Category: music

The old adage used to be “you are what you eat.” But with the advent of digital music and the popularity of gadgets like the iPod, now it’s “you are what’s on your playlist.”

Scottish Opera is looking for a new leader. But who would want to take on such a precarious company, whose recent history is pocked with controversy. “What’s needed is someone with the rare combination of vision and experience to juggle the financial and practical necessities with the artistic skills to successfully fire this esoteric artform. Scottish Opera is there for the taking – and for the making. Inexperience or mediocrity would be disastrous…”

“For at least 50 years, amplification has regularly been used in opera houses for oracles and offstage voices. It has also been used to transmit the sound of the orchestra to the singers, and vice versa, and to circulate the sound of the ongoing performance throughout the backstage area.” But talk about amplification in the opera house and suddenly everyone gets skittish…

The Metropolitan Opera is doing okay, but not as well as it used to. So what would set the buzz just a little bit higher? “Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Met were to set up shop as a star factory along the lines of MGM in the 1930’s, leveraging the reputations of its best talents in its own institutional interest.”

Composer Peter Maxwell Davies is using his position as Master of the Queen’s Music to argue loudly for support of classical music. “In his lecture Sir Peter will condemn the fact that the government, despite launching a music manifesto last year which promised greater access to instrumental tuition for schoolchildren, has put no money towards its fulfilment.

The UK’s Opera North is about to be ousted from its house for a year while the building is upgraded. “The £31.5m, two-phase renovation and building project involves, in the first instance, construction of rehearsal rooms and an overhaul of the auditorium. The second phase will see the 19th-century Assembly Rooms, next to the theatre, converted into a public space that will serve as a recital hall and room for education work.”

“Perhaps it’s a stretch to insist that a passion for baseball and a passion for opera are related, though the link is documented. But as Placido Domingo intimated, the link seems most intense in Chicago, where the ache for a baseball victory is palpable (the White Sox are virtually as hapless as the Cubs), where theater, the symphony and the opera are virulent inspirers of local pride, and where a recent newspaper poll asking whether sports or the arts were more thrilling ended in a dead heat.”

Riccardo Muti goes to New York to conduct the New York Philharmonic. At the end of rehearsal he spoke to musicians: “He made no specific mention of Milan, but the fabulous, brilliant and sometimes imperious Muti dropped whatever guard he had, and told the musicians how good they had been to work with, and how much he looked forward to their working together in the future.”

A dispute between the Seattle Symphony and violinist Ilka Talvi, who was the orchestra’s concertmaster for 20 years until he was fired by the SSO last summer, has gotten ugly and very public since Talvi started a blog (http://schmaltzuberalles.blogspot.com/) airing criticisms of the orchestra. Talvi’s accusations have “led to Internet accusations, police involvement and the threat of legal action.”

Major music labels may not think world music is worth the bother, but thanks to small labels there’s never been so much music easily available. “The broad rubric holds a wealth of music that is now more accessible than ever before. And while major labels have largely lost interest in world music, independents have been busy, while listeners are no longer dependent on the shelf space or classification skills of local record stores.”