Category: music

The English National Opera says it will start using supertitles, even though its operas are performed in English. The company says that “research showed 61% of its audience was more likely to return to the Coliseum if surtitles were used. They will be introduced from March 2006, beginning with Vaughan Williams’ Sir John In Love.”

A Christian group says it will take legal action against a planned production of Springer, The Opera, if it plays in Birmingham. “If you wanted to be deliberately offensive and provocative to Christians, you couldn’t do much better than put Jerry Springer: The Opera on at the Birmingham Hippodrome.”

“Beethoven certainly changed the way that people thought about music, but this change was a change for the worse. From the speculations of Pythagoras about the “music of the spheres” in ancient Greece onwards, most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer’s idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul. This was a ghastly inversion that led slowly but inevitably to the awful atonal music of Schoenberg and Webern.”

Russian pianist Alexander Kobrin wins top honors at the Van Cliburn Competition; South Korean Joyce Yang wins second and Chines pianist Sa Chen wins third. “Kobrin and Yang, the two top prize winners, couldn’t be more different. Kobrin polarized critics, bloggers and audience members. He often received screaming ovations, and fans threw carnations on the stage after his chamber orchestra performance Thursday night. Yet, some critics reacted strongly toward his steely style, dubbing him “The Undertaker.” Yang, on the other hand, is effervescent. She so dominated the news conference after the awards, that it was easy to forget Kobrin was actually the gold medalist.”

After weeks of listening to competitors of this year’s Van Cliburn Competition, Scot Cantrell has some advice for competitors…

The new Star Wars movie sound track has cracked the Billboard Top 10 albums. And the music? It’s epic, writes Richard Dyer. “What Lucas does not say is that the music often tells the story more clearly and in greater depth than the filmmaking does; the music’s emotional resonances reach further than the dialogue and the acting do.”

What use is a bassoon? “We hold the whole thing together. Aside from holding up the bottom of the four main woodwind instruments, we modify our colors, and in the process, suddenly it’s not a flute and a bassoon, it’s a ‘flassoon.’ And the combination of clarinet and bassoon is a ‘bassinet.’ The same thing with the oboe. It’s our job to make these instruments into something altogether different. A good bassoon player has to have an ear for color and has to be a good ensemble player.”

American Symphony Orchestra League president Henry Fogel says orchestras will have to change to survive. “Complex program notes, musicians in white ties and tails and dowagers who hiss if one claps at the wrong time all keep newcomers out of the concert hall, he noted. After recently seeing a conductor wag his finger at concertgoers who applauded too soon, he wondered ‘how many more times those people will actually pay money for tickets so they can be humiliated’?”

The Opera Company of Philadelphia has recorded its first major deficit since 1995. “The company ran a $400,000 deficit on an $8.6 million budget for the fiscal year that ended May 31. As a result, the company has let go Susan S. Ashbaker, a key member of the music staff for 16 years; plus the director of marketing, director of development, and two lower-level staff members.”

“Old recordings of great performers are often marred by scratches and surface noise, or by sound badly filtered through primitive microphones. [But a new technology] is offering the same music with the immediacy of live performance and the acoustical advantages of a contemporary piano.” The innovator is Dr. John Q. Walker, and he breathed new life into the Disklavier, which has so far mainly been used to allow live performances to be simultaneously reproduced far away on an automated piano. Walker’s latest project is the digitization of recordings by old masters of the instrument, which can then be newly “performed” by the specially equipped pianos.