Category: music

Last month, Tim Page offered a list of 25 opera recordings he felt could give a listener a good overview of the artform. Not surprisingly, (are there any fans more rabid than opera fans?) Page’s readers scrambled to modify his list. “A few recurring themes can be isolated: Neither baroque nor modern opera seems to be especially popular with many operaphiles (although there are listeners who take to these genres more quickly than they do to much of the standard repertory); it was widely believed that Mozart, Verdi and Wagner should have been represented by more than two operas apiece (and Puccini and Richard Strauss by more than one); and, more than a quarter-century after her death, Maria Callas may still be the world’s most popular opera singer.”

Luciano Pavarotti comes to Philadelphia offering to help start a singing competition. So far, though, no one’s taken him up on the offer. “Young singers don’t need glaring spotlights. They need greenhouses to keep them incubating until they are sturdy enough vocally to survive the international-opera treadmill, with the bad airplane air, unsympathetic conductors, and high-concept stage directors that go with it. Competitions are more suited to instrumentalists. They aren’t nearly as vulnerable to the kind of permanent damage an overused voice can suffer.”

Boston’s Symphony Hall is widely regarded to be one of the finest concert halls in the world, both acoustically and architecturally. And this past summer, one of the most distinctive features of the hall, the 1900 Hutchings organ, underwent a historic tuneup. “In February, [organ builder] Foley-Baker removed the innards of the organ, took apart the electro-pneumatic engine that makes the whole thing work and has been analyzing and rebuilding the elegant old machine. It’s the first major reconditioning since ’49, and includes installation of many of the pipes [that a previous restorer] planned to use in the first place.”

“Music executives abroad are scrutinizing the American industry’s legal campaign against people who share files on the Internet. But many doubt such tactics would work in their countries, given the relative weakness of laws protecting copyrights and the ubiquity of the activity. ‘People in their 60’s are burning CD’s at home. Housewives, who should be cooking, are burning. It’s not like we can go after 80-year-old men or 12-year-old kids. We have to find the right approach’.”

In the 19th century, as America began to grow from an infant nation into a world power, its musical development lagged far behind that of Europe, and no one had yet succeeded in capturing the distinctive musical voice of the New World. It took the keen ear of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak to identify the native melodies which would become the American Sound, and to begin incorporating them into his own music. “In a famous interview, he declared: ‘Inspiration for truly national music might be derived from the Negro melodies or Indian chants.’ The response from some composers was racist outrage,” but the next century of American music would eventually belong to Dvorak’s populist vision.

Opera fans are known for their devotion, and it’s a good thing they are. What other art form regularly requires entire buildings to be erected, solely to stage the work of a single composer? Such is frequently the situation confounding anyone who wishes to put on a truly impressive production of Wagner’s infamous Ring cycle. In fact, the composer himself had to convince his benefactor, King Ludwig, to build the famous opera house in Bayreuth before he could stage the first Ring. As Toronto prepares a similar undertaking, William Littler paid a visit to Bayreuth to see how the monument to operatic self-indulgence has held up. Pretty well, as it turns out.

Striking musicians of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra returned to the bargaining table on Friday, but walked out again two hours later, when it became clear that the CSO’s management had made no substantive changes to their original proposal, which included wage cuts and a shortened season. No further talks have been scheduled, and the Charlotte strike is now three weeks old.

When the Louisville Orchestra was in danger of folding this past summer, the orchestra’s board claimed that it simply couldn’t raise enough money to pay its operating costs. Three months later, the ensemble is back on track, and money is rolling in from a group of local developers who have pledged to lead the way in making the orchestra fiscally secure. The Home Builders Association of Louisville has already raised more than $400,000 on a $465,000 pledge, and they say they won’t stop there.

Mike Figgis’ “The Blues” series for PBS chronicles an important shift in audience, then ignores it. “The accretion of whites in Mr. Figgis’s film reflects both the majority of the public-television viewership as well as the largest audience for the blues these days. The London blues-rock stars who heard the music as teens in the 1950’s and 60’s — like Eric Clapton and Eric Burdon, who are both featured in Mr. Figgis’s film — exposed it to the rest of the record-buying world: suburban kids who now keep it alive. It’s a sad fact that ‘The Blues,’ devoted to the cumulative power of a cultural phenomenon, tends to ignore the racial shift in the music’s fans. Such a lack is like overlooking a roasted tree stump that was rocked by lightning.”

A lavish new opera house in Germany has ambitious aspirations. “Lavish the new opera house may be, but its start has not been painless. It was meant to be part of a new deal for opera, theatre and ballet involving Weimar (pop. 65,000) – whose Deutsches Theater (where Germany’s first democratic constitution was launched) is a mere 15 minutes train ride away. Under this so-called ‘Weimar Model’, Erfurt was to specialise in opera, touring to Weimar, while Weimar specialised in spoken theatre, it being the city of Goethe, Schiller and Herder. However, the people of Weimar strongly objected to the loss of their opera .”