Category: music

It seems the more conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt likes a piece of music, the less he’s inclined to perform it. He’s a sworn enemy of routine. This and his thoughts on Bach, Bruckner and Beethoven. – The Independent (UK)

The Ottawa Chamber Music Festival presents 98 concerts in two weeks with some of the world’s best chamber music groups and attracts 45,000 people. What’s the secret? – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

“Only if you’ve ignored the growth of opera over the past 15 years would you be so foolish to think that opera isn’t as popular, American and indissolubly linked to summer as baseball. In fact, opera is booming, in no small part because of the experience offered by adventurous summer companies like Glimmerglass.” – Washington Post

Iran holds it first big music festival, but a proposed performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is scrubbed. “We will not perform the Ninth, because it calls for women’s voices and that is banned under Islamic law.” – BBC Music Magazine

When the history of post-war American music is written, which history will it be? “A widely held belief asserts that during these years a band of rigorous, cutting-edge composers, mostly based in prestigious East Coast universities, seized the intellectual high ground and bullied their colleagues and students into accepting serial procedures as the only valid form of modernism. Yet another, quite opposite take on that period holds that the 12-tone composers never wielded much influence, that they themselves were the beleaguered minority group marginalized by the majority of composers, who continued to write music that was essentially tonal and far more popular.” – New York Times

• Sure there’s lots of new opera these days. But American composers look back to the familiar if they want a production. “There’s a general notion [in Europe] that we’ve fallen so far behind in innovations. They say there’s nothing happening in America anymore. I jump to the defense of our artists. But it’s true that the primary institutions in the U.S. have been reluctant to embrace innovators. . . . Without a doubt, there’s been a chilling effect.” – Philadelphia Inquirer

Nothing new about crossover music. But “it is increasingly difficult to define what, exactly, an orchestral pops concert should be. And many, if not most, of the classical pops concerts I’ve heard in the past few years have epitomized a sort of weird potpourri – a little of this, a little of that, and nothing very specific at all.” – Washington Post

“The one discipline you might expect to be free of such internecine squabbling is the big tent of World Music, a generic term used to describe just about anything outside the mainstream. But even here the canvas is being rent, as rival interests – from different continents to distinct countries to particular regions (or, if you’re part of Morocco’s notoriously fractious Master Musicians of Jajouka, individuals) – fight for the right to partake in what is, following the success of Buena Vista Social Club, a veritable pot of gold.” – The Sunday Times (UK)

Well known as the composer of “Stars and Stripes Forever” and dozens of other first-rate American marches, John Philip Sousa has not received much acclaim to date for the composing he did for the theater. Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, new York, opens its 25th-anniversary season this weekend with “The Glass Blowers,” Sousa’s last completed and most elaborate operetta. – New York Times