Category: music

Leonard Bernstein was a trailblazer. And yet, “since Bernstein’s passing in 1990, at 72, none of the Big Five American orchestras has appointed an American music director. Of the other leading U.S. orchestras, only the San Francisco Symphony, which is thriving under Michael Tilson Thomas, and the Atlanta Symphony, which recently named Robert Spano as its music director, have dared to engage native sons.” – Chicago Tribune

Aaron Copland would have turned 100 years old this week. “Ten years after Copland’s death, and 29 after Stravinsky’s, the latter seems secure as one of the seminal figures of 20th-century music. Copland’s position is more provincial, his reach only barely extending beyond the Americas. But Copland made it respectable to be a composer of art music in America.” – Dallas Morning News

“All in all, there were roughly five Coplands, some of them overlapping. He was a Stravinskian modernist of the 1920s, a folk-inspired populist from the 1930s through the ’50s, an even more modernistic 1960s serialist, a Hollywood film composer who won an Oscar for 1949’s The Heiress, and, in the most encompassing characteristic of all, a musical dramatist. In all guises, Copland is, more than ever, a fixture in the American musical landscape.” – Philadelphia Inquirer

The staff tumult at Carnegie Hall since its new director took over become nastier. “Maybe the Carnegie staff has not done its job and is being told so in no uncertain terms. Yet having observed the people who seem to be fleeing pell-mell from the building, I find that notion hard to believe. Another possibility is that Americans take more kindly to persuasion than to command and obedience. Resistance to strongly expressed authority is in our nature; in fact, it is why we happened as a country.” – New York Times

The rock-’em-sock-’em World Wrestling Federation has become one of the major sponsors of the Connecticut Grand Opera & Orchestra’s Education Program. “It would seem like there are a lot of differences, but there are facets of both that are the same. They perform on a stage, we perform on a stage. They have a story line with good and evil, greed and jealousy, just like we do. The only difference is they solve things through singing, we solve things using various household objects such as tables, chairs or ladders.” – Hartford Courant

Continuing the recent public auditions for the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, Christoph Eschenbach stepped in for the ailing Kurt Masur this week. How’d he do? – New York Times

Thousands of musicologists converge on Toronto to dissect the elements of music. “The paradox is that Western thinking about music has provided the field’s lingua franca at the very moment that Western art music is considered least central.” – New York Times

Britain’s top two opera company jobs are currently up for grabs. The post of executive director at the Royal Opera House is giving headhunters fits since it’s such an impossible job. Meanwhile, the top job at smooth-as-silk Glyndebourne came open this week. – The Guardian

A new opera about golf by a Scottish composer bows in Berkeley. ” ‘Giocatore’ (The Player) tells the tale of a young Italian golfer, Giovanni, living in Scotland, who needs to raise money to visit his dying father back in Italy. He and the owner of the Scottish manor take on two American golfers in a wagered game.” – Sonicnet

South Africa’s traditional arts organizations have been in turmoil since the government has cut back funding. Last July the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra went out of business. Now not one, not two, but three new orchestras are set to come into being. “Interested parties are convinced that Cape Town cannot support two orchestras, let alone a third. The tragedy-farce started after the CTPO management decided to liquidate the orchestra in an attempt to avoid the financial implications of paying a retrenchment package to its 80 musicians.” – Daily Mail & Guardian (South Africa)