Category: music

Andre Previn is better-known as a conductor than a composer. But he’s working on changing that. “Temperamentally, Previn is probably unique among American composers in that he has nothing to prove. Thanks to all those years on the Hollywood treadmill, he writes with speed and fluency. Whatever the reason, some of Previn’s music is wonderful, and some of it meanders. You could wonder to what extent Previn knows the difference – or if he takes his composing life seriously enough to revise more rigorously.”

Pop concert promoters run a risky business. They have to judge demand and specify guarantees. Often the two don’t meet. “Ticket prices have spiraled out of control as artists demand higher guarantees. Every year promoters pledge to say “no” to those acts, but they never do. This year might be different.”

So Washington DC loses another classical music radio station. “Once upon a time and long ago, bringing classical music to the airwaves was an image-enhancing operation, a programming decision, in the words of music historian Russell Sanjek, to “win over the custodians of public taste and appease the Federal Communications Commission.” These days, it’s bad taste even to mention public taste, and the FCC is appeased just by keeping a wardrobe functioning. What the classical fade-out tells us more than anything is that the “custodians of public taste” have left the building.

Music of the past is full of recorded gems that get lost in history. A small recording label called Arbiter makes the case for forgotten masters – some are familiar names, but others…

“Susan Stafford decided she needed to practice her bagpipes outside her Lake Elmo home after her veterinarian warned her the high-pitched tones could affect the hearing of her two parrots. She didn’t want to give up the birds or the instrument. But she was worried about the birds, her diabetic cat, the multitude of distractions at her house and, finally, that neighbors might complain. Bagpipes, after all, are loud. So a few weeks ago, she called City Hall in hopes that someone might suggest places she could practice without interruptions and without disrupting others…”

UK musicians are protesting what they claim are outrageous visa fees for visiting the US. “A singer hoping to perform in the US can expect to pay $1,300 (£680) simply for obtaining a visa. Groups including the Musicians’ Union are calling for an end to the “raw deal” faced by British performers. US acts are not faced with comparable expense and bureaucracy when visiting the UK for promotional purposes.”

When the Boston Symphony hired James Levine as music director, it knew that its audiences would be in for a healthy dose of modern music amid the Sibelius and Beethoven. But less than a year into Levine’s tenure, some are beginning to ask why the maestro seems to go out of his way to select the most tiresome, unlistenable examples of 20th and 21st-century music. “Most of those contemporary composers favored by Levine, such as Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, have little patience with anything that smacks of tonality or emotional catharsis. These sons of Schoenberg… also could not care less about music that could rebuild an audience for classical music.”

Studying music in a conservatory is very different from being a professional musician, as graduates of such cloistered institutions as Juilliard and Curtis quickly discover. But an innovative outreach program at Boston’s New England Conservatory is aiming to prepare its young participants for the work they will be expected to do as professionals, as well as bringing high-quality, low-cost music to underprivileged corners of the community.

Even as the Chicago Symphony prepares to usher in a new era with the departure of music director Daniel Barenboim, one familiar face at Orchestra Hall won’t be going anywhere. Pierre Boulez, the onetime enfant terrible of contemporary music, has made a home for himself in Chicago as the CSO’s principal guest conductor, and some would argue that his effect on the orchestra has been more profound than even the music director’s. “His presence has enlivened the contemporary music scene throughout the city. Some listeners who hear his lucid, highly honed performances of new music with the CSO have been tempted to seek it out elsewhere.”

It’s called the “Atkins Diet Opera.” “”Opening in Oxford on Friday, the production – which extols in rhyming couplets the virtues of avoiding carbohydrates – is one of the high-spots of an annual tour of Ig Nobel award-winners, given as ironic counters to Nobel prizes for those who carry out research ‘that should never be repeated’.