Category: music

In eight years Leonard Slatkin has remade Washington DC’s National Symphony. The key to his success? Choosing the right players. “The personality of an orchestra reflects the tastes of the music director. Sometimes you can encourage existing members to alter their approach to suit your purposes, but for the most part, you inherit the sound of the previous conductor, assuming he had one. Therefore, it is the appointment of new personnel that determines the overall sonic characteristics of the orchestra.”

Five hundred tapes of the Beatles’ recording sessions from 1969 that were stolen in 1970 have been recovered in a warehouse near Amsterdam. “While the tapes, enough to fill 15 CDs, will be returned to their legal owner, record company EMI, they could prove to be a source of further tension between the two surviving band members and the estates of their former colleagues, Harrison and Lennon. The Get Back sessions were dark, tense days for the Beatles and the tapes display the most intimate, and potentially embarrassing, details of that tension.”

Three levels of government bailed out the Winnipeg Symphony on Friday, amid rumors of financial mismanagement and a $1 million deficit this season (added to a $1.8 million accumulated deficit). “For its gala season opener in September, the consultant reports, the WSO sold only 40 tickets at full price when the Centennial Concert Hall had a capacity of 2,223. The WSO claimed 1,456 tickets were sold, but 1,230 of these were freebies.”

Sure, portable MP3 players are convenient, but they also change the way you listen to music. “Play with these portable gadgets enough, and you find yourself listening more actively, thinking like a DJ – seeking the mind-bending segue or the track that kicks things into another gear, savoring this surreal mix-and-match moment in which historical artifact rubs up against disposable remix. You start to imagine all sorts of new-frontier ideas – kiosks in airports offering custom mixes (by Moby, Nikka Costa, anybody) or an hour’s worth of music from unknown talents selected by some veteran coolhunter.”

The jazz business is in a bad way right now. “The talent level has never been so high. But jazz economics are at a nadir not seen since the late 1960s, when Miles Davis, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra went electric and brought fusion to rock-oriented baby boomers. In this attenuated climate, jazz sales accounted for about 2% of the total market, mostly from back catalogue and new product by singers like Diana Krall and Norah Jones, who helped their labels stay solvent by going platinum.”

The US State Department has enlisted writers to write about the virtues of America in a propaganda effort. “Regardless of whether you buy into this kind of cultural marketing, it’s clear that the State Department chose the wrong medium. American book publishers can tell you that American men between 18 and 30 don’t read a lot of books. The Arab street reads even fewer—just one book, mostly: the Quran. The United States should have followed the lead of Arab governments, which know that music is the region’s most powerful form of expression. That’s why they use it for propaganda—and also why they ban so much of it.”

The Colorado Springs Symphony board of directors has followed through and declared the orchestra bankrupt. The orchestra had demanded wage cuts from the orchestra musicians and gave a deadline of Thursday night. “In a letter delivered to management at 4 p.m., the musicians agreed to discuss the conditions for possible contract renegotiations but did not immediately accept any of the orchestra’s demands. Declaring that this action did not go far enough, the board’s executive committee decided Thursday evening to proceed with the bankruptcy filing.”

Los Angeles Opera is having a rough season. Earlier this year the company had to cancel a Kirov production of Prokofiev’s War and Peace, then saw sets for the replacement production go sailing out of the harbor in a dock strike. The latest is a series of illnesses that have forced cancellations and scrambling for replacements. Tenor (and LA Opera director Placido Domingo) is sick and had to cancel out of a series of January performances. And a much-anticipated new opera by Luciano Berio had to be canceled because the composer was too ill to finish it. Then there was a rush to find replacement programs and singers, a visa scramble and…

The Vienna Philharmonic has hired its first-ever female member, after decades of refusing. “Ursula Plaichinger, a 27-year-old viola player, has caused a sensation in artistic circles by appearing unannounced at the 158-year-old Philharmonic’s traditional new year’s concert in Vienna. The performance was seen by millions around the world and a recording has already sold out in Austria.”

“As hip-hop approaches its 30th birthday, pop culture is coming down with a serious case of nostalgia for the genre’s early days. ‘People are realising what a monumental and phenomenal force hip-hop has been, and for the first time you’re starting to really get people outside of the culture to realise it’.”