, about $2,000 more than last year’s figure of $2.53 million. This is the third year in a row the festival has set a sales record.”

The generation of Jews and others who perished in the Holocaust doubtless contained untold thousands of talented artists, composers, and performers whose skills were tragically lost to history. But conductor James Conlon is determined to bring attention to the music of unjustly ignored “Holocaust-era composers who were banned by the Nazis… Unearthing these lost musical treasures of the Holocaust has become a virtual obsession for Conlon, who begins his first season as music director of the Ravinia Festival on June 23 with a concert of music by Mahler and a virtually forgotten composer who perished at Auschwitz, Viktor Ullmann. Mahler and Ullmann will remain a season-long emphasis.”

BBC listeners downloaded almost 700,000 copies of the first five Beethoven symphonies as Radio3 played nonstop Beethoven last week. The most popular download was the First Symphony. “This trial was all about gauging listeners’ appetite for downloads and the results are astonishing.”

Sound art – is it art? Is it music? “Sound art is moving into the mainstream. In Britain, it can be heard in our most celebrated buildings and, as most sound artists started off as musicians, it is making a noise in the music arena, too.”

Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music has reached its CAN$60 million fundraising goal early, and a groundbreaking ceremony was held this week for the school’s spectacular new Telus Centre for Performance & Learning. The early start was made possible when an elderly alumnus of the school chipped in an unexpected CAN$2 million gift to put the campaign over the top. The new building will provide the RCM with “two floors of academic space, more studios and classrooms, and state-of-the-art technology facilities.” A second round of fundraising, with a goal of CAN$25 million, will begin in the fall.

Negotiations have broken off between the Houston Symphony Orchestra and the Houston Grand Opera, talks which would have returned the HSO to the HGO pit for the first time in four years. The symphony had sought to once again become the official pit orchestra of the opera as part of an effort to right its financial ship, which has been listing badly in recent years. But after hearing the HSO’s proposal, the opera chose instead to sign a new 6-year contract with its in-house orchestra.

So English National Opera is going to use English supertitles for its productions in English. This is a great thing, writes Anthony Holden. “The fundamentalist objection is that you can’t do two things at once: read the words while listening to them properly. But the problem is that, half the time, you simply cannot make out the words – in English or any other language.”

Opera-tunity is a TV show documenting the search for raw operatic talent, and its fabulously entertaining TV, writes Noel Holston. “The challenge that the English National Opera set for itself was to see if its scouts and coaches could find amateur singers – people with great instruments but against whom life otherwise had conspired – and bring at least one or two of them to a professional level in a matter of months. The ENO got 2,500 video applications, from people literally singing in the shower to roofers belting from the ramparts.”