Category: music

The Ebglish National Opera has commissioned a work about Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi. The unnamed work is about “a man of humble origin, born into a Bedouin tribe who became a powerful and influential political leader… the volatile relationship between the Middle East and the West and… international politics and their representation in the media of both worlds”.

London’s Underground has been piping in classical music into some of the most crime-ridden stations in the system. “Mozart and Pavarotti broadcast through loudspeakers has resulted in a drastic reduction in anti-social behaviour by gangs of youths. It is not that the music has a soothing effect – the gangs hate it and it has driven them away.”

The San Francisco Symphony gets a $10 million grant – the largest in its history for use in ‘Keeping Score: MTT on Music,’ the orchestra’s multimedia effort, started last year, to build new audiences for classical music. The gift will be delivered once the Symphony raises $10 million during the next three years. “Keeping Score” was initiated with a two-part national television show last year, which featured Thomas and orchestra members talking about Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and then performing the piece.”

America’s live-concert business did well in 2004. “The concert business not only survived 2004, it hit a new high of $12.8 billion in revenue, according to a report released yesterday by the trade publication Pollstar. That figure is a 12 percent jump over 2003, when the industry took in $12.5 billion”

“The New Israeli Opera Tel Aviv will participate in the controversial staging of Beethoven’s prison-based opera “Fidelio” at the site of Buchenwald concentration camp, German organisers of the production announced on Tuesday. The controversial production is the brainchild of Giancarlo del Monaco, guest artistic director of the new Erfurt Opera House.”

Simon Rattle is getting some of the first criticism of his career. “At 50, Rattle becomes a senior statesman, an establishment figure. He risks entering the kind of self-protective custody that turned Karajan from a powerfully engaged maestro into a misery on Parnassus, watching the world drift away from his concept and his grasp. Rattle has detached himself from his country without fully mastering German language or culture. He is perilously adrift from the way others are starting to perceive him. He may not enjoy reading bad reviews, but unless he gets to grips with shifting perceptions he will wind up in the ivory tower he has always struggled to escape. At 50, and on top of the world, Simon Rattle still has all to prove.”

Baritone Bryn Terfel loses his voices only hours before a Covent Garden performance of Das Rheingold. “The Royal Opera House was involved in a frantic dash to find a replacement, who stood in the orchestra pit to supply Terfel’s “voice”.

Prompters sometimes take a very active role in an opera performance. “In the prompter’s box during performances, she calls out the first few words of every line a second or so before the singer is to sing it, her linguistic repertoire including Italian, German, French, Spanish and Russian. Comparing her job to that of an air traffic controller, she is hyper-alert, keeping track of several performers at once.”

“What musical geniuses has America produced? From the nineteenth century, the pickings are slim. If the idea of musical genius is defined by Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert , Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky and others in the list of immortals, it can’t be appropriate to consider Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin in that category, however remarkable and special their gifts and contributions. In the 20th century, Copland, perhaps, Gershwin, but then when we talk about Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, to pick a few others from a longer list, the term genius seems inapplicable.”

For a long time, juke boxes have been in decline. But attached to the internet, instead of offering a few hundred selections, juke boxes offer hundreds of thousands. And the choice is reviving the corner juke. With expanded choice, it’s not just the big hits that get played. Turns out people aren’t as hit driven as we’ve been led to believe. “A typical CD jukebox generates about $400 a month in revenue. With our product, a jukebox generates an average of $1,000 a month.”