Category: music

The single music track is staging a comeback – online. “Although sales of vinyl and CD singles declined again by 14% to 26.5m last year, more than 5.7m downloads were sold during the year. ‘We have already announced that downloads will soon be included in the official UK singles chart and had downloads been included in the singles figures for 2004, the market would have shown a 4% increase’.”

“Where are the great films of opera? Yet to be made. The form has never conquered what might be called the tongue-and-teeth problem. While it makes perfect sense within the opera house that everything is sung, when transferred onto film, the opera illusion often breaks down. Suddenly one is wrenched from a world where it’s normal for people to say hello and good night and I love you in song into a world where you notice huge gaping mouths, swelling diaphragms, quivering tongues and glistening teeth. And even when the films are dubbed, and the singers attempt to look as if they’re speaking, there’s an uncanny sense that the voice is emerging from a hole not big enough to produce it.”

For the second year in a row, the Pittsburgh Symphony has decided not to tour Europe. “The PSO never signed contracts for the tour — therefore it didn’t officially cancel — but the tour was listed as being in development for almost a year on the Web site of European concert promoter Hans Ulrich Schmid. It was to include stops in Italy, Slovenia and Austria.”

Experts say a portrait in a Berlin gallery may be the last-ever portrait of Mozart. “The picture was painted by the German artist Johann Georg Edlinger in 1790, a year before Mozart’s death. The picture was identified as a Mozart portrait when an expert on the composer used computer analysis to compare it with another painted 13 years earlier.”

Simon Rattle has been music director of the Berlin Philharmonic for two years. How does he get along with his musicians? “They always want to know why we are doing something. They don’t just do it – they are not an obedient orchestra in that way, but they are a very creative orchestra. They are not that easy to deal with but it’s a lot of fun. Big temperaments, big personalities. It’s difficult.”

The Takacs Quartet has named a replacement for departing violist Roger Tapping, and the San Francisco Symphony can’t have been terribly happy to hear about it. The SFS’s beloved principal violist, Geraldine Walther, was tapped by the Takacs, and will leave the Bay Area later this year. Walther is widely considered to be one of the top orchestral and solo violists in the U.S., and will be joining a quartet which has had a great run of success in recent years.

Chicago’s Lyric Opera is tightening its belt a bit this season, and is going to extraordinary lengths to keep its subscribers and donors happy. Part of that effort can be seen in the company’s choice of programs for next season: plenty of old warhorses, not a single American opera in the bunch, and a new staging of “Rigoletto” to replace the last new staging of “Rigoletto” Lyric mounted in 2000, which prompted dozens of furious letters from subscribers due to its, um, “frank sexuality.”

With no end to the musician work stoppage in sight, the St. Louis Symphony has canceled this weekend’s concerts with music director-designate David Robertson. Meanwhile, the musicians have issued a call to other orchestras for financial assistance, and spent yesterday walking a picket line in front of Powell Symphony Hall.

At the heart of the dispute between the St. Louis Symphony’s managers and musicians are the dueling issues of fiscal sanity and competent oversight. The SLSO flirted with bankruptcy in 2000, a financial crisis brought on by years of dipping into its endowment and mismanaging the money on hand. In the years since that low point, the organization has raised $130 million, bolstered its endowment, and paid off a lot of debt. The musicians, who accepted major salary cuts to allow the SLSO to get back on its feet, now believe that they’ve earned the right to get back some of what they lost. The management insists that it isn’t yet financially stable enough to take that step.

Franco Zeffirelli has attacked La Scala’s comeback season. Zeffirelli accused the opera house of inviting second-rate conductors to perform. Writing to a journalist on the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, who had written approvingly of the programme, he said the situation “risks becoming utterly absurd and developing into a scandal of truly international proportions because La Scala belongs to the whole world”.