Category: music

“Despite slashing musicians’ pay and bringing popular new music director Stefan Sanderling onboard, the Florida Orchestra’s financial woes continue. A promised endowment campaign has yet to be announced, and the strain is starting to drive some players to other orchestras.”

Apple has sold 50 million songs through its iTunes service, and is currently selling about 2.5 million songs a week. “Crossing 50 million songs is a major milestone for iTunes and the emerging digital music era,” said Apple boss Steve Jobs.

Time was that the UK’s Top 10 charts bristled with pop energy of the latest thing. But look at them now – the list is dominated by easy-listening and soft jazz. “Of the few pop acts that remain in the Top 10, the mellow Zero 7 and newly-soulful Will Young sound distinctly adult. So how did every day come to sound like a dinner party?”

“Los Angeles Opera is growing like a rambunctious weed. In 2004-5 there will be 100 performances, a 30 percent increase over this season. The budget of $48 million is up by a third over this season and double what it was when Plácido Domingo took over as general director five years ago. These numbers put Los Angeles in position to challenge San Francisco’s longtime West Coast operatic primacy and to surpass, in terms of quantity if not necessarily quality, other worthy companies like those of Seattle and San Diego.”

Luciano Pavarotti’s opera farewell at the Metropolitan this weekend was a nostalgia-charged event, writes Tim Page. The door has still been left open as to whether the great tenor will come back to opera. “Myself, I hope he packs it in. It has been a glorious career and it might be best to leave before mounting and irreversible infirmities, apparent throughout the evening, overwhelm what remains of his fragile but still magnificent artistry.”

Covent Garden’s rude brush-off of Deborah Voigt for being too big is a sign of a changing opera world, writes Joshua Kosman. “The resultant possibilities for mocking and excoriating this once- respected opera company are rife and fairly obvious (insert “the opera ain’t over” joke of your choosing here). But this mini-scandal reveals some important shifts in the prevailing attitudes toward opera and the performing arts in general. Have we really reached the point where only the slim or the beautiful (the two terms are far from synonymous) need apply? Does artistic prowess now count for less than comeliness? Must every other consideration be subsumed to the visual?”

“In a campaign long on ambition and short on funding, music aficionados and historians have targeted for preservation nearly 2,000 New Orleans-area buildings connected to the birth of jazz — from the childhood homes of its pioneers to the mammoth halls where they performed. By poring over old phone books and dusty property records, through word of mouth and even the stubs of timeworn rent checks, researchers and historians have identified more than 600 homes and 1,300 performance halls linked to the early days of jazz.”

Yes there’s a trend towards hiring svelte singers who can look more like the opera roles they’re performing. But “if there is a truly extraordinary voice, you’ll make a place for it, regardless of how the singer looks or moves.” Apparently not, writes Charles Ward, if you’re London’s Royal Opera.

Starbucks is unveiling a new instore music service. The ubiquitous coffee chain plans to offer 250,000 songs for sale in its stores. Customers can then order tracks they like, have them burnt on to a CD and buy it when they leave.