Category: music

There is no ensemble more tightly connected than a string quartet, so when a major quartet loses one of its members, as Canada’s St. Lawrence String Quartet did two years ago, finding a replacement who is both musically and personally compatible with the rest of the group can be a nearly impossible task. The St. Lawrence thought they’d found their new cellist, only to discover after a year that the match wasn’t quite made in heaven. Now, the group is trying to fill the hole again, and American cellist Chris Costanza is “[fitting] in as naturally as if he had been playing with the others since the beginning.”

“Its 9,990 pipes were designed to resonate to the ends of the Empire and have been painstakingly restored in a three-year, £1.7 million project – but Britain’s largest organ fell silent last night. Royal Albert Hall bosses confirmed today that the mighty instrument, known as The Voice of Jupiter, suffered an electrical fault before an evening BBC Proms performance. Technicians were today bidding to determine the cause of the mystery problem, which set in following a successful afternoon recital.”

A few former board members of the now-defunct Florida Philharmonic are still furious with local critic Lawrence Johnson for several articles he wrote pointedly criticizing the organization’s management and board. In fact, a recent letter to the editor of Johnson’s paper accuses the critic of actually having contributed to the orchestra’s demise by pointing out failings rather than rallying the public to support the floundering ensemble. Johnson isn’t buying it: “Overpraising mediocrity subverts that [critical] duty and serves only to reward lazy or inept artistic leadership. When the third-rate is praised to the skies, there’s zero incentive for those organizations to ever strive to improve.”

The New York Philharmonic travels a lot, even by major orchestra standards, but this summer, one could forgive Chicagoans for mistaking the Phil for their own orchestra. This month, the New Yorkers’ radio broadcasts have been added to Chicago radio, a sign that negotiations with the Chicago Symphony’s musicians for a radio presence are at an impasse. And this past weekend, the Phil made its first appearance in five years at the CSO’s own Ravinia festival, showing off the much-hailed collaboration between the notoriously conductor-unfriendly New York musicians and guest conductor David Robertson, who is considered a strong candidate to be the orchestra’s next music director.

Musicians who spend their careers in the pit of an opera house or theater are something of a different breed than those who get to solo in front of thousands or take repeated bows as members of a symphony orchestra. For one thing, the players in the New York Philharmonic aren’t generally found reading novels during the performance to stave off boredom…

It was more than a quarter-century ago when some of the brightest lights of the rock ‘n roll world – including Janis Joplin, Buddy Guy, and the Grateful Dead – boarded a train in Toronto and proceeded to ride it 2,100 miles across Canada, performing festival-style shows in three cities and, more importantly, capturing the whole trip on film. “The shows for the paying customers… were terrific, but the real action took place during the impromptu jam sessions and inebriated socializing on the train.” Thirty-four years later, the sights and sounds of the Festival Express are finally getting a public viewing, after decades of legal battles over copyrights and unpaid bills.

Proving that major symphony orchestras don’t have a lock on serious conflict between musicians and boards, the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies (GTCYS) are currently embroiled in an embarrassingly public conflict over the attempted firing of the organization’s chief conductor and artistic director. Dr. Jean Montes, a “charismatic, 33-year-old Haitian” who was hired last fall to lead the top GTCYS orchestra, is quite popular with his students and their parents, but apparently quite difficult for his fellow staffers to get along with. Last night, nearly 300 Montes supporters showed up at a hastily called meeting to urge the board to reconsider his dismissal.

Duncan McGhie, the chairman of Scottish Opera, has quit in protest of the Scottish Executive’s treatment of the company. The board McGhie has led, which also oversees Scottish Ballet, is slated to be disbanded under the terms of the Executive’s much-criticized plan to keep the opera company afloat. The resignation is only the latest high-profile protest against the plan.

It was 1966 when the fiery iconoclast Pierre Boulez, who had once suggested solving “the problem of opera” by blowing up all opera houses, came to Bayreuth to conduct Wagner’s Parsifal. “Famously, he conducted the quickest and least pompous Parsifal ever seen at Bayreuth. This year, he’s back [at Bayreuth] with Parsifal after a gap of 35 years… To conduct Parsifal as a slow, grandiose celebration of religiosity could all too easily turn into a proto-nationalist ritual, so it’s no wonder Boulez wanted to strip away these connotations.”

Pirated music is now a $4.5 billion industry each year says the International Federation of Phonographic Industries. “It is estimated 35% of all CDs sold in the world are pirate copies.”