Category: music

John Harbison’s “Great Gatsby” opened to mixed notices last season at its premiere. In years past that might have been the end of the opera – second productions are few and far between in the modern opera world. But Chicago Lyric Opera is producing a new “Gatsby” and Harbison has done some substantial rethinking. – Chicago Sun-Times

“The very fact that America’s two largest opera companies, the Metropolitan Opera and Lyric Opera, are trading productions of untested works by American composers, signifies that the move toward multiple productions has turned into a promising trend. It also suggests that opera directors and audiences are taking new American works a lot more seriously than they once did.”  – Chicago Tribune

Admittedly, there have been skeptics of Placido Domingo’s ability to take Los Angeles Opera into the big time. “History has not been kind to superstar performers recast in management roles, in opera and in other fields as well. But Domingo’s first major moves here since taking office, as noted in not one but two press conferences a couple of weeks ago, have been particularly shrewd in addressing some of the most-discussed company weaknesses. – LA Weekly

Yo-Yo Ma is “exuberance incarnate, arguably the finest, certainly the most dynamic cellist on the international circuit.” And yet he still spends half of every concert tucked in the back of the orchestra playing as one of the section cellists. “It would make him the world’s most expensive rank-and-file orchestral cellist but for the fact that, as he says, ‘I come free after the interval. You know, there’s nothing like the thrill of sitting at the back of the cellos, close to the basses, wind and brass.’” – The Telegraph (UK)

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra travels to Sydney with a program featuring the orchestra and Maori performers. “A note in the program explains that the concerts not only project biculturalism for international purposes, but launch a tour that will take these performances to the people of New Zealand itself in an act of reconciliation – or at least of united purpose. Such a worthy plan has its risks.”- Sydney Morning Herald

If the winner of a major international competition feels it necessary to later enter another big competition, what does that say about the first competition that it wasn’t able to properly launch the career of its winner. “As this all suggests, the piano competition circuit is rather more of a lottery than most competition organisers would like the public to realise.” – Irish Times

A music critic who wrote about the “dysfunctionality” of the modern symphony orchestra hears plenty of dissent from readers. – National Post (Canada)

Carnegie Hall spends the weekend paying tribute to Isaac Stern, the violinist who became one of the most powerful movers in the music world. – New York Times

The BBC Symphony Orchestra is quintessentially English. So how does Leonard Slatkin, renowned for championing American music, fit in as BBC’s new music director? – The Telegraph (UK)

Evgeny Kissin is acclaimed as one of the best modern pianists. Yet one critic notes an alarming trend in his playing: “At the louder and more extroverted end of the dynamic spectrum, though, Kissin’s taste for thunderous banging is growing ever more pronounced. Without gradations or subtlety, he will suddenly begin to pound away – sometimes in midphrase, sometimes at sectional transitions that are then marked all too starkly. The result is a maddening duality, a kind of sonic whiplash that keeps listeners shuttling uncomfortably back and forth between dynamic extremes.” – San Francisco Chronicle