Category: music

The massive renovation of London’s Royal Festival Hall is being billed as the city’s last, best chance at gaining a truly world-class classical music facility. But in the short term, the one-year period (beginning summer 2005) when the hall will be completely closed is causing major headaches for the two London orchestras which make their home there. “Viable alternatives are thin on the ground. The only other full-scale classical concert hall in London is the Barbican hall, but that has a busy schedule with its own resident band, the London Symphony Orchestra, and a host of visiting ensembles.”

Norman Lebrecht checks in on Philadelphia and finds an historic orchestra in disrepair. Could it be music director Christophe Eschenbach? “While it only takes one conductor to make a great orchestra, one misjudged transfer is enough to secure relegation. Philadelphia, like many football teams at this time of year, finds itself facing a very long drop. The testimony of my CD shelves suggests that there is no return from orchestral oblivion.”

“The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra expects to increase its projected deficit for the 2003-2004 season from $1.6 million to $2 million, administrative officials said yesterday. The $400,000 increase would push the orchestra’s accumulated debt to about $3.2 million. Driving the red ink are shortfalls in ticket sales for the BSO’s own concerts and presentations of other performers at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, and a shortfall in contributions to the annual fund.”

Columbia University’s Miller Theatre has found a successful format. “In most classical concerts, if listeners hear any music by contemporary composers, it’s in small doses, which may be for the best. In a mixed program, a composer’s style must quickly declare itself, both on its own terms and in relation to the styles of the other composers on the bill. The problem is that a composer discovered in a mixed program may not turn up again for months or even years. Single-composer concerts allow for a better assessment, but they are risky. A composer can be like a cat with a spool of yarn. Having found an intriguing idea, he or she may explore it from different perspectives through a dozen works or a dozen years. How well a handful of pieces based on the same notion — a rhythmic device, say, or a way of changing harmony — will work depends on the composer’s inventiveness.”

In Finland, music is practically the national language. Children are frequently taught to read notes before they can read words, and the government pours money into national music and arts education at a rate which would cause U.S. lawmakers to choke on their tax cuts. The result of all this national emphasis on music is clear: Finland, with a population comparable to the state of Minnesota, is dominating the international music scene, and “classical music has little of the elitist aura that tends to be the case in the United States.”

“It was the quietest concert of the year and perhaps the noisiest. For long stretches of the Tune(In))) the Kitchen, a four-hour electronic music gathering on Thursday night that was as conceptual as its title, the only sounds in the Kitchen came from people strolling around and sporadic conversations. But the airwaves in the room were alive with abstract sounds. Four simultaneous performances and a channel of video soundtracks were broadcast to the FM radios and headphones of the audience. The musicians worked at tabletop setups, never knowing who was listening.”

American conductor Gerard Schwarz says his choice of music when he first arrived as music director of the Royal Liverpool Orchestra may have scared off some audiences. Players of the orchestra recently voted not to renew Schwarz’s contract with the orchestra. “In my first season’s programme, I didn’t think I was stretching the audiences. Obviously, everyone doesn’t agree with me.”

“The prevalence of swearwords in modern pop has led to the rise of ‘radio friendly’ versions of singles, in which obscenities are muted, leaving only either the initial consonant or an isolated vowel. When swearing is the very point of a record, this approach results in a quite bizarre stop-start patchwork of noise and silence. Perhaps this is a cunning marketing ploy.”

“By using licenses, the labels and their download sites are secretly transforming music into a service—something to which you subscribe, and about which they can change the rules any time they want. But it’s a particularly crappy service. Who wants to ‘own’ this sort of pseudo-property, these annoying, stubborn, mulelike music files? In contrast, a music-streaming site advertises itself as a service, with an entirely different sort of consumer logic and much more satisfying results.”

Workers at a UK opera company have been banned from using the theatrical greeting ‘darling’. The English National Opera confirmed they had issued staff new guidelines on using the term of endearment. They fear use of the word ‘darling’ could constitute sexual harassment in the workplace.”