Category: music

Dallas Opera has a new leader in general director Karen Stone, who takes over at a challenging time. “It’s a company doing major-league work on a $10 million budget, half that of comparable operations in Houston and Seattle, but with nearly $800,000 in accumulated deficit. But it’s also a company preparing for a snazzy new opera house being designed by Foster and Partners for the Dallas Arts District.”

The Cuban government says the US is holding up visas for Cuban music stars who have been invited to the Latin Grammys. “Nominees including Latin jazz stars Chucho Valdes and Los Van Van are unlikely to attend Wednesday’s ceremony because they have not been given visas. But US diplomats say visa requests were delayed by the Cuban government.”

A new book makes the case. But Sasha Frere-Jones maintains that making the case is problematic. “Picking an All-Time No. 1 in any category is an exercise that’s generally more fun than scientific. This is especially true when picking top critics, a breed who succeed precisely by being in and of their time. There’s a good chance Bangs owns the ’70s but carving him in marble for all time does his gifts no service.”

Chicago Lyric Opera is down to the wire negotiating new contracts with its musicians and chorus. Will the contract be wrapped up before the season is scheduled to start? We’re sure it’s going to happen. We just don’t know what time of the day or night.”

New York City Opera costumers have voted to authorize a strike against the comnpany. “The vote, at the union’s headquarters on West 45th Street, means that the union could strike at any time, though both sides said yesterday that talks were continuing. The union’s contract expired in November.”

Pianist Susan Tomes is pressed into service as a conductor unexpectedly: “At first I stood at the foot of the stage with the score propped on a chair, and gave an upbeat. Astoundingly, they all came in together and, even more astonishingly, they kept playing; all the musical fragments fitted together in the correct places. I even found that I could make them speed up and slow down where indicated without losing them. There was something poignant about being the only person in possession of the whole map…”

There’s something new apparent in the lists of nominees for this year’s Latin Grammys. “Call it the globalization of Latin music. Not in the sense of a particular Latin genre hitting it big with non-Latins, i.e. salsa being hot in Europe or Latin-flavored American pop hitting it in the United States. This is about Latin music taking its place as an essential part of the world pop music pantheon.”

Tim Page ensures that his fall will start off with bags of vitriolic hate mail as he chooses 25 opera recordings meant to “give a novice listener an opportunity to explore the field.” “The selection process was not easy. Operaphiles are an opinionated lot, and I can already anticipate some of the mail, both curious and furious, that I’ll receive. A few sample heresies: Not one of the more than 60 operatic works by Gaetano Donizetti made the final cut. Virgil Thomson’s “The Mother of Us All” is here, but George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” an infinitely more popular American opera, is not. Where are the works of Benjamin Britten? And how can such composers as Mozart, Verdi and Wagner be limited to two operas apiece?”

The Minnesota Orchestra is beginning life under new music director Osmo Vanska. “After seven years of flight and fancy under Eiji Oue and nine previous to him under the iron fist of Edo de Waart, the orchestra is banking on Vänskä as a happy balance — an elite, uncompromising musician of mild temperament, an A-list conductor for top orchestras in America and Europe, with expertise in a corner of Scandinavian repertoire the Minnesota Orchestra yearns to conquer. The stakes are high.”

“Most singing that we hear has words, and, although the singer may depart from those words for bar after bar of vocal gymnastics (as in a bel canto aria, for instance), we know that in the end we shall be returned to the text. It doesn’t matter that the text may be more of a pretext for music than a real text conveying important information. Nor does it seem to matter very much to many people if the text that is being sung happens to be in a language they do not understand. A song that has no text at all takes us into a different world.”