Category: music

The new download chart measuring music downloaded on the net debuts in the UK. “The countdown, broadcast on BBC Radio 1, is an attempt to take account of the thousands of tracks that are bought legally from online sites such as iTunes and Napster. But if supporters of online music were hoping it would herald a break in the dominance of the music industry majors, they were disappointed:” all the music in the Top 20 was produced by major labels.

The Salzburg Festival has a difficult summer. It “was the last century’s most illustrious summer camp for musical and theatrical talent, but seemed more than ever trapped between the glories of the past and an uncertain future in more competitive times. In the years since the death in 1989 of Herbert von Karajan, who ruled over the proceedings as if by divine right, Salzburg’s artistic focus has been blurred.”

Jürgen Flimm has been appointed as new artistic director of the Salzburg Festival. “Flimm, who is head of the festival’s theater section and an internationally known opera and theater director, will succeed the composer Peter Ruzicka, who earlier this year said he did not want a second five-year term.”

James MacMillan is one of Scotland’s most successful composers. But in recent years, besides his busy composing schedule, he has developed a whole other career conducting. This leads some critics to wondering if “all this conducting – he’s also lined up with orchestras in Japan and Europe – is diluting his compositional output, or if it might even be a way for him to deliberately lighten the compositional load.” There is some evidence…

The Grand Theatre in Leeds is getting a £31.5 million makeover. “By mid 2006, Opera North, whose new production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice opens at the Edinburgh Festival tomorrow, will have the home it deserves in the city which sees more opera performances than any other outside London.”

A new British documentary suggests that Mozart may have suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome. “Tourette’s is a constant battle between chaos and control, having a compulsion and trying to control it, and that translates into music. Mozart let his music run off in chaotic directions but then always brought it back under control.”

Seattle’s KING-FM radio has been one of America’s few commercial classical music radio success stories. but in the past year the station has said goodbye to some long time hosts and some listeners are wondering what’s going on with their station…

For a year, a young opera entrepreneur has been trying to set up a small company in Winston-Salem, hoping it would become the nation’s “premier African-American opera-training company.” But a series of missed commitments, broken promises and misunderstandings suggest the fledgling enterprise might never get off the ground…

In Detroit a new opera is taking shape. Composed by Richard Danielpour with a libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, “Margaret Garner” is undergoing workshops where it is being refined…

For 25 years Solomon Volkov’s purported memoir of Shostakovich has been debated by critics. Some are tired of the debate, and look for the book to convey greater truths. But this isn’t right, writes Alex Ross: “It isn’t enough for the memoirs of a major artist to have an ambience of authenticity. A book that subjected Picasso or Joyce to such manipulations would never have made it to publication. For some reason, though, music is treated as a childish realm in which fables serve as well as facts.”