Category: music

BBC Three is betting that last year’s flash-mob trend is still alive, at least in the ranks of opera lovers, whom it plans to lure to a performance this fall. “Flashmob – The Opera will see opera singers and 65 musicians joined by an impromptu crowd of people who will be alerted to the event by text message.”

Which are the UK’s worst orchestras? wonders Norman Lebrecht. “Competition has never been so fierce. Beyond London lies a marshland of orchestral mediocrity. With the gleaming exceptions of Manchester’s Halle where Mark Elder has wrought wonders, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra which has adjusted under Sakari Oramo to post-Rattle quietude, the rest of the civic and regional bands are in varying states of disrepair, the legacy of a generation of industrial failure.”

The Bonn Opera House has been damaged by a fire. “The blaze started in the roof, where welding works were being carried out, authorities have said. There were no reported casualties but the fire and smoke plus water from firefighters also caused considerable damage to the stage and wings.”

Taken on an August morning in Harlem in 1958, the image known as “the greatest photograph in the history of jazz” is the sole focus of Harlem.org. Visitors to the site are invited to learn in detail about the photo and the jazz musicians who populate it: Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus and 54 others.

“In a move that has shocked the opera world, the music director of the Welsh National Opera has resigned with immediate effect. At 26, the Ossetian conductor Tugan Sokhiev was the youngest musical director of a major national company anywhere in the world, except for Mikko Franck, the 25-year-old at the helm of Finnish National Opera.”

John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” is 40 years old. “Revered wherever jazz is spoken, recorded (at least in part) by no less than Wynton Marsalis and Carlos Santana with John McLaughlin, praised by critics, dissected by scholars, rehearsed by young tenor saxophonists who dream of greatness, the indelible recording long since has earned a sacred place in American culture. So much, in fact, that musicians often hesitate when asked to perform this music publicly, for fear of presuming to step into the shadow of a jazz deity who addressed life and afterlife, man and God, in an oft-shattering recording.”

The Chicago Symphony and its musicians have taken a little time off from their contract talks. “Contract negotiations between CSO musicians and management are rarely easy, and they typically go down to the wire, but these talks could be among the toughest in recent memory. Like many American orchestras, the CSO has been running deficits and watching the size of its audiences stagnate if not shrink. CSO management is pushing to save money; CSO musicians are pushing to avoid losing too much ground.”

“One wonders how much discussions of new music have to do with the classical music world today: a collection of fundamentally conservative institutions in which predominantly old music is presented and received in reverential, churchly silence and new music, for better or worse, is too often something to sit through. Many critics deplore this situation and are deeply invested in encouraging contemporary performances from classical institutions. In essence, we’re demanding of classical music that it be a living art. But focusing as we do on the larger institutions, we’re not necessarily keeping abreast of the latest trends in composition ourselves.”

What’s next in classical music? Kyle MacMillan suspects the “next big thing is going to come in how classical music – in some cases, all music – is perceived and understood. Already causing a huge transformation is our unprecedented ability to log on to Amazon.com and buy recordings of music from virtually anywhere in the world and any period of the past 1,000 years. This widespread availability of recordings and the accompanying reach of the Internet are helping spread classical music well beyond its usual Western confines.”