Category: music

Struggling to develop an online strategy, European music producers have decided to offer free music downloads – for a day. “The campaign – Digital Download Day Europe – will allow music fans to download five euros’ (£3.40) worth of music for free from sites that pay royalties. The promotion takes place on 21 March and will be available in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK and The Netherlands. More than 150,000 tracks will be available to download, with a third able to be copied to CD.”

Opera Australia reports an operating deficit of $2 million this year “as a result of last year’s costly season.” The compan y is undergoing an audit and is also beginning a search for a new music director after clumsily deciding not to renew Simone Young’s contract.

Fifty years after his death, Prokofiev is being re-examined. Why did he leave the West to return to the USSR where artists were stifled? “He was only semi-successful in the West. He didn’t attain the degree of fame that would satisfy his ambitions. In the West, he tried to be even more avant-garde than he was naturally, and it didn’t work. He was going along with the tastes of fashion, but it was against his nature. Then, when he returned to Russia, he wrote the ballet Romeo and Juliet, identified with it and produced an absolute masterpiece.”

“The name game at l’Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal got a lot hotter on Monday, as Kent Nagano was outed as the top contender for the music director post abandoned last spring by Charles Dutoit. Nagano, a 51-year-old American conductor, is in negotiations with the orchestra after being chosen by its search committee, according to a report in La Presse. The Montreal newspaper cited an unnamed source ‘very close to one of the most influential members’ of the 13-person committee. Marie-Josée Desrochers, the OSM’s director of communications, said that the committee has made its selection, but would not confirm that Nagano is the man. She said the matter is in the hands of the OSM hiring committee.”

The European music industry’s winter meetings are going on in Cannes. “No one at Midem talks about art or passion or even, heaven help us, music. They talk about money. I have to confess that I find it all incredibly disheartening. With more than 10,000 delegates of 3,604 companies from 89 countries touting their wares to one another, it genuinely does not seem to make a blind bit of difference whether what they have to sell has any quality whatsoever.”

The British Arts Council has decided to bail out the English National Opera. “The decision was rushed through in less than 24 hours and comes as stalwarts of the ENO audience threatened to show their anger over the management’s cutbacks during tonight’s Coliseum premiere of Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina.” How much money will be coming the ENO’s way was not revealed, but the council said it would be enough to “stabilize” the company’s operations.

The Recording Industry Association of America has discovered a whole new way to tick off consumers looking for ways around being gouged by CD distributors and, well, the RIAA. The new plan calls for the prosecution of internet service providers whose users illegally download and share copyrighted music. The strategy is most decidedly not getting good reviews, and one internet security consultant has compared it to prosecuting the highway department because drug smugglers use roads. “But the RIAA scored a big win against an ISP on Tuesday, when a federal judge ruled that Verizon Communications must turn over the name of a Verizon Internet subscriber who allegedly downloaded 600 songs through file-trading network Kazaa in one day.”

Mannheim Steamroller is a man, a band, and a marketing juggernaut, and no one really seems to understand why. The music is new age pop with just enough intelligence to be slightly more palatable than, say, Yanni or John Tesh. “Mannheim is really just one person, a 53-year-old, bearded, wool-sweatered and slightly rotund former jingle writer named Chip Davis. He lives near Omaha, composing what he calls ‘Elizabethan-style rock’ by himself, recording with hired hands as he needs them, for his own label, American Gramophone. He pockets about $4 for every album he sells. He owns three mansions and a Saberliner jet. He smiles a lot.”

The Kronos Quartet, which revolutionized the chamber music experience and breathed life into a faltering new music movement when it formed back in the 1970s, turns 30 this year. Thirty years is a very long life for any quartet, let alone one which makes its living, as does Kronos, playing exclusively modern music. And while there are probably more daring ensembles about today, Kronos remains a revered original, and none of today’s successful contemporary music groups would deny that they owe much to the San Francisco-based foursome.