Category: music

Last week New York Times critic John Rockwell posed the question: who can better judge a conductor – the audience or the players working for the conductor. Michelle Dulak disagrees with how Rockwell framed his question, as well as how he went about answering it. “There is, of course, a sense in which musicians are self-serving. They aren’t typically looking for comfort or ease, exactly; but they are looking for something, and it may not be exactly what the audience — or rather the critics — want. To read Rockwell, you’d think he was not merely a critic but the director of a critics’ PAC (Political Action Committee).”

Opera San Jose is supposed to move in September into a theatre renovated for $75 million. But the finances of getting into the building and living there scare the company. “We are running frightened,” general manager Irene Dalis said. For 20 years, she has looked forward to moving the company from the 515-seat Montgomery Theater to the California Fox, she said, “and now I dread it.”

Why must orchestras present such a formal presence? “No wonder young people find this museum approach such a turn-off. Linked to the earthen rigidity of most mainstream concert programming, and the general predictability of the repertoire, the majority of weekly orchestral offerings in the Usher Hall or the Royal Concert Hall can have as much pull as a traditional Church of Scotland service. Come to think of it, the audience profile in both cases is about the same – elderly and growing thin on the ground. Surely it’s time to freshen things up, bring our orchestras into the modern age and apply the creative touch to more than just the sound of the music.”

The 80-year-old chairman of New York City Opera, Irwin Schneiderman, is stepping down from the job. He’s “leaving at a crucial moment for City Opera, which desperately wants a home of its own, having shared the New York State Theater for 38 years with the New York City Ballet. The company has long complained that the theater was acoustically unfit for opera.”

David Robertson’s appointment as music director of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra seems to be solidifying the notion that the SLSO, so recently on the brink of financial collapse, is back as a major player on the national orchestral scene. “A lot was riding on the identity of the new music director. The wrong conductor could have derailed the orchestra’s forward momentum, artistically and financially. But the right conductor – and there can be little doubt that Robertson’s the one – will build on what his predecessors left him and then help the orchestra on to even greater things.”

When Mahler wrote his almost unbearably bleak 6th symphony, he broke up the pervasive despair of the score with a beautiful, lush slow movement. Mahler originally intended the slow movement to be played just before the finale, but then switched it with the scherzo movement in the work’s first rehearsals. The new order remained the standard until 1963, after Mahler’s death, when the inner movements were flipped again, ostensibly because of ‘new scholarship’ on the work. “Now it has become clear that the transposition of movements was no mere mistake but a willful act of an editor, Erwin Ratz.”

Major symphony orchestras are cultural treasures, and a point of pride for the cities which have them. But for every big-budget, 95-member symphony orchestra, there are countless smaller, semi-professional orchestras performing across America, feeding the desire of ordinary concertgoers for an affordable night out listening to great music in a more casual setting than the big boys offer. “These orchestras truly live by their own rules, mixing classical and pops on the same program. They often flourish during tough economic times that bring larger orchestras down… At the very least, these orchestras offer the tactile experience of being in the same room with a masterpiece.”

You may have missed it, what with the capture of Saddam Hussein and all the recent suicide bombings in Iraq, but rapper Eminem recently threatened the life of the President of the United States. Sort of. A line from an unfinished song off a bootleg recording of an Eminem concert reportedly includes the following: “I don’t rap for dead presidents. I’d rather see the president dead.” Of course, Eminem is just a pop musician in a frankly thuggish corner of the music industry, and he clearly isn’t planning an assasination attempt, so the Secret Service isn’t taking it seriously or responding to silly questions about it. Only, wait. Actually, they are.

$7 million per year. That’s what it costs to put the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the air each Saturday afternoon. With the Met scrambling for new sponsors, there are rumblings in the opera world that the price tag is just too high, and that the broadcasts aren’t worth saving. Nonsense, says William Littler. There are other great opera companies, but none that consistently match the Met’s high level of performance. “I’ve visited them all, and I’ve never encountered in any of them the sustained quality I experienced last weekend during four performances at the big house at Lincoln Centre. As Harold C. Schonberg, late music critic of The New York Times, once observed, The Met sometimes fails, but when it does, it does so on a level of its own.”

Canada is imposing a new tax on MP3 players. “A price increase of between $2 and $25 will come into effect after the Copyright Board of Canada gave the go-ahead Friday on a new levy for digital audio recorders, including Apple’s hot-selling IPod. The move is part of several efforts underway to combat music downloading and copying.”