Category: music

UK legal music downloaders are “being turned off net music stores because of pricing and disappointing sound quality compared to CDs. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said legal music downloads rose by 900% in 2004.”

The San Diego area is getting some visits from some high-profile orchestras next season. “With their out-of-town cachet, they have more glamour than the San Diego Symphony, the city’s hometown musical team, which is working hard to cultivate audiences and appreciation. Do visiting ensembles provide unfair competition to the San Diego Symphony? Or are they beneficial to everyone?”

Peter Maxwell Davies says what ails classical music is the lack of good education. “Successive governments have cut back on music education in state schools to the extent that music specialists have become a rarity. Not only can few teachers read or write musical notation, but the music teachers themselves are unfamiliar with the world of classical music. Can we imagine the teaching of English in circumstances where the teacher not only does not know any poems, novels or plays, but cannot read?”

“Graham Vick, the respected opera director, is attempting his own radical solution to declining audiences and the trappings of elitism by staging a Monteverdi opera with a mix of professionals and amateurs in a burnt-out ice rink in Birmingham’s Chinatown.”

James Oestreich reports that 43-year-old Norwegian conductor Arild Remmereit has come out of nowhere to be a star-in-waiting. He’s recently substituted at La Scala and at the Pittsburgh Symphony, and seems destined to be a major conductor.

Anthony Tomnasini views the flood of new opera DVD’s with alarm. “With the DVD boom, will the labels start issuing operas based primarily on the production’s visual elements? The market is already flooded with routine musical performances of well-known works that just happened to have been taped for DVD. Also, as dramatic as opera may be, it’s refreshing to hear just the music on a fine recording without the powerful distraction, in a sense, of a production. There are recordings that I never tire of because the visceral impact of the music-making allows my dramatic imagination such fancy. But I do tire of seeing the same sets and costumes, the same camera angles, the same close-ups.”

“Radio is in decline; satellite services XM and Sirius are ascending. Warner Music is scrambling to meet shareholder’s demands, but independent labels Merge, Sub Pop, and Kill Rock Stars are watching records sell in unprecedented numbers. These days a band doesn’t have to be seen on MTV, or heard on WBCN, or written about in Rolling Stone for fans to find out about it. The Internet is challenging the corporate clutch on both radio and retail.”

Atlanta Opera director and founder William Fred Scott leaves the company. “Scott stepped in near the beginning of the Atlanta group’s life, and helped build it into a $5.4 million organization. His departure comes at the end of a revolution that promises major changes in Atlanta’s cultural landscape.”

La Scala has chosen a new artistic director. “Frenchman Stephane Lissner, of Paris’s Theatre de la Madeleine, has been given a four-and-a-half year contract. Musical director Riccardo Muti quit on April 2, citing the “hostility” of fellow employees after a series of rows. His post has yet to be filled. The president of the orchestra quit last week, giving no explanation. Mr Lissner’s appointment was welcomed both by the musical establishment and unions representing the opera’s 800-strong workforce.”

Flutist Dawn Weiss has played flute for 25 years in the Oregon Symphony. But new music director Carlos Kalmer sent her a letter last fall complaining of her “technical errors, poor pitch control, lack of leadership, choppy phrasing, failure to connect rehearsal corrections to performances, and an ‘airy and unpleasant’ sound quality.” Weiss worked on the issues, but Kalmer wasn’t satisfied. “And so a tense drama began, pitting a prominent musician in the orchestra against her conductor. After receiving the letter, Weiss pressed ahead with an improvement program. And when her efforts failed, she decided to break with symphony protocol and brought the warning letter she received and her story to The Oregonian last week.”