Category: music

Despite the declining ticket revenues, the COC is on a sound financial footing. Besides operating with what is essentially a balanced budget, the Canadian Opera Foundation has seen its endowment balance rise to $43 million. This is nearly double of what was in the bank at the end of 2009-10 — $22.4 million.

Chris Goldscheider, a former viola player in the orchestra at Covent Garden, said he could no longer work as a musician due to the ‘acoustic shock’ he suffered over a weekend rehearsal of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in 2012. He said the noise he was exposed to was unacceptable.

Musical eras are often defined by their dominant modes of production — analog, electronic, digital — each bringing about new styles and ways of listening. This era is marked by the release of the first AI-human collaborated album, Hello World, by the music collaborative Skygge. Skygge, led by composer and producer Benoît Carré and musician and tech researcher François Pachet, translates to “shadow” in Danish and was inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story of the same name.

“As a person whose primary beat is writing about religion, I can’t help but notice the parallels between classical music and religion in America today. As an aging Christian population watches its congregations shrink, younger seekers who don’t feel welcomed give up on church. Americans still discover classical music in their youth, but even those who play enthusiastically in school often can’t afford to go to the symphony, or if they do, they’re asked to treat it like a religious space, which it isn’t. Classical music isn’t dying, but our ways of experiencing it are becoming ossified.”

“[Playing in the avant-garde improvisation group] Nuova Consonanza really reunited me with the love of my life — composing absolute music, music that is not related to a film, or to a pop song. One of our rules was to avoid anything that was melodic, anything that was usual. We had to produce very strange sounds, very complicated sounds, because we wanted to get as far away as possible from the so-called traditions of classical music. The experience with them really helped me to bear the burden of working in the commercial sector.”

“For musicians in Paris, the rue de Rome is a legendary place, at the same level as Tin Pan Alley or 42nd Street in New York. Sheet music shops and luthiers’ workshops are packed in like sardines. … It’s a place to inquire into these mysterious objects” — the hand-crafted bows for string instruments — “whose secrets are unknown even to most musicians.”

“The investigators found that Mr. Preucil and Mr. La Rosa engaged in sexual misconduct and sexually harassing behavior with multiple female students and colleagues over a period of years while employed by the Orchestra,” the orchestra’s statement read.

Why so long away? “Because when I finished, I finished – I don’t really believe in going back. … There was no special reason. But now when Mr. Muti asked me to come, I said, ‘Why not?'” Barenboim tells Howard Reich how it feels to be back and how the CSO is different from any other orchestra he’s worked with.

As Andris Nelsons, an eminent Latvian conductor, coaxed the quiet notes from the string section of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, a woman in the balcony rustled a bag of gum, the Sydsvenskan newspaper reported. A young man sitting next to her glared a few times and then lost his patience. He snatched the bag from her and threw it onto the floor.

“Debussy accomplished something that happens very rarely, and not in every lifetime: he brought a new kind of beauty into the world. … His influence proved to be vast, not only for successive waves of twentieth-century modernists but also in jazz, in popular song, and in Hollywood. When both the severe [Pierre] Boulez and the suave Duke Ellington cite you as a precursor, you have done something singular.”