Category: music

How far would you walk to see a concert? Probably not as far as Hilde Binford, a music history professor at a Pennsylvania college, who just completed a 33-mile trek with several of her students, ending at New York’s Lincoln Center, just in time for a performance of the Philharmonic. Why they did such a thing is a complicated question: suffice to say that it has to do with J.S. Bach’s own 250-mile pilgrimage to hear an organ recital, but also a lot to do with simple intellectual curiosity and the love of a challenge.

Composer James Dillon was very much looking forward to hearing one of his works performed in his hometown of Glasgow, by the renowned Royal Scottish National Orchestra. But at the performance, he was taken aback by what he says was the incredibly poor quality of the playing, as well as a palpable and aggressive disinterest on the part of the musicians and their conductor. The disengaged sound was also noted by both of Glasgow’s daily newspapers, and the BBC, which had planned to broadcast the concert recording, has changed its mind.

“More than 200 protesters from the pro-Kremlin youth movement Moving Together gathered outside the theatre, shouting: ‘Sorokin – out of the Bolshoi.’ Vladimir Sorokin, the postmodernist author who wrote the libretto, has been accused of dragging the famous theatre’s reputation into the mud. The opera features a scientist called Rosenthal, who creates clones of the famous composers Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Mussorgsky and Verdi. After his death, the composers are forced to busk outside a train station and Mozart falls in love with a prostitute.”

Representatives of Australia’s national orchestras are meeting in Sydney to fight proposals to cut government orchestra funding. “The orchestras are fighting the recommendations of former Qantas chief James Strong to save money by cutting musician numbers in some ensembles by 25 per cent.”

The stage is set for the opening of the Bolshoi theater’s first new opera for 30 years on Wednesday, but Russian critics are branding it pornographic and conservatives want it banned before the curtain even goes up…

One thing is clear about the La Scala mess, writes Norman Lebrecht: Riccasrdo Muti is out as music director. “Gradually, a realisation dawned that Muti’s tyranny was at an end. The relief was spontaneous and universal. Milan, more with a whimper than a bang, had brought down a musical dictator who modelled himself on Arturo Toscanini, demanding fanatical fidelity to the score and throwing screaming fits when thwarted. Muti, now 64, is a self-made anachronism. A Neapolitan of modest origins, in ever-black designer hair and suits so sharp you can cut a finger on the crease, he tempers feral energy and vicious tantrums with a magnetic warmth that he switches on and off at will.”

Neeme Jarvi, 67, who steps down from 15 years leading the Detroit Symphony, has been appointed music director of The Hague Residentie Orchestra in the Netherlandsis. He’s already scheduled to become music director of the New Jersey Symphony next fall. “Though not of the same size and stature of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam or the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Residentie Orchestra is an important symphony in Dutch musical life.”

“Everyone who has heard this burly Latvian conduct the two orchestras with whom he has spent the most time (the Oslo Philharmonic and the Pittsburgh Symphony) has witnessed that rare alchemy whereby a good ensemble—as if galvanized by a collective will the players didn’t know they had—becomes greater than the sum of its parts. In this regard, Mr. Jansons’ only peer may be Sir Simon Rattle, who brought his provincial City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to New York a few years ago and played a Mahler Third Symphony that had the man sitting in the box next to me—the New York Philharmonic’s then music director, Kurt Masur—glowering in disbelief at the spell cast by these nobodies from the English Midlands.”

“Worldwide sales of recorded music declined 1.3 percent to $33.6 billion last year as the U.S. market grew for the first time since 1999 and consumers bought more concert and video DVDs. The figures released on Tuesday, which reveal the fifth straight year of falling sales for the record industry, do not include digital downloads or mobile phone ringtones, which music companies say would have made 2004 sales flat against 2003.”