Category: music

To have their music sold in stores like Walmart, artists whose work contains profanity or controversial lyrics often record cleaned up versions. “You might think that these edited-for-content discs would be a popular alternative in an age of edgy music. Wrong. Young fans and artists hate them, many merchants disdain them, parents are confused by them, and even industry honchos find them wanting in quality.” – Los Angeles Times

“The intruder, either hungry for better grazing or charmed by the American diva’s voice, had broken through a series of fences before ending up in the water.” – Ninemsn (AAP)

“While our word processors, spreadsheets, and graphic applications share the same basic conventions as their predecessors from the early nineties, the software employed by actual musicians to create and edit their sounds on the PC has undergone a dramatic transformation. Indeed, today’s audio-production software features some of the most radical interface design anywhere. The funny thing about that transformation, though, is how backward-looking it turns out to be.” – Feed

La Scala’s opening night is the most glamorous event on the annual arts calendar. This year’s opening is high stakes though: “The first is the recent announcement that its standing-room area, lair of the claque and wellspring of disruptive booing, will be permanently closed – a brave, if not foolhardy, step that has excited enormous antagonism. The second is that January 27 will mark the centenary of the death of Giuseppe Verdi. – The Telegraph (UK)

La Scala, just down the road from the hotel where the composer died in January 1901, is dedicating its season to him, and the city has mounted a magnificent and comprehensive Verdi exhibition in the Palazzo Reale. – The Times (UK)

It was only a month or so ago that Mariss Jansons was being talked up as a successor to Kurt Masur at the New York Philharmonic. But the marriage is evidently not to be. Critics cite the “lack of devotion reportedly exhibited by Philharmonic musicians during a concert Jansons conducted them in on Oct. 31. Reviews of the performance were mixed, and some felt that the connection between Jansons and the Philharmonic musicians was lackluster. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

After a musicians’ strike and a prolonged search for a new executive director, the Toronto Symphony has posted the largest deficit in its history. “The orchestra now has an accumulated deficit of $4.9 million, after an operating loss of $2.3 million this past year.” – CBC

Michael Kaiser departs as head of London’s Royal Opera House this Friday. No successor has been chosen yet, though the short list is said to include Pierre Audi, artistic director of the Netherlands Opera for 12 years and founder of London’s Almeida Theatre, Rudolf Berger, who runs Strasbourg Opera, Richard Lyttleton, president of EMI Classics, and Tony Hall, currently head of BBC News. – BBC

“An opera about a strong-minded wife of the prophet Muhammad has been canceled in the Netherlands after the Moroccan cast and composer were pressured into withdrawing by Muslim clerics. The intimidation of the cast has caused a stir in Dutch cultural circles because it is seen as reminiscent of the censorship and the threats against Salman Rushdie and other Muslim writers who have touched on subjects involving the Koran.” – New York Times

“Occasionally we act as though artistic worth were constant across the ages – hence the phrase ‘timeless classic’ – but it isn’t so. The past, as novelist L.P. Hartley remarked, is another country, and the future another one still. Why assume that audiences in all those countries value the same things? And why assume that the things valued by future listeners are more profound and more important than those that appeal to a composer’s contemporaries?” – San Francisco Chronicle