Category: music

Forget drugs. “A strong dose of Mozart is more likely to enhance athletic performance. This is the revolutionary theory of a Greek cardiologist who, when not attending to affairs of the heart, busies himself as a composer. He recommends music as the best stimulant for sporting success and claims that a series of studies have shown that, used in combination with the right diet, ‘it can act as an energy supplement in the attempt to reduce the use of pharmaceutical substances by young people involved in sport’.”

Sales of music are up 9 percent in the first three months of 2004 after three years of declines. Yet downloading on the internet is still increasing. So if downloading wasn’t responsible for declines in music sales in recent years, what was? IOndustry watchers say it was a combination of factors…

Why is there such a huge discrepancy between the salary of orchestra executives and musicians? AJ blogger Drew McManus correlates the pay compensation of players and the people who manage orchestras. Executives earn, on average, between 3 and 6 times as much as the musician earning a base salary…

Leon Fleisher is king of the musical metaphors. “Listening to Fleisher talk about music is delightfully dizzying. The metaphors come in an endless flow. Play like a cat, he might say, but with sheathed claws. Play it like a Bavarian milkmaid, not like Britney Spears. Fingers shouldn’t be hammers, they should be dolphin flippers. This chord change could be from a Marlene Dietrich song; croak over it.”

It was 170 years between performances of Rossini’s opera Ermione. Anne Midgette is aware that such long lost finds more often than not prove why they were forgotten. But “for my money, this is the best rediscovery to cross the radar in a long time. Anyone who likes 19th-century Italian opera — from Donizetti to Verdi — should see City Opera’s “Ermione.”

All of a sudden there are all these opportunities to buy cheap tickets to opera and music in London. So here’s the challenge – how much can you get in to £50? Try five shows at some of the city’s biggest performing arts venues.

London’s Royal Opera House’s plans to offer some of its best seats for £10 is not going to widen the audience for opera, says a leading think tank. The critique suggests that “such schemes are more likely to encourage the middle class to go to the opera more often, rather than widen access.”

For the fourth year in a row Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 has topped Classic FM’s most-loved music poll. “Its emergence – in each year so far of the new century – as the British classical listening public’s favourite tune indicates Rachmaninov’s position as perhaps the most popular mainstream composer of the last 70 years. Its place was secured by the votes of the commercial station’s listeners.”

Larry Nager was recently fired as the Cincinnati Enquirer’s pop music critic. Nager says it was because he just turned 50. “The Enquirer, Nager claims, deemed him expendable because he didn’t fit the paper’s profile of someone who should be reporting on the Britneys and Justins of the music world. Nager accuses the Enquirer — and many other newspapers — of targeting an 18-34 female demographic, a move he calls a reaction to the whole MTV-ing of our society … newspapers are trying belatedly to be ‘with it.'”

This year, the administrators of the $50,000 Avery Fisher Prize for American musicians changed its rules of eligibility to include ensembles, and the first beneficiaries are the members of the Emerson String Quartet, who will be announced as the 2004 winners of the prize in a Monday ceremony. The group says it will “try to do something creative [with the money.] We won’t just spend it.”