Category: music

“The single is now over. Not the pop song, of course, which blasts over everything from car ads to party political broadcasts, but the single record, which has now gone the way of the tape-to-tape. Just before Christmas, it was announced that more songs were downloaded from the internet than were bought as CDs or records in shops, and, this week, it emerged that sales of new songs were being outstripped by their sales as mobile phone ringtones. Downloading means no physical record, no sleeve, no artwork of any kind, just a piece of sound that will most often be deployed now by young people as a way of alerting them to another sound they like much more: the sound of each other talking. When the song becomes tired, consumers will simply press “delete”. Given that pop music has always been the most nostalgic of art forms, the new disposability might sit oddly.”

Last year after 20 years trying to convince Riccardo Muti to conduct in its house, Covent Garden had to watch as the maestro walked out at the last minute. And Muti? He puts the blame squarely on the opera company: “I think that Covent Garden didn’t behave properly. La Repubblica wrote a line that was wonderful. It said, ‘In this story, for once, the English behaved like Italians, and the Italians behaved like the English.’ That said everything.”

Where is the new classical music? Okay, there’s lots of music being written out there. But “what is the most recently composed piece of classical music to have achieved a genuinely established place in the repertoire? I mean a piece that you can count on hearing in most major cities most years, and a performance of which is likely to bring in a large general audience. Shostakovich’s first cello concerto, written in 1959, perhaps? Even that is stretching a point. A more truthful answer might be Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, composed 56 years ago in 1948.”

China is creating its first international summer music festival this July. “The festival, similar to the famous Tanglewood and Aspen music schools of the United States, will be the first large-scale annualinternational professional music summer camp ever held in China orSoutheast Asia.”

There’ a big slug of Beethoven showing up on programs around America this year. “An overabundance of Beethoven, or any composer, during an anniversary year is hardly noteworthy. But with no birth or death commemoration of Beethoven in the offing, why so much Beethoven now?”

Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts has been open for less than four years, but an internal report by the acoustic engineer of Verizon Hall, the center’s main stage and the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, suggests that a major interior renovation will likely be necessary to fix what are described as “serious acoustical problems.” The hall has received mixed reviews from critics since its opening, but the concept of a major renovation is likely to face opposition, and debate has not even begun about who would pay for such a project.

” Most serious concert halls can be found in big cities. That’s where the audiences are; that’s where orchestras tend to make their homes. The Music Center at Strathmore, which opens Saturday in Montgomery County, [Maryland], is a rare exception… From the beginning, its designers set out to demonstrate that a suburban concert hall can be just as successful as its urban counterparts, in serving audiences and performers, and in showcasing classical music…From the standpoint of architectural design and construction, this music center measures up to the finest concert halls of the past 20 years – warm, intimate, visually sumptuous.”

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has been test-driving the new Strathmore concert hall for several weeks, and so far, everyone seems to be thrilled with the acoustic. “It’s too soon to know the extent of long-range public relations or financial benefits the BSO will accrue from having an additional performance venue. But, on purely artistic grounds, Strathmore, opening Saturday, looks – and sounds – like a can’t-lose prospect.”

Opera can be about a lot of things, but more often than not, it ends up being about death, and dying, and what happens to the bereaved after someone dies. Mortality is a natural human obsession, of course, but there does seem to be something about the operatic form that causes composers and librettists to linger on the subject.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is in talks with the small Finnish record label Ondine to distribute a series of CDs which would be produced live by the orchestra and distributed internationally by the label. Philadelphia has been without a recording deal since 1996, when it was dropped by EMI, although the orchestra has released a few albums on its own in recent years. The recent labor agreement between the orchestra and its musicians reportedly allows for lower pay rates for recording than those imposed on orchestras nationwide by the musicians’ union, a change which paved the way for the new deal with Ondine.