Category: music

Carnegie Hall’s decision to hire Clive Gillinson as its next executive director is a clear sign that the venue wanted a leader whose focus would be on the artistic side of the operation. Not that Gillinson doesn’t have fundraising ability (he does), but he has been most celebrated for his collaborations with conductors and soloists, and his willingness to work with difficult personalities to develop engaging and original programming ideas. Still, Carnegie had to be impressed with Mr. Gillinson’s budget-balancing skills as well: when he took over the London Symphony, the orchestra was nearly bankrupt. Today, it is the UK’s most financially stable ensemble.

Natalie Dessay isn’t your average opera star. Ask her about the challenges of the profession and she won’t speak of the difficulties of melisma, or the necessity of being fluent in multiple languages. Rather, Dessay believes that an opera singer’s primary job is to communicate the emotions of a character to the audience: in other words, to act. It’s a quality that is sorely lacking in most opera singers, and grossly undervalued by directors. “Dessay even says with diva-worthy bravado that she refuses to return to the Metropolitan Opera unless it agrees to mount a new production for her – a desire born not of vanity but her unrelenting desire to deliver compelling theater.”

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a fan of classical music, pop, rock, hip-hop, or whatever. If you attend live performances, you are in ever greater danger of having your evening out ruined by… The Concert Fool. “There is no escaping the Concert Fool. He (and every once in a while, she) is the chronic carbuncle on the rear of rock. The Concert Fool is either unglued by music, or drunk, or unaware of the invisible line that separates civilization from anarchy. Or aware of the line but past caring about it.”

A doctor from East Essex, England, has donated a box containing 88 works by prominent composers including Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg to Caius College in Cambridge. The contents of the box, which sat undiscovered until Dr. Philip Marriott inherited it recently, could be worth millions of dollars. The college is expected to sell the manuscripts to raise money.

John van Rhein writes that a unifying idea in classical music just isn’t as important as a unifying commitment to bring the form back to prominence: “Rather than worry about Big Ideas and where they’re coming from, let’s create the societal conditions that allow many schools of composition to flourish and composers to do their best work… Being reasonably conversant with classical music, its traditions and history used to be considered one of the marks of an educated person. No longer… No wonder our symphony orchestras are going in for spoon-feeding [audiences.] Daniel Barenboim said it best: ‘Music has lost a large part of its place in society.’ Full stop.”

London has never been able to alleviate the terrible traffic bottleneck at Vauxhall Cross on the Thames embankment. But a choir group believes that music might be the next best thing to free-flowing traffic. All day today, groups of eight singers will be serenading frustrated drivers trapped at the intersection with an 18th-century work supposedly once performed on the spot. “The performance is being recorded, complete with squealing brakes, horns and swearing motorists, and will be played tonight in the tranquillity of Tate Britain.”

Conductor James Judd’s contract as the new music director of the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra has been terminated a year before he was to officially take up the position. Neither side is saying what caused the split. Judd, who is currently music director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, also led the now-defunct Florida Philharmonic before resigning during that orchestra’s much-publicized battle between musicians and management.

A reader responds to ArtsJournal’s newest blog by questioning the very foundation of the critical conversation. “While it is interesting to see what name critics apply to certain groups of individual composers, many of those composers eschew the categories anyway, preferring to simply do their own work and get on with it.” Alex Ross, for one, is stung a bit by the critique, but says such reminders may be for the best: “I feel as though casual posts are being scrutinized as if carved in marble. I guess, though, it’s always good for critics to get smacked around a little. Profound, mysterious irony: some of us don’t take criticism very well.”

“Ambitious plans for an open-air production of Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ in Seville, Spain, and for a music festival of which it was to be the centerpiece, were postponed indefinitely Wednesday. Organizers said they were unable to find a top-level conductor to replace Lorin Maazel, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, who earlier this week withdrew from the project on medical grounds.”

If there was ever any doubt that a conductor can revitalize a struggling ensemble, Louis Langrée is putting it to rest with his debut this summer at the helm of New York’s Mostly Mozart festival. In retrospect, says Anthony Tommassini, the fault for the festival’s notorious struggles in recent years must be laid at the feet of Langrée’s predecessor, Gerard Schwarz. “It’s sad to have to say this so definitively, but Mr. Schwarz, though a tenacious defender of the basic concept of the festival over his 17-year-tenure as director, was just wrong for the job. He lacked a compelling artistic vision and was too limited as a conductor.”