Category: music

Luciano Pavarotti’s final Metropolitan Opera performance Saturday night was his last opera performance anywhere, he says. “At the end, there was an 11-minute ovation that featured four solo curtain calls as everyone from the orchestra to the standing room section applauded and yelled ‘Bravo’.”

Luciano Pavarotti sang his last performances in opera at the Metropolitan this week. Richard Dyer: “This is not the occasion to survey Pavarotti’s nonoperatic career in concert, arena events, on film and television, with the Three Tenors, and as a newsworthy talk show celebrity; all of that continues. What is important is that Pavarotti let all of his outside activities feed back into opera. He could have left the opera house decades ago and made even more money than he has, but he chose not to. The musical world needs its celebrities because they vouch for the validity of the art.”

“How does one grow old gracefully in hip-hop? Truth be told, I’d rather talk about hip-hop’s aging than my own, and since I have watched hip-hop from its infancy, I’ve been thinking about the relevant and parallel question: How does a culture like hip-hop, so invested in its youth, experience its own aging process?”

Tower Records has been in financial difficulty for a while. So there was considerable concern that when the chain declared bankruptcy last year, the end was near. Not so. “Wrapping up a fast-track case that’s been mostly a formality, Tower is poised to emerge from bankruptcy protection Monday with its debt load $80 million lighter and its business intact.”

What makes a great violinist? “The Genius of the Violin festival, which starts in London later this month, is designed to display the instrument’s extraordinary versatility in everything from Bach to bluegrass. It is a tribute to the impresario Joji Hattori’s powers of persuasion that three of the world’s top fiddlers should be participants.”

Time once again to play The Shostakovich Question. “The ‘Shostakovich Question’ is a debate is over the relationship between the composer and the triad of Stalinism, Mother Russia and Shostakovich’s own deep humanism. It asks: why did Shostakovich remain in the USSR, while others like Stravinsky left? Was he obliged by a love of country to acknowledge, if not accept, the government? Or was his life torn between a public and private self? Indeed, was every musical phrase a thread woven through a tortured tapestry of dissent, a passionate but coded cry of opposition?”

So where is the great opera happening in England these days? “Our regional companies, all of which tour way beyond their home bases, are currently setting standards at least as high as their better-heeled metropolitan rivals.”

“When the Florida Philharmonic went bankrupt, it effectively meant the end of the Philharmonic Chorus as well. Yet in less than six months, a new organization has risen from its ashes to bring choral repertoire to local audiences.” It is an old, established organization, and yet as an independent newcomer, the challenges of setting up are formidable.

Former punk-rocker Charles Hazlewood is the BBC’s new “face of classical music,” and he takes a particularly populist approach to his shows: “There is a terrible conservatism, like a cancer, right in the heartlands of music-making, a tremendous resistance to change, an absolute horror of the idea that more people might connect with music. That infuriates me more than I can say. The very idea that people are too stupid to get their heads round what a fugue is is beyond me. I think it’s total bollocks and it drives me mad.”

Music producers are fascinated with the demographic shift in music sales. Instead of kids driving the charts, it’s older fans with money to buy CDs. But “the problem is that the whole concept of the charts may have become outdated, certainly as a measurement of units of music consumed. A large and ever growing proportion of young people simply no longer go into record shops, or even listen to the radio, but that does not mean they are not interested in music.”