Category: music

“Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison Thursday for multiple counts of fraud, including the failed festival in the Bahamas last year where the 26-year-old lured hundreds of millennials with the help of celebrity investors like Ja Rule and Instagram celebrities like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid.”

The Berlin-based Korean composer, who has already had three major works performed by the Philharmonic, receives the biennial award just a week after the orchestra premiered the previous prizewinner’s commission — Louis Andriessen’s Agamemnon.

“Alas, it’s hard for me to see how the Met can realistically hope to reinvent itself other than by razing its superannuated theater and starting from scratch. Nor am I sanguine about the long-term prospects for, say, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, whose home is the 3,563-seat Civic Opera House and which was just shut down by an orchestra strike, or the San Francisco Opera, which performs in the 3,126-seat War Memorial Opera House. (The Vienna State Opera House, by way of comparison, has 2,220 seats.)”

He prides himself in understanding all the technical processes which go into creating a great violin and he makes around 8 a year. He even knows the whereabouts of most of his instruments and gets to see them from time to time as the musicians who commissioned them often become friends.

The stolen Strad resurfaced in 2015, several years after the death of the apparent thief, a violinist with a checkered career, when his ex-wife turned it over to the F.B.I. The bureau returned it to Mr. Totenberg’s three daughters, Amy, Jill and Nina Totenberg, who decided to have it restored and sold — but who wanted to make sure it wound up with a musician, not locked away in a collection.

Reporter Julien Hanck visits Warsaw and talks with two jury members and all six finalists about the challenges and joys of using instruments from Chopin’s own lifetime and about their own experience with those pianos. (One prizewinner had been playing them since he was 12, another started as a harpsichordist, and one finalist had never played anything older than an early-20th-century Erard.)

“[The collector] referred to Mahler’s ‘spectacular banalities,’ Wagner’s ‘voluptuous debauches,’ and Weber’s ‘inanities.’ … ‘Why give us so much … that nourishes the idle, the ignorant, the lazy, the debauche, to whom in music the only thing is the cheap emotional orgy?” Yes, the Barnes and the Philadelphians are building two programs out of this — and they should be good ones.

In its court filing, dated Aug. 31, the BSO argued that Rowe and Ferrillo’s work are not comparable, stating that “the flute and the oboe are not comparable instruments, nor are they treated as such by most major orchestras in the United States.” It added that “each instrument has its own pay scale at leading orchestras around the country, including the BSO.”

According to the orchestra’s statement, while the Lyric’s budget grew from $60 million in 2012 to $84 million in 2017, the weekly salary for musicians increased an average of less than 1 percent annually and, when adjusted for inflation, decreased by just over 5 percent since 2011. The orchestra is represented by the Chicago Federation of Musicians.