Category: music

Wolfgang Sawallisch is on his way out the Philadelphia’s music director. But as he’s turned 77 the critics are noting a new intensity in his performances. While Sawallisch notes the change, he’s at a loss to explain it. – Philadelphia Inquirer

Has a singer ever been trashed so thoroughly by the critics as Andrea Bocelli has? Yet his first recording of a complete opera (“La Boheme”) has some critics rethinking their assessments. “Judged as a recording experience, Bocelli’s Rodolfo, which he has performed onstage in Sardinia, offers a great deal. His pop-crossover background may be responsible for his unusual attention to words; try his wistful query about Mimi in the Act IV duet with Marcello, “L’hai visto?” (have you seen her?). This Rodolfo simply sounds young, a bit light in the head and endowed with the soul of a poet.” – San Francisco Examiner

“MP3.com announced a distribution agreement with the Universal Music Group on Tuesday, shortly after a federal court awarded the world’s largest record company $53.4 million in attorney fees and statutory damages stemming from one of the Web site’s streaming audio services.” – Sonicnet

The Vienna Philharmonic is changing, despite itself. “There are now three Australians in the orchestra. There are also two Americans, a Canadian, and both harpists are French. Over the next four years, seven viola-players are due to retire and it is a safe bet that most of the newcomers will be foreign and probably female. The pressure for change has come primarily from guest conductors who, accustomed to industrial-strength precision playing in American orchestras, have complained about Viennese frailties – notably the trombones and tuba – without recognising that those wavery underpinnings were part of what audiences identified as the Vienna Philharmonic sound.” – The Telegraph (UK)

“The idea of capturing opera on film, surprisingly, goes back to the beginning of cinema. Thomas Edison told the New York Times in 1893 that his intention was ‘to have such a happy combination of photography and electricity that a man can sit in his own parlor, see depicted upon a curtain the forms of the players in opera upon a distant stage and hear the voices of the singers’.” – Los Angeles Times

What is it about the Philadelphia Orchestra that makes (made?) that distinctive sound? – New York Times

While women have made notable inroads in the jazz world as singers and instrumentalists, they are still noticeably missing behind the bandstand – a fact not lost on detractors of the plans for Jazz at Lincoln Center, the lavish new home of Wynton Marsalis’s Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Their response to Marsalis’ claim that he runs a meritocracy and is waiting to find more female talent? “The argument that women will eventually be good enough is very old. There have been women good enough to be included for at least 60 years.” – Village Voice

Elliott Carter was 90 when he wrote his first opera. Some consider Carter America’s greatest living composer. Others “a mandarin aesthetic whose target audience can only be the academic analyst armed with graph paper and a calculator.” An the opera? “It boasts his perennial avoidance – as if on principle – of any hint of beauty, expressive content or sensual delight. It remains as resolutely standoffish toward the listener’s merely human sensibilities as a lump of granite.” – San Francisco Chronicle

Recent developments in the digital music industry (like Napster’s partnering with Bertelsmann and announcements of enhanced security systems) spell disaster for some proponents of freely accessible downloadable music. But maybe “what’s really at stake is not whether music will be expensively secure or freely exchangeable – but simply how soon the recording industry will assemble the music delivery system that is inevitable, the ‘celestial jukebox.’ In layman terms, a networked device that will allow you to download any song your heart desires, anytime.” – Salon