Category: music

The Toronto Symphony is auditioning for a new horn player. “In North America, the appointment of a new member of a professional symphony orchestra is a complicated process, full of protocols and safeguards intended to ensure that the selection is fair. Good orchestra jobs come up only rarely, and it’s been decades since the TSO last searched for a principal horn: Fredrick Rizner held the job for 39 years, before retiring last year to Eastern Ontario, to start an antique business.”

“For music to remain vital, recordings have to exist in balance with live performance, and, these days, live performance is by far the smaller part of the equation. Perhaps we tell ourselves that we listen to CDs in order to get to know the music better, or to supplement what we get from concerts and shows. But, honestly, a lot of us don’t go to hear live music that often. Work leaves us depleted. Tickets are too expensive. Concert halls are stultifying. Rock clubs are full of kids who make us feel ancient. It’s just so much easier to curl up in the comfy chair with a Beethoven quartet or Billie Holiday. But would Beethoven or Billie ever have existed if people had always listened to music the way we listen now?”

Even as big recording companies prosecute downloaders for trading in copyrighted recordings, there’s a better place to find illegal music: EBay. Sellers are offering lots of bootlegged recordings for sale, and for some reason no one’s being sued.

“In a move that has shocked the British music world, Paul Kildea, artistic director of the Wigmore Hall – regarded as one of the plum jobs in the arts – has resigned after just two years in the post.”

Want a shot at the best seats in Colorado Opera’s new theatre? It’ll cost you the price of the tickets plus a “donation” of $100-$500 a seat. Gotta pay for that new building somehow. And the number of donors has gone up.

A few years ago the Toronto Symphony was an organization in trouble. Then came a dramatic turnaround. “The upshot? Over a three-year period, audiences have risen by 25 per cent. There are now 25,000 subscribers and the orchestra sells 230,000 seats per season. More than 20,000 young people (aged 15 to 29) have been recruited to the new “tsoundcheck” program alone, offering them good seats over the Internet for only $10 a ticket. The price makes going to the symphony competitive with a first-run movie.”

The Van Cliburn Piano Competition enters its final round. “For the first time in the competition’s history, three Asian women have reached the finals. Two Italians and a Russian make up the men. “

This year’s Van Cliburn Piano Competition is a very international affair. But “of the 35 initial contestants, the largest group, 10, has graduated from or is still studying at New York’s Juilliard School. Seven are or have been students of Yoheved Kaplinsky, the Israeli-born chairwoman of the piano department. Four list Robert McDonald among their teachers.”

The Boston Symphony, writes John von Rhein, “is a unique orchestra, a unique audience and a unique administrative vision that has made the Boston Symphony Orchestra the business model for other symphony orchestras, at a time when just about everyone in classical music, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is chanting the same litany of declining ticket sales, rising deficits and aging audiences.”

It was a bit of a difficult season for classical music in Chicago. “There are no easy answers to the difficulties classical music organizations are facing, and endless facets to the questions themselves. Classical music in America is far from dead, but the shape of its future may look quite different from its past.”