Category: music

Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, has criticized the Scottish government for its treatment of Scottish Opera. ” ‘If a European country of the size of Scotland cannot support a musical life that encompasses an opera company, that is very serious. It would be ‘unimaginable’ for comparable countries such as Denmark not to have major orchestras, opera houses, ballet companies, as a central part of their national existence.’ Mr MacGregor said the fate of the opera company was not simply a matter of funding, but had elements of a Scottish Calvinist tradition in which music was not seen to be as important as literature.”

La Scala opera house is scheduled to reopen December 7. But the construction is still a long way from being finished. “La Scala’s $67 million renovation added precious storage space for sets which will allow the opera house to mount more productions and performances to meet growing demand for seats.”

For the first time, last year American music has outsold UK music in the UK.”American artists sold 45.4% of albums compared with the UK’s 42.3%, the British Phonographic Industry said. The BPI said the figures could be explained by huge-selling albums by US singers Justin Timberlake and Norah Jones – against scant UK competition.”

Is it time to dump the MP3 format for music? “In order to keep file sizes down MP3 encoding loses a lot of data, a lot more than modern formats, and this shows in the quality of the listening experience. The way it compresses files and plays them back means that the music too often sounds awful on anything but tinny laptop speakers or cheap earphones. We cannot let some sort of techno-nostalgia get in the way here. There is no reason to defend MP3, no reason why everyone who currently listens to MP3s stored on their hard drive should not move to something significantly better.”

Why did the well-regarded Miami String Quartet give up its Florida residency to move to become quartet-in-residence at Kent State? There are various stories. But one thing is clear, writes Laurence Johnson: “Though a much less public affair than the bankruptcy of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, the loss of the Miami String Quartet is a comparable blow to the local music scene.”

“The efforts of Stratford Summer Music to bring the Axelrod Stradivarius String Quartet to Canada for a series of concerts have fallen through — and have left the Stratford concert presenter and Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution pointing fingers at each other.” The quartet plays on instruments worth $50 million, and the Smithsonian has clamped down on how often it allows them to travel in recent years. What actually caused the breakdown in this case is still murky, but the connection of the instruments to now-incarcerated philanthropist Herbert Axelrod is high on the list of speculative hang-ups.

This week, the Juilliard School, possibly the world’s most famous training ground for classical musicians, will put on a benefit concert featuring… um, Elton John? “The benefit is only one of the renowned music school’s latest fund-raising strategies, part of an effort to find new donors to support a major capital and endowment campaign estimated at around $290 million. The funds will be used to expand the campus and increase the scholarship money available for students.”

It was a good season for classical music in Philadelphia, but there are more than a few storm clouds on the horizon. The city’s music critics go over the good (“Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia music director Ignat Solzhenitsyn went several extra miles with Shostakovich’s darker-than-dark Symphony No. 14”), the bad (“the elimination of the city’s arts and culture office by Mayor [John] Street”), and the profoundly worrisome (“Now that most listeners have tired of talking about the acoustics of the Kimmel… let’s not forget that the city spent $265 million to build a great orchestra hall and didn’t get one.”)

The New York Philharmonic, battling deficits and deep into contract negotiations with its musicians, has canceled a tour of Europe scheduled for September, saying that the Spanish presenters couldn’t guarantee the necessary fees to keep the tour in the black. This is the third time in the last calendar year that the orchestra has canceled a tour, but Philharmonic officials insist that a fall 2004 tour to Japan and South Korea is not in danger.

Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio is supposed to be a comedy. Comedies, as a rule, do not include “scenes of copulation, fellatio, rape, torture and mutilation.” Comedies do not end with the protagonists littering the stage as corpses. And yet, this is the much-criticized approach being taken to Seraglio by Berlin’s Komische Oper. People are walking out of the production in droves, and newspapers are braying about misuse of public funds. So why even attempt such a bloody and controversial production? Well, every show thus far has sold out. “It could also be that shock treatment is just what’s needed to jolt some outmoded art forms back to life.”