Category: music

Low-cost videoconferencing brought together live collaborative performances between British and South African musicians in “a fusion of communications technology and live performance. An array of British and South African sponsors combined forces to present Call and Response, an interactive concert linking musicians and audiences in Benoni and Birmingham, United Kingdom.” – Daily Mail and Guardian (South Africa)

Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, led by Pinchas Zukerman is on a tour of Israel and Jordan. But an eruption of fighting on the West Bank has forced the orchestra to cancel concerts. – CBC

The Boston Symphony has hurriedly withdrawn this season’s covers of its program books after discovering that part of the cover image “presents an indistinct image that creates a visual double-entendre of a distinctly anatomical nature.” – Boston Globe

“Some think of the Opera House as a superb example of Goethe’s frozen music; others imagine a beached white whale, a galleon sailing off to Elfland, nine ears cocked to hear some heavenly aria, nine nuns playing football. ‘A bunch of toenails clipped from a large albino dog’, the Sydney journalist Ron Saw once wrote.” – London Review of Books

In February baritone Bryn Terfel felt a stab in his back in the middle of a performance and limped off the Metropolitan Opera stage. After back surgery and five months to recover, he’s back. “It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my very short time on this planet.” – CNN

The “Court of Musical Euphemisms and Factual Economies” is now in session. Sorting out the twists and turns of choosing music directors for America’s major orchestras is a mysterious game. “For reasons I have never fathomed, US coverage of serious music seldom delves below the veneer of stability and tends to reiterate every last euphemism and half-truth without so much as a cocked eyebrow. Such complacency nurtures a system rich in abuses and absurdities.” – The Telegraph (UK)

Antonio Pappano on his plans as the new music director at the Royal Opera House: “Conduct as many masterpieces as possible and there is a chance that their quality will rub off on you.” If that maxim holds true, he will be in dazzling shape in four years’ time, for by then he intends to have conducted the Royal Opera in Ariadne, Wozzeck, Falstaff, Butterfly, Lohengrin, Pagliacci, Salome, Aida, Tannhauser, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Faust and Peter Grimes. It’s an astonishing list. If a No 11 bus happens to stray on to the Covent Garden stage, you feel that Pappano will conduct that too.” – The Times (UK)

The Chopin Competition, one of the world’s major international piano competitions, is set to begin. The competition has launched the careers of pianists such as Maurizio Pollini and Krystian Zimerman and standards are so rigorous that no winners were declared in the last two competitions (in 1990 and 1995). “This year’s competition has already proved tough. Only 98 pianists qualified, based on videotapes of their performances, compared with 140 in 1995.” – Ottawa Citizen (AP)

Cleveland Orchestra conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi slipped on a stair Sunday night and dislocated his right shoulder. But though he was noticeably in pain, the accident didn’t stop him from conducting the orchestra’s opening night in Carnegie Hall. It is Carnegie Hall, after all. – The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

Pinchas Zukerman and Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra are in the Middle East on the orchestra’s “most extensive tour ever” But bloody clashes in the West Bank have cast a pall over the tour. – The Globe and Mail (Canada)