Category: music

After about 1900 broadcasts, 84-year-old opera lover George Jellinek is signing off his WQXR show. “New York is losing one of the oldest and best-loved facets of its opera life: after some 36 years, George Jellinek’s weekly radio program, “The Vocal Scene,” is going off the air. The final broadcast is tonight at 10 on WQXR-FM, where the show originated in October 1969. The first program was titled “Love in Opera.” Tonight’s finale will be called, appropriately enough, “Leave Taking” and will be devoted to operatic farewells and Mr. Jellinek’s own.”

A touring production of the musical Oliver! opened this week in California, with a machine in the orchestra pit and live musicians protesting outside the front door. As in similar disputes in New York, producers claim that the so-called “virtual orchestra” synthesizer is nothing more than a versatile new instrument which augments the sound of the show’s 10 live musicians, while the local musicians’ union claims that the Sinfonia, as it is known, takes jobs away from trained musicians.

It’s been a rough year at the Detroit Symphony, with mid-contract pay cuts for the musicians and serious upper management upheaval to boot, but things appear to be changing for the better. “Three of the DSO’s highest-profile donors have combined to give the orchestra an unusual $1.5-million challenge grant designed to broaden the orchestra’s base of support.” The orchestra intends to use the matching challenge as an opportunity to cultivate a new generation of donors who can stabilize the organization in the long term.

In a growing trend, artists are bypassing established recording labels and selling their music in non-traditional outlets. “Bypassing the record labels, James Taylor has sold 1 million copies of his new holiday album by offering it next to the greeting cards at Hallmark Gold Crown Stores.”

San Francisco Opera is getting close to naming a successor to general director Pamela Rosenberg. Who might that person be? “Ideally, the search committee will recognize the tremendous strides the company has taken under Rosenberg’s leadership and select a general director who won’t roll back those advances. The task, instead, is to retain the artistic and theatrical excitement of the curtailed Rosenberg era while expanding its appeal to a wider and more varied audience base.”

What’s happened to Christmas music? “The proliferation of novelty tunes such as Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer suggest that Christmas as a public event has become so thoroughly commercial as to defy attempts to treat it non-ironically. Those who try end up producing songs that sound like advertising jingles.”

Simon Rattle has had a storybook career as one of the world’s great conductors. “But lately it’s not all been rosy. In Berlin, there’s one prominent dissenting voice in the shape of prominent music critic Klaus Geitel himself, who declares roundly that Rattle is the weakest musical director of the Berlin Philharmonic he’s ever seen. The recent recordings of the nine Beethoven symphonies left many reviewers puzzled by its odd mix of “period” and mainstream styles, and the Fidelio recording had some curious vocal casting. In the UK, the dissenters are more numerous…”

For years, two Melbourne opera companies have been competitors. Now they’re joining forces. “The two local companies, once bitter rivals – Melbourne Opera and Melbourne City Opera – are merging under the name, VicOpera. They also declared that they want to co-operate with the Sydney-based national company, Opera Australia. This simplifies the situation, but leaves several issues unresolved.”

What does new music need to win the hearts of listeners? “Decades ago, composer Pierre Boulez predicted that audiences would subscribe to music-generating computers much the way they now do to their favorite orchestra. Guess why that hasn’t happened: no warm bodies. Instead, I hear current composers translating the shape and timbre of electronic sound to, say, the live acoustic string quartet.”

Sitar master Ravi Shankar says he’s concerned for the future of Indian classical music. India’s musicians should not expect support from the government, he says, but corporate and indivisual support is essential. “After some great performers in the field of Indian classical music we have had promising talents, however, the programmes which new talents get to perform are not good.”