Category: music

Canada’s National Youth Orchestra brings together the country’s top young musicians each summer and plays a tour across the country. But this year the tour has been cut back from 15 concert stops to eight because of funding cuts. – CBC

Choosing from country music generators that know the long road from “flirt” to “hurt” or Goth-inspired generators that will search for that perfect rhyme for “pierced skin” (“fierce kin”?), phonetically challenged songsmiths and Web surfers looking for distraction can now pick up the mouse and sit back as the poetry springs forth from the computer screen. – New York Times

After 43 years John Crosby is stepping down from running the Santa Fe Opera. “A first-rate visionary and a second-rate conductor, Crosby has run his festival like a reasonably benign dictator, amassing an extraordinary record of significant premieres to counterbalance the tourist-attraction repertory. He has done much to cultivate domestic exposure to the neglected operas of his favourite composer, Richard Strauss, and has also helped discover several generations of important American singers. Glyndebourne was never like this.” – Financial Times

• “I’ve lived with opera for a long time,” composer Leslie Uyeda told Canada’s National Post. “And one thing that a Canadian does not have when she watches opera is an intimate knowledge of the rolling hills of Italy — the landscape where [a typical Italian opera] takes place. I wanted to write something that North Americans would have no trouble relating to.” – Sonicnet

After conducting “Falstaff” this weekend, Boston Symphony conductor Seiki Ozawa was driving home when he came across a car wreck. The car was on the edge of a cliff and Ozawa held onto it and stayed with the driver for 30 minutes until police arrived. – CBC

The New York Philharmonic truly wanted Riccardo Muti as its next music director, but the courtship’s officially over – the Philharmonic decides now that what it needs most of all is a full-time musical director. So the search goes on… – New York Times  

The opera singers Marijana Mijanovic and Kresimir Spicer are “the couple of the summer,” having thrilled audiences at Aix-en-Provence’s popular summer opera festival. “But it is also because they are a real-life Romeo and Juliet: she is a Serb, he is a Croat, and they live together in Amsterdam. – New York Times

“Any number of classical music lovers will tell you with glee of the bad pieces they love to hate. But people who will tell you about pieces they hate to love, but love anyway, are somewhat more rare. Saying you’ve got a thing for Brahms’ Hungarian Dances Nos. 4 and 5, for instance, especially if you’ve ever gone anywhere near a music school, is particularly dangerous – but only if you mean it sincerely. Irony does exist in classical music, but it’s mostly in the ears of cynical (younger) beholders.” – Philadelphia Inquirer

It’s common practice today for record labels to create “clean versions” of albums with explicit lyrics, and some companies even ask artists to re-record versions without profanity. “”It’s getting like we almost have a McCarthyism in the business, but the censorship isn’t new; what’s new is the fear and the compliance going on to this extent. And I think a lot of artists go along with it because they’re afraid of being lost in the corporate shuffle and falling out of favor with their labels.” – New York Times

Turns out those infrared enhanced-hearing headsets provided by theatres for hearing-impaired patrons are the perfect bootleggers tool. “Bootleggers can simply request an ALD headset, which provides a high-quality feed of a live show via a low-level FM frequency broadcast inside a facility. The music pirates then steal the headset feed, giving them concert performances devoid of the usual bootleg problems such as random crowd noise or distortion.” – Seattle Times (AP)