Category: music

Mahler significantly “reworked” six of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. “Mahler’s editing of Beethoven generally pleased performers. But he made his changes in red ink on the printed music. Critics saw a lot of red ink and they raised the roof.” Now Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony plan to perform the remade 9th symphony. “For those who know this music well, you’ll have fun spotting the differences.” – Chicago Tribune (AP)

LA Times critic Mark Swed recently lamented that American orchestras don’t play enough American music. Conductor John Mauceri responds in a letter to the editor: “While I totally agree with Swed and his passion for playing more American music, I would just hope he could find a way of embracing a larger vision of what constitutes important and vital music written on these vast and complicated shores.” – Los Angeles Times

About taxes, about his new young companion, about his weight – “I am very chubby. I make a competition for very young singers. If someone comes out who is chubby like me, he must sing like a god.” – New York Times Magazine

John Eliot Gardner is performing and recording all of Bach’s cantatas this year. “Though Bach is best known now for his grand masterpieces like the “St. Matthew Passion” and the B minor Mass, it was the 340 cantatas composed during his five years, starting in 1723, as cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig that drew the most notice when he died on July 28, 1750. They were the only pieces of music noted in the first paragraph of his obituary.” – New York Times

Itzhak Perlman has begun conducting, making his Tanglewood debut this weekend. “Of course, as a virtuoso violinist Perlman can do anything he wants to. As a conductor, Perlman is not a virtuoso, but he turns that into a virtue by approaching everything simply and directly, never attempting to juice things up or impose himself on the music, and by releasing the musicians to play as personally, responsively, and expressively as he has always wanted to. They in turn carry him over the rough spots, and they had to.” – Boston Globe

“That’s not to say Perlman should quit his day job, should trade bow for baton, anytime soon – despite his appointment as principal guest conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra starting in 2001. His conducting style is certainly idiosyncratic.” – Boston Herald

A North Korean orchestra has traveled to South Korea to perform a joint concert with a Seoul orchestra for the cooperative performance since the country was divided in two. – Korea Times

A few months ago there was a lot of hoping that Riccardo Muti might be persuaded to be the next music director of the New York Philharmonic. Here’s one critic who’s quite glad he didn’t get the job. – New York Times

Shostakovich is considered one of the giants of 20th Century music. But “the story of his life has been turned into a battlefield. Of course, everything and everyone is pulled into the line of fire. They shout obscenities on the Internet, publish articles and write books and plays about Shostakovich; someone even went to the trouble of composing an opera about him.”  – New York Times

Tonight Itzhak Perlman and the Philadelphia Orchestra play the first-ever pay-per-listen orchestral concert over the internet, launching the new Classical Music Internet Agreement, the deal in which 65 leading ensembles worked out an agreement with the on-line network and the American Federation of Musicians. “In this era of dwindling CD sales and the lack of recording contracts by most prominent American orchestras (including the Philadelphians), this initiative may well be the prelude to a new future for musical organizations.” – Philadelphia Daily News

A British bank pledges money to redo the acoustics of Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall. “For years, musicians – in particular the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, one of the main tenants of Roy Thomson Hall – have griped about the quality of sound in the facility, designed by Vancouver-based architect Arthur Erickson and opened in 1982.” – The Globe & Mail (Canada)