Category: music

Robert Craft has been the keeper of the Stravinsky legacy. But it’s difficult to separate where one leaves off and the other begins. “Craft’s influence on Stravinsky was such that it was sometimes hard to tell who was responsible for what. Three decades after Stravinsky’s death in 1971, that symbiosis is starting to seem merely part of the Postmodern musical landscape. Still, Craft’s talent to be revelatory and obfuscatory at the same time makes his peculiar memoir, ‘An Improbable Life,’ as infuriating as it is engrossing.”

Nominations for this year’s Classical Brit awards offer few surprises. “There are three nominations for a serial winner, the conductor Sir Simon Rattle, two for last year’s outstanding contribution award winner, Andrea Bocelli, while last year’s album of the year recipient, Russell Watson, is vying for the same award for his third album, Reprise.”

The troubled English National Opera could use some help from Opera Europa, a “powerful European opera forum with a dynamic new director.” Unfortunately that director is Nicholas Payne, whom the ENO fired last year. Oh well…

“On Sunday it will be the end for Jazz at Pearl’s, the city’s last full-time jazz club. The room is losing its lease after 13 years. After a heated back-and-forth with the landlord over renegotiating a lease that, they hoped, would give them five years with an option, [owners] Buxton and Wong folded.”

“One must come to music with complete respect. I don’t know how directors can do a film and after the script’s been written, and the film’s cut and all this money’s been spent – it’s like, well now let’s get the composer. It’s just insane to keep the composer out of the loop until so late.”

Last week Seoul, South Korea, hosted the largest-ever gatherin of women composers from around Asia. Some “300 composers and musicians from 22 different countries presented research, participated in panel discussions, and performed 69 works in nine venues scattered around Seoul…”

This month CRI, the recording company that has championed new music through more than 900 releases, is shutting down. Time for laments. But New World Records will take over CRI’s catalog and “digitize the master tapes of the complete CRI archive and keep each album available as a custom-made CD, burned to order and mailed to the buyer with the original liner notes. Not only that, New World is exploring the possibility of making CRI recordings available through digital downloads, as that technology becomes more viable. So what seems a simple act of one nonprofit’s salvaging another’s catalog could represent a bold step into the online future of recording.”

North Korean dictator Kim Jong II has written a book on opera. “You might assume the book is a socialist critique of La Traviata and Carmen. Unfortunately, it’s nothing so delicious, and isn’t even whacked-out enough to be fun. It’s just desperately prosaic and, for us, a creepy cautionary tale about what happens when someone whose favorite opera is titled ‘Sea of Blood’ (and whose favorite movie is Rocky III, according to another of his aesthetic tracts, ‘On the Art of the Cinema’) attempts to legislate the artistic process.”

As CD sales fall and the recording business seems to fall apart, legislators in New York and California are considering tough new laws to help ensure artists get the money owed to them.

Last week radio giant Clear Channel Communications announced it would discontinue what many consider the pay-for-play system of choosing which music radio stations play. “But it’s likely that the Clear Channel decision won’t overturn the pay-for-play system so much as reconfigure it. Instead of funneling money through independent promoters to radio stations, record companies will now have to deal directly with Clear Channel programmers in seeking access to the airwaves. And, as in all things radio, money will talk. The radio giant said as much in a statement announcing the move, in which it promised a ‘new, restructured relationship with the recording industry . . . on specific group-wide contesting, promotions and marketing opportunities.’ Those words sent a shudder through many industry observers.”