Category: music

This week the BBC televises the finals of its BBC Young Musician of the Year. The live broadcast is a rarity. “In an age when the competition’s viewing figures have plummeted from 20 million in its heyday to an anticipated 1.5 million this weekend, what kind of future can the winner look forward to? Is classical music living on death row? Is it really a tougher place to be than ever before? And what pitfalls lie in wait for an unsuspecting young musician suddenly catapulted to fame?”

Congressional investigators say they’ll question the New Jersey Symphony on its purchase of 30 rare string instruments. “This transaction raises the question of why someone would sell a multimillion-dollar instrument collection for what he claims is less than half of its appraised value, and what tax benefits he may have received in return.”

“The music industry grew into a $40 billion sector at its peak in 1996. That figure has since fallen by almost 25%. During the last eight years, there has been a drop in global earnings of almost 25% – which record companies blame on massive counterfeiting and downloading music from the internet. Are we therefore looking at the death throes of a once invincible industry?”

Poor Scottish Opera. In death throws over funding provided by the government, the company is in dancer of having to lay off staff and reduce operations. Now, “the company – providing few details – confirmed that it aims to spend more than a third of any future budget on education and “outreach” programmes. The opera is funded with a £7.5 million annual grant from the Scottish Arts Council. It currently spends about 11 per cent of its core budget on such programmes.”

When the Colorado Symphony hired 47-year-old Jeffrey Kahane to succeed Marin Alsop as music director, it signaled a distinct change in the way the orchestra will present itself to the community. Alsop was a virtual unknown when she came to Denver, and as her star rose in the wider music world, the CSO’s name came along for the ride. But Kahane is no up-and-coming youngster: he’s an established name in the industry, a much-respected pianist, and an artist in the prime of his career. Those may seem like excellent reasons to hire a music director, but at a time when so many other orchestras are looking for the next big thing in conducting, Colorado seems to have made something of a safe choice.

Just as certain smells can make you salivate and certain visual images can inspire certain feelings, music and sound have the power to trigger specific reactions in the human brain. A biotech company is hoping to take financial advantage of that fact by “integrating neurosensory algorithms into music to create a certain mood and evoke more intense responses from listeners. The company hopes to market its compositions to the movie industry and video game companies.”

The New Jersey Symphony thought that philanhropist Herbert Axelrod was nuts when he offered to sell them a $50 million collection of instruments for $18 million, but they certainly never thought that, by agreeing to the sale, they would be running afoul of the United States Congress. But now, with Axelrod hiding out in Cuba from charges of tax evasion, “Senate investigators are questioning whether the instrument sale is representative of a fast-growing tax dodge in which wealthy donors inflate the value of gifts — from rare violins to paintings, period furnishings and even fossils — abetted by docile appraisers, weak tax enforcement and cultural institutions with little interest in making waves.”

Sixteen-year-old violinist Nicola Benedetti has won the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year award. “She triumphed over four other finalists at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and became the first Scot to win the competition. Nicola began playing the violin at the age of four and left school aged 10 to attend the Yehudi Menuhin School for gifted musicians in Surrey.”

For a long time now, many pianists have suffered from a bewildering lack of personality. Oh, the notes were (usually) all there, and the technical prowess could astonish. But too many pianists sounded the same. Tim Mangan notes that four young pianists are distinguishing themselves with their individualistic playing.

Conductor David Zinman has long been the world’s greatest unknown conductor, the guy whose commitment to contemporary American composers and less-than-tactful way of getting things done kept him a guest rather than a resident with the world’s top orchestras. A man of principles, Zinman relinquished his conductor laureate title at Baltimore because current management hadn’t sustained modern American music programming. Then, almost stealthily, the budget-priced Zinman/Zurich recording of Beethoven symphonies on the Arte Nova label – acclaimed for the crisp manner of period performance, but with the “oomph” of conventional instruments – infiltrated the music world with sales that now top 1 million discs. Now, the unknown conductor and the provincial orchestra are thinking about recording all the Brahms and Mahler symphonies.”