Category: music

Dennis Hanthorn, general director of Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera Company, is leaving to take the top job at Atlanta Opera. “Hanthorn said Atlanta offers ‘a bigger pond to play in.’ The metropolitan population is more than 4 million, compared with Milwaukee’s 1.3 million. The Atlanta Opera’s budget, Hanthorn said, was $6.8 million to Florentine’s $3.7 million. Atlanta staged four operas vs. the Florentine’s three. But the Atlanta Opera has a debt of about $1 million; the Florentine has been in the black for 11 years.”

What’s the Next Big Idea in music? It’s a flawed question, to be sure. Just asking it betrays a bias about how the history of music works. Twelve of America’s best music critics debate the question in a new AJ Blog called Critical Conversation…

Facing a $300 million bill to renovate Avery Fisher Hall, the orchestra is experimenting with a stage that would put the orchestra in the center of the auditorium surrounded by seats. “The experiment put the orchestra out much closer to the middle of the hall than ever before, allowing it to play under a higher ceiling. Onstage the musicians play in what is essentially a box set back under a lower roof than the one over the audience.”

The Royal Albert Hall organ is a magnificent beast. “It has 9,999 pipes, 147 stops, weighs 150 tons, and at its loudest sounds like a jet taking off. It is a quite magnificent beast that the Royal Albert Hall has just spent £1.7m restoring to all its Victorian majesty. Which is why there was a palpable air of embarrassment hanging over the hall yesterday, because on Saturday the damn thing wouldn’t work: not a squeak from one of its much-vaunted 9,999 pipes.”

London’s Royal Festival Hall has acoustics that aren’t up to much. Now the hall is to get a £71 million refurbishment that will guarantee that it has the ‘finest and most flexible’ sound in the capital by 2007.”

“A storm of boos greeted the opening operas at both the Salzburg and the Bayreuth Festivals last weekend. High ticket prices — as much as 360 euros ($437) — in Salzburg and stratospheric expectations in Bayreuth didn’t help. When all was said and done, when singers and conductors had been politely applauded, the direction teams marched onto stage and the audiences responded with the verbal equivalent of the rotten tomato.”

The disappearance of decent election music is a sad reality in this age of artistic angst. In previous generations, well-crafted campaign songs were as plentiful as gas-guzzling four-door sedans and helpful service from government employees. Democrats could adopt catchy little tunes such as Happy Days Are Here Again (Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932) or High Hopes (John F. Kennedy in 1960) and be assured that nothing in the impossibly peppy lyrics would inspire impressionable youth to burn down their school or have unprotected sex on a Ferris wheel. At some point in the late 1960s, it was no longer commercially viable for most mainstream musicians to be happy, and campaign-worthy songs became an endangered species.”

When CDs were first introduced, they were advertised as almost indestructable. Turns out that isn’t true. “CD deterioration may start with a smattering of pinpricks or what appears to be rust creeping inwards from the edge of the disc. Certain tracks jump or emit clicking noises. Eventually, the CD loses all data and is better used as a shiny coaster.”

As the recent case involving copyright and the recording label Hyperion shows, copyright of music is an issue fraught with peril. The question is: who is helped by the current law? It would appear that everyone loses all around…

The Walkman is 25 years old. Norman Lebrecht says it transformed (and cheapened) music. “Its advantages were many, mostly unforseen. Actors learned their lines by Walkman on the bus into rehearsal. Splenetic executives used it for lunchtime meditation. I once heard Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony on a vertical Alpine train as a thunderstorm crashed all around. In unforgettable settings, music acquired unsuspected dimensions. But these benefits were soon outweighed by its corrosive effects.”