Reporter Michael Cooper joins the Pulitzer winner in the search for shears (“The big thing is the sound. I’m not really looking for how they cut.”) for her new piece about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, Fire in my mouth, written for the New York Philharmonic and The Crossing and arriving on stage this week. — The New York Times
Category: music
Why A Flashy New Concert Hall Might Be Just What London Needs Right Now
In a country grappling with austerity and Brexit, a plan for a 2,000-seat “center for music” seems to hark back to the more confident, stable time in the early 2000s when the Tate Modern opened. Indeed, there have been claims that it could do for the city’s classical music scene what the new Tate did for London’s standing as a center for modern and contemporary art. – CityLab
A Professional Mercenary Explains Why ‘The More Horrors I Witness, The Deeper I Cling To Opera’
Sean McFate: “For a man in my profession, there’s much to love. Like war, things usually go horribly wrong in opera. For instance, take Verdi’s La forza del destino.” But it’s more than that: “Opera is my lodestone in the darkness. Its beauty offsets war’s ugliness, and without such balance, we slip into numbness and eventual insanity, robbed of our humanity.” — Quartz
Why The Sydney Opera House Has Put Dogs On Staff
No, they aren’t audience engagement personnel, at least not in the usual sense. The Opera House has a couple of very popular places to eat outdoors, and the place is right on the harbor — so there are plenty of brazen seagulls ready to steal your food. Management has finally hit on the right way to keep the greedy fowl at bay. — Time Out Sydney
Chopin Was The Quintessential Composer For The Piano. But Was He A Great Composer?
Alan Walker’s Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times, which came out in the U.S. last October, is the first full-scale English-language primary-source biography of Chopin.1Best known for his definitive three-volume biography of Franz Liszt, Walker has done an equally thorough and thoughtful job of recounting the life of Poland’s foremost composer, of whose music he is an unstinting admirer. – Commentary
Using Virtual Reality To Design New Musical Instruments For The Disabled
The leader and a researcher from the Performance Without Barriers project write about how, always working with disabled performers themselves, they’ve adapted VR technology to augment the instrument of a blind clarinetist and create an entirely new instrument for a musician with cerebral palsy. — The Conversation
UK To Get Third National Classical Radio Station
“Scala Radio, a station designed to have a more casual and youthful approach than its established rivals [BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM], with a focus on film scores and work by modern composers alongside the likes of Mozart and Holst,” will debut March 4 on DAB radio and online. — The Guardian
Proposed New London Concert Hall Makes A Bold Statement
The £288 million it will cost will all come from private donations, and the hall’s backers know critics will say now is not the time for such an expensive building. “Now is never the time to do anything new,” said Sir Simon Rattle, the LSO’s music director and public face of the project. “This is not something that we are trying to do with public money, this is something we are attempting to do ourselves and we are trying to make a difference.” – The Guardian
Eye-Popping Plans For London’s New Center For Music
Images show a place of open foyers dotted with informal performance spaces, where mezzanines, stairs and escalators create a vertical parade of places to see and be seen. Architect Diller describes these open lobbies as “the theatre of the theatre … informal by day and very glamorous by night”. – The Guardian
The Promise Of Esa-Pekka Salonen And The San Francisco Symphony (A Sneak Preview)
The classical field is now waiting to see what Mr. Salonen will do in his career’s full maturity. He has announced a benevolent little think-tank army of artists who will be helping him, including Nico Muhly, Esperanza Spalding and Julia Bullock, and their plans will germinate through next year, as the orchestra turns to celebrating Mr. Thomas’s final season. – The New York Times