Category: music

Eighty-six promising young opera singers gather in Israel for an opera boot camp. “Survival in the dicey world of opera — which can demand more years of preparation than brain surgery, without the guaranteed payoff — was a subtext during the 17th summer of the Israel Vocal Arts Institute’s program. Participants have a four-week schedule of one-on-one voice, diction and role coaching, and almost nightly performances, with public master classes, concerts and eight fully staged productions.”

“In the past few weeks the charismatic American vocalist David Daniels – who has ridden the countertenor boom of the past decade to something like classical music rock star status – and his Perth-born accompanist, guitarist Craig Ogden, seem to have successfully co-opted Justin Timberlake’s business plan. Just look at the cover of the album, A Quiet Thing, where the duo stare out moodily in casual shirts…”

Audience members at a concert will be asked to judge between a Strad and a modern instrument. “At the concert on 15 September, a Nagyvary violin, built in six weeks earlier this year, and the $4 million Rochester Stradivarius, built in 1720 by Antonio Stradivari, will each be played behind a screen by violinist Dalibor Karvay. Audience members will attempt to distinguish between the two, and at intermission their guesses will be tallied up.”

Can the bankrupt Florida Philharmonic be restarted? Perhaps – but a new model is needed. “Clearly what we did did not work. A different business model needs to be considered. Whatever is decided to be done, you’ve got to be put on good financial footing to begin with, with the money down before you build anything. That was never done with this orchestra.”

“It was never any secret the Philharmonic was staggering from one financial crisis to another, although most patrons and the public never realized how deep the problems ran. Since 1989, the Philharmonic burned through roughly $123 million, with yearly expenses soaring over $10 million, its financial records show. The orchestra’s board and managers borrowed from its own foundation and endowment funds, which were supposed to guarantee its survival.”

Conductor James Judd left Florida last week without much of a sendoff from the orchestra he led for 16 years. “Recent circumstances make a festive send-off difficult. The Florida Philharmonic, which Judd helmed for 16 years and helped raise to its highest creative level, is in bankruptcy; with a reorganization effort floundering for lack of funds, the orchestra’s demise appears all but certain. The conductor’s abrupt resignation, following several dubious moves by an interim management team that left him out of the loop on key artistic decisions, widened the divide between himself and the organization into a gaping chasm. Still, it’s an undeservedly quiet coda for the charismatic Englishman who built the Florida Philharmonic into a major regional arts institution and brought it international recognition.”

“Pop stars and punk bands alike are piping their voices through the hardware, which corrects and improves their vocal pitch during concerts and on records. With musicians on the road touring for weeks on end, the autotuner has become a safety net that catches the occasional clinker on days when their voices may be off. (In a nutshell, the autotuner is told what key the vocal is in and analyzes the wave form in real time. If the singer is off-key, it will adjust the pitch to the closest note in that key.)”

So you’re transferring your music to recordable CD’s so you’ll have them forever? Better think again. A Dutch magazine tested CD’s that had been recorded less than two years ago and discovered many of them no longer play. “It is presumed that CD-Rs are good for at least 10 years. Some manufacturers even claim that their CD-Rs will last up to a century. From our tests it’s concluded however that there is a lot of junk on the market. We came across CD-Rs that should never have been released to the market. It’s completely unacceptable that CD-Rs become unusable in less than two years.”

Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman have been named to the top a Rolling Stone list of the top 100 guitarists of all time. “B.B. King, who turns 78 next month, came in at No. 3. ‘His string-bending and vibrato made his famous guitar, Lucille, weep like a woman,’ the magazine said.”