Category: music

Edward Elgar was so revered in his home country England that his picture adorns the back of the £20 note. “Yet a recent YouGov poll found that three-quarters of British adults were unable to recognise his portrait on the back of theirs. They were more likely to say the man with the droopy moustache was the imperialist Lord Kitchener than England’s greatest home-grown composer since Henry Purcell.” A new initiative aims to raise Elgar’s profile.

Charles Rosen is a brilliant writer about music. But he’s also a major pianist. “He would probably be better known as a pianist if he had not published a single word about music. That he has not belonged to the most visible group of concert pianists that includes Murray Perahia, Emmanuel Ax, Alfred Brendel, Maurizio Pollini, and Richard Goode is a circumstance with multiple causes (including his decision to play Boulez rather than Brahms, Schoenberg and Carter rather than Schubert and Copland).” So his new book about the piano is something to be taken very seriously indeed.

Aram Khachaturian’s music was dismissed by many in the 1950s and 60s as being lightweight. But this year – the year he would have been 100 years old, “the pendulum of serious music has swung to the other extreme. The realities of Soviet life and politics are better known, and the personal histories of artists are understood as having been more complex. The time may be ripe to take another look at Khachaturian’s music.”

Conductor Keith Lockhart tore his rotator cuff last year, as a direct result of what he does for a living. Laugh if you must, but what orchestral musicians (even conductors) do onstage is a physical nightmare for the human body, and injuries are becoming increasingly common. String players contort their arms and shoulders into impossible positions to reach around their instruments, brass players spend hours with their lips frozen in a pucker, and a conductor leading a Mahler symphony might not drop his hands to his sides for more than a few seconds in a 90-minute performance. Many musicians are adapting new methods of relaxation and muscle relief in an effort to stave off career-threatening injuries.

Two of the country’s grandest and most venerable companies, the San Francisco Opera and the Metropolitan Opera, began their new seasons recently, and they made an instructive contrast.” Both face financial challenges. The Met chose ear-pleasing fare for its opening. SF Opera, by contrast presented a challenging American work. And the grumbling at intermission?….

The St. Louis Symphony, struggling to get its finances in order, has dismissed its general manager. The orchestra says the move is to help reduce expenses, and that the duties of the well-respected Carla Johnson will be divided among other senior staff. Critic Tim Page called Johnson “the administrative heart and soul of the St. Louis Symphony.”

David Hyslop has been in the orchestra management business for 40 years. He has worked for orchestras from Elmira, New York, to Portland, Oregon, and has been the top man at two major American orchestras. This weekend, he steps down after 12 years at the helm of the Minnesota Orchestra, confident that the orchestra industry will weather the ongoing economic storm, but admitting to a few questions about the sustainability of the current economic model. “The key thing — and the challenge — is that the 52-week season, whether it’s here or in any other market our size, wasn’t driven by market demand but by labor.”

For small, regional orchestras, the challenge of drawing a significant audience to concerts is considerable, and many resort to booking “superstar” performers like Itzhak Perlman or Yo-Yo Ma in order to sell tickets. The trouble with that strategy, of course, is that such soloists command exorbitant fees, which tend to wipe out most of the profit gained from the full hall. But not every orchestra is trapped in the star cycle. “The simple idea of giving the music itself top billing has kept the Las Vegas Philharmonic in the black for its first four seasons, without having to prop up its main-stage offerings with pops concerts or big-name guest artists.”

“Tenor Plácido Domingo left the stage of the Vienna State Opera this evening after apparently falling ill during the second act of Giordano’s Fedora, but later returned to finish his performance.”

“Working on the go has become standard operating procedure in the music industry. Times have changed: Twenty years ago, a studio was the only place where professional recordings could be made; even five years ago, desktop computers were just starting to get enough horsepower to make great records. Today, a laptop offers plenty of power to make a great-sounding track – and that portability is changing the way music is made.”