Category: music

“In Britain, these days, opera in the garden is all the rage. If you own a country house with grounds, you turn everything upside down in July and August to stage a home-grown Götterdämmerung (or for the fainter-hearted, Barber of Seville). And patrons, ideally in evening dress, picnic grandly on your lawns during intermissions… The phenomenon feeds on fantasy… the proprietors imagine they’ve traveled back in time, as 18th-century princelings with private courts and orchestras at their disposal, while they reinvent the Arcadian dream. Not that they readily admit it.”

It’s well-documented that the conductors best loved by musicians are not always the ones who get the best results from their orchestras. So when the Toronto Symphony hired former Tokyo Quartet violinist Peter Oundjian to be their next music director, William Littler needed convincing of the wisdom of the decision. But after following Oundjian around North America for a week and talking with members of various orchestras, the critic admits that there may be something to the idea of a musician leading musicians. “There is an unfailing politeness in the way he addresses the players and a consistently high energy level in his conducting.”

From an operatic standpoint, Shostakovich’s The Nose is a bit of an odd duck, “an absurdist portrayal of a man whose nose departs from his face, runs around town disguised as a bureaucrat, and makes hash of prerevolution Russia’s strict class distinctions.” Musically, the work is a brutal exercise in control, featuring among other things a ten-part chorale and a double canon. (“Imagine Noel Coward patter songs played at warp speed and thrown into a blender.”) But after decades of relative obscurity, The Nose is starting to see some more performances, and the Kirov Opera has adopted it as something of a cause.

Chicago’s Steans Institute for Young Artists may not be as famous a professional training ground as Tanglewood, but it has been nurturing young musicians in a semi-professional setting for 15 years. But while the program has come far from its humble origins as a chamber music seminar, Andrew Patner says that the organizers may need to reconsider some of their programming decisions, if they’re truly aiming to educate their participants, rather than simply to bore their audience.

Five of the 30 rare violins sold by Herbert Axelrod last year to the New Jersey Symphony might not be what he purported them to be, suggests an investigation. “They are old instruments, certainly, dating at least to the 19th century. But, the experts say, it is likely they were crafted by someone other than the famed violin-makers to whom they are attributed. In short, the experts say, they are probably fakes, worth a fraction of their appraised value.”

“A former executive of the American Federation of Musicians has been charged with embezzling at least $400,000 from the union and spending some of it on clothes, jewelry, a trip to Cuba and a bottle of expensive champagne for Fidel Castro.”

Liverpool is scrambling to deal with two cultural setbacks as the city gears up for its gig as European Capital of Culture in 2008. The Liverpool Philhramonic recently decided against renewing music director Gerard Schwarz’s contract. It “follows hard on the heels of the city’s decision against going ahead with Will Alsop’s controversial ‘fourth grace’ on the Pier Head. The Philharmonic now faces a race against time to find a new music director who can be in place to take over the baton in the 2006-07 season.”

The Washington National Opera finished its season with a $2 million surplus. But it was a tough season for patrons. The company spent the first half of the season in temporaryt quarters at Constitution Hall While the Opera House at the Kennedy Center was undergoign renovation. “Opera patrons, who paid up to $285 a seat, said parking was murder, the bathrooms were remote, and some sections of the hall were a sweat box. The longer the opera stayed in Constitution Hall, the more operagoers stayed home.”

With several orchestras seemingly ready to sign on to use the Concert Companion handheld device, interest seems to be building. “The newer devices have more features: They show video from the stage with up-close images of the conductor’s and musicians’ faces, and they contain program notes like those traditionally included in the concert playbill.”

What are today’s Big Ideas in music? Well, before you can start identifying them, you have to first decide whether music needs any Big Ideas. Some of America’s classical music critics struggle over definitions…