Category: music

“Some 10,500 Wagner lovers from 50 states and 27 foreign countries, along with a sizable contingent of international press, are making the pilgrimage to Chicago to catch the four-opera, 16-hour epic. Lyric is hawking Ring T-shirts, caps and socks in its lobby boutique to fan the flames of their enthusiasm. Such encouragement hardly seems necessary. Wagnerians are famously obsessive in their devotion to this marathon masterpiece, perhaps even more so than the Hobbit-ear-wearing Tolkienites who have made a cottage industry out of a certain other ‘Ring’.”

Australia’s symphony orchestras have received official assurances from the government that their rosters of musicians will not be scaled back in the wake of a report which recommended severe cuts. Of course, that doesn’t solve the problem of where the money to maintain the orchestras in their current form will come from, but with the downsizing issue behind them, all sides sound more amenable to compromise.

More than a half-century after Arnold Schoenberg pioneered his twelve-tone system of composition, the world of classical music is still embroiled in a raging debate over the direction of compositional form, centered on the thorny question of just how much complexity audiences can and will tolerate. But two of America’s leading composers point out that the debate may be less about music at this point than ideology. “Most of these perceptions [of serial vs. tonal music] come not from hearing or knowing the music but from reading what someone has written about it… the biggest problem with the perception about the 12-tone system is absolutely akin to the perception of Schoenberg – that it’s become a journalistic cudgel.”

Copenhagen’s new opera house may not be a universally acclaimed architectural hit, but there is no question that its opening has invigorated the city. Moreover, operagoing in Denmark is clearly an experience considered to be worth savoring, as “arriving early and lingering late seem to be part of the experience,” a far cry from the dashes for the exits so common when the curtain rings down in New York and London. Could the jaded New Yorkers learn a thing or two from their Danish counterparts? “After a compelling performance at the Met, shouldn’t there be a natural tendency to want to share the moment with the audience, to bond, to cheer, to let out the pent-up intensity you’ve experienced with some lusty bravos?” One can only hope…

A small jazz recording label has signed on to become the new sponsor of the annual Detroit Labor Day weekend jazz festival, which “found itself on the brink of extinction last month when Ford Motor Co. chose not to renew its title sponsorship for the first time in a decade.”

The protests and scandal over the Bolshoi’s new opera isn’t really about artistis values after all. “At the center of the silly protest swirling around “Rosenthal’s Children,” the new opera at the Bolshoi Theater, lies a billion-dollar question: Who gets to control the huge budget to renovate the aging building? The debate, alas, is not about cultural values, political ideologies or the preservation of Russia’s artistic heritage.”

Women from the Canton [Ohio] Symphony have produced a provocative calendar. ” ‘More Than You Expect from an Orchestra’ features 18 women from the symphony, its staff, board members and supporters in a number of risque poses. ‘We need to change the symphony’s image, to get it away from being stuffy’.”

“Copenhagen’s is the very model of a modern major opera house. Its size is moderate (about 1,600 seats); the auditorium is tiered and horseshoe-shaped, with adaptable acoustics; and a flexible studio space is attached. Everything backstage is controlled by fingertip technology. The front of house is illuminated by three dazzling chandeliers designed by Olafur Eliasson, famous for his light installation at Tate Modern. It all symbolises openness and accessibility. As yet, the atmosphere in the place seems a bit sterile, more conference centre than fun palace.”

The music industry is in court against p2p file-trading services. “But even if the entertainment business manages to coax more users into paying for legal downloads and succeeds in court against Grokster and StreamCast, its problems are unlikely to go away. True, a Supreme Court ruling in the industry’s favour would put paid to other P2P services. But it is not clear that curbing illegal downloading will translate into extra sales for the music business. A rush into legal downloading would hardly be good for sales of CDs: some cannibalisation is inevitable. And perhaps the decline in global sales is indicative of a far greater problem for the music industry—consumers simply think that many of its products are just not worth paying for.”

An film opera of “Carmen” had its birth in the townships of South Africa. “It is the first operatic film to be made in South Africa’s Xhosa language, it is the first African film to win the coveted Golden Bear for best picture at the Berlin Film festival and it is the first mainstream film to use actors almost exclusively from the townships. They were brought together almost five years ago after extensive auditions held in the townships across South Africa.”