Category: music

A $50 million gift to the Philadelphia Orchestra came with some strings. “The Annenberg grant is the biggest in the ensemble’s history and is believed by orchestra leaders to be the second-largest gift ever made to an American orchestra. Taken as a whole, the 12-page agreement, which is signed by Annenberg and orchestra leaders, outlines a broad set of institutional ambitions for the world-famous ensemble – some new, others tried but hobbled in the past by a lack of money. Still, all of the programs outlined in the 12-page agreement cannot be paid for with the interest and other income eventually generated by the $50 million nest egg.”

A Canadian choral festival arranged to present the country’s professional choruses together, made a major omission – it forgot to invite the country’s “only professional choir dedicated to Afrocentric music. The concerts are taking place this weekend in Toronto, during the final days of Black History Month.”

On Tuesday, numerous websites staged a protest against EMI who moved to try to block distribution of a remix of the Beatles’ White Album. “The protesters billed the event as “Grey Tuesday,” calling it “a day of coordinated civil disobedience,” during which more than 150 sites offered the album for download. Recording industry lawyers saw it as 24 hours of mass copyright infringement and sent letters to the Web sites demanding that they not follow through on the protest.”

“In a bid to turn Miami’s Performing Arts Center into one of the world’s whiz-bang wonders, students from the MIT Media Lab are spending this semester figuring out how to incorporate digital technology into the center’s opera, concerts and ballet.”

Sam Bergman on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra: We’re getting more press on this tour than we ever have. But it reminds us how little relationship we have with critics when we’re not on tour. “The upshot of this dumbing down of the arts press is that most orchestra musicians have little to no contact with their local cultural reporters, and the vast majority could probably not pick the critic who reviews their concerts out of a police lineup. Only maybe half of musicians bother to read the reviews, anyway, since so often, most papers will spare only a few paragraphs for such elitist claptrap, and even a well-constructed column is always in danger of being brutalized for space by some overzealous editor who has to make room for the latest installment of the five-part series on Janet Jackson’s Super Boob.”

The English National Opera is about to move back into its newly renovated home. But the company has been plagued with problems in the past two years. And even getting back into its home has proven problematic.

Beethoven heard a different piano than the ones we use today. Now some Australians have turned back the clock. “The separation of sound quality between note textures is so significant on these old instruments, and it’s something Steinway has tried to minimise. With the Stuart we are going back to the sound concept of the 17th and 18th centuries, when instruments were far more clearly transparent. We are dealing with the age of enlightenment. Nothing is hidden, everything is open. This instrument is sublimely suited for this repertoire. This is the sort of thing Beethoven would have wished to have had in his time.”

After a couple of years of sales downturns in the recording business, the industry has just racked up five straight months of sales gains. “So why are so few people in the music world ready to celebrate an industry comeback? ‘The past four or five months has turned the predictive ability of all of us on its head. I think people are holding their breath’.”

Sam Bergman on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra: The orchestra plays Barbican Hall in London, a place the critics hate, and musicians find difficult to play in. “The audience is listening to the big picture, and we’re working to create an understandable canvas, but the tiny muscle movements and mental adjustments required dictate that we must spend an inordinate amount of our time and effort on the seemingly insignificant details of our instruments and our surroundings. It’s a bit like the paintings of George Seurat – huge, beautiful depictions of idyllic scenes, all created from tiny dots dabbed on the canvas one at a time. The artist obsesses over the dots…”

The New York Philharmonic, like many orchestras, is experimenting with giant video screens. “Just as, if you go to a football game, the camera focuses in on the face of the athlete. You wouldn’t want to go to a movie and just look at the back of Cary Grant. You want to see his face.” But the orchestra’s players aren’t enthusiastic so far: “It just seems like a bit of a sellout. Better we should spend the money on a hall that brings the audience closer to us. People might as well stay home with their big-screen TV’s. It’s going the route of MTV, and I’m not sure it’s the way to go.”