Category: music

There is more choice for classical music in Scotland than ever before. “Things have changed dramatically. For a start, more people are actually listening to classical music, thanks largely to the populist phenomenon of Classic FM. The radio station that rams lollipops down your lughole with the systematic Pavlovian persuasiveness of Radio 1 may chop up the classics into snippets that match the diminishing concentration span of today’s average listener – and may be driven by blatant commercial forces such as one-sided Faustian contracts with artists and recording companies – but it has had the astonishing effect of shaking up BBC’s Radio 3.” One problem thoug – many of the live concerts don’t sell many tickets, and that’s because…

Canadian orchestras commission a study on the state of their business. The results are sobering. “Among its findings? That many orchestras lack a clearly articulated vision of what they are about. That boards are often untrained and imperfectly informed. That managers are so overworked that little time is devoted to planning. That close to a decade of budget cuts has begun to erode artistic quality.”

Music of the French Baroque is very popular right now. And no one has done more to popularize it than conductor William Christie. “Why this sudden surge of interest in music ignored by the public for 250 years? Partly it’s a matter of the larger early-music movement and our culture’s growing fascination with its own cultural legacy. That fascination has its healthy and unhealthy aspects, suggesting a welcome attention to its past and perhaps a waning interest in its creative present.”

John Rockwell writes that Carnegie Hall gives up something important by becoming home to the New York Philharmonic. “At Lincoln Center, meanwhile, the immediate impression might be that the rats are scurrying down the hawser, fleeing a sinking ship. The New York City Opera is making noises about abandoning the center for a Ground Zero cultural center not yet designed, let alone built. The Philharmonic is on its way out. Who’s next? What is to become of the grand late-50’s and early-60’s dream of a cultural center that would bring everyone together, a dream that spawned imitators all over the world? Not much bad, say I, and maybe something good. The urban-renewal aspect of the Lincoln Center project has long been fulfilled.”

Anthony Tommasini wonders what’s in it for Carnegie Hall in bringing over the New York Philharmonic from Lincoln Center. “To make sense, this move must be seized by the Philharmonic as a chance not just to enhance its aural impact but to jolt its artistic metabolism. For Lincoln Center, meanwhile, this decision is more than a disruption. It’s a disastrous setback, no matter how much administrators try to spin it as an opportunity for new ventures.”

Over the past 20 years the Early Music movement has revolutionized the way we perform and listen to early music. But renovating sound is not its main accomplishment. “It’s not really a matter of philosophical debates as to whether and exactly how we follow composers’ own conceptions of their works, or recover the precise aesthetic or sound of a long lost age. Far more important has been the recovery of lost repertoire and the reinvigoration of the familiar.”

“Right now, the Billboard Top 10 includes six straight hip hop records (as well as a further two that could be described as strongly hip hop-influenced). Furthermore, hip hop is currently the best-selling musical genre worldwide, outstripping pop, country, rock and any other you can think of. Amazing, eh?”

So what will become of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall after the New York Philharmonic leaves? Lincoln Center says there’s a big opportunity and management envisions “new uses sweeping and small, including hosting the world’s top orchestras, staging festivals, introducing interactive technology to audiences and emphasizing youth education programs. The hall ‘is now a blank canvas, and we have a palette of musical colors that we’re going to paint on that canvas’.”

As New York’s Metropolitan Opera removes Alberto Vilar’s name off its building for failing to make good on pledges, Placido Domingo, director of Washington Opera and Los Angeles Opera, reveals that he has loaned Vilar $2 million to make good on his pledges to those two companies.

Three of the world’s great piano companies – Blüthner, Bechstein and Steinway – turn 150 this year. “Since 1853, artists have praised their instruments. Claude Debussy remarked that piano music should only be written for Bechsteins. For Wilhelm Furtwängler, Blüthner was best. ‘Blüthner pianos can really sing, which is the most wonderful thing you can say about a piano.’ Martha Argerich, an Argentinian-born artist, believes a Steinway sometimes plays better than the pianist — ‘a marvellous surprise’. In business terms, the three fared very differently…”