Category: music

Lars Vogt is a pianist who seems to believe the impossible. “Power, he says, ‘has nothing to do with the force of hitting a key. You see some pianists attack; that’s what makes the sound ugly and not resonant,’ he says, demonstrating with a welter of loud but indistinct notes. ‘If the fingers are very close to the keys, you always have a feeling of drawing the sound out – rather than pushing the sound into the key. You can be a lot more intense in the playing while still making the piano sing.’ Sit down and try to do it yourself, and you realize that much of Vogt’s success comes from his head rather than his hands. He imagines the sound and wills it into being.”

“Scottish Opera has, for reasons hard to discern, acquired pariah status. No one will speak up for it. Less than a year after the triumphant conclusion of its Ring Cycle, generally held to be one of the great post-war Wagner productions, it is cast in the role of profligate – elitist, unpopular, and irrelevant. Apparently unwilling to conform to the demands of contemporary cultural policy, it has retreated into the ranks of the untouchables, tarred with the great New Labour crime of being non-inclusive. The time has come, say its critics, to shrug it off, to clear it from the desk, to consign it to outer darkness. Except that no one can quite bring themselves to say so.”

Baltimore’s Peabody Institute “unveils nearly $27 million worth of campus renovations, the most extensive and expensive construction project since the institution opened in 1866.” The school campus has looked in for decades, and the renovations are designed to reconnect with the community.

“Musicians at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra are understood to have voted for Gerard Schwarz to be ousted from his position as musical director. Maestro Schwarz was brought in three years ago to turn fortunes around at the cash-strapped orchestra, which was then £2.5 million in debt.”

Two thirds of the musicians of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic voted to not renew music director Gerard Schwarz’s contract. “A final decision on whether to renew Mr Schwarz’s contract will be taken by the 11-strong board of directors following the review. The issues that musicians have disagreed with Schwarz about are said to include programme planning and repertoire choice. There has been some concern over the new umbrella job title of musical director.”

“It is not surprising that the latest venture from Raymond Gubbay, the man who brought opera to the Albert Hall, has attracted the sneers of the experts. Savoy opera, intended to offer (relatively) cheap, accessible productions of the classics in the West End, has been accused of undermining London’s other opera companies by skimming off the easy stuff and offering less than perfect performances, with cheap labour in the form of young, largely unknown singers. It is the antithesis of what the purists, regardless of the viability of the product, appear to believe opera ought to be.”

Who made the first rock ‘n roll record? Think you know? Really? “It’s one of those debates that’s going to go on forever. It’s one of those questions that there’s no answer for. It would be nice for me to tell you that the first rock’n’ roll record ever made was by Fred Bloggs, but it’s an impossible thing to do. You’re never going to get a definitive answer.”

“An 18th-century Italian-made violin reported missing earlier this week was found in an alleyway near the Manhattan bar where its owner had left it, police said. Odin Rathnam, the first-chair violinist for the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, had been in New York for a meeting and left the violin, along with a borrowed viola, at Yogi’s bar on the Upper West Side. The violin, valued at about $95,000, was made by Bartolomeo Calvaros of Bergamo, Italy, between 1750 and 1755; the viola belonged to a friend.” A bar patron actually claims to have hocked the fiddle at a local pawn shop for $600, but doesn’t have a good explanation for how it ended up back in the alley.

In the last year alone, a conductor in Rio de Janeiro has mooned an audience which was booing the opera he was conducting, and another baton-twirler went on a 10-minute tirade against an audience in Florida for some perceived slight or other. The problem of audience behavior and musician backlash is nothing new in the music world, of course, but when conductors begin displaying their posteriors in public, someone needs to step in, and Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, figures it might as well be her. In fact, she’s proposing a career exchange with the marauding maestros. “It is true that Miss Manners can’t count terribly well, but she looks fetching in evening clothes and has some experience at terrorizing people into silence with a mere glance. How difficult can the rest of it be?”