Category: music

The Competition Bureau has expanded its investigation into Ticketmaster to include its secret scalper program after a joint CBC News/Toronto Star investigation revealed the ticket seller is working with large-scale scalpers to resell millions of dollars worth of tickets.

“Over the next two years, he will visit 36 cities — winking at the fact that each of the six [Bach cello] suites has six sections — on six continents. In each city, he will pair a performance of the full cycle … with what he’s calling a ‘day of action’ that brings Bach into the community. It’s a small and glancing, but also deeply felt, attempt to suggest that this music, with its objectivity and empathy, its breathless energy and delicate grace, could, if heard closely by enough people, change the world.”

“The Chamber Music Society (CMS) of Lincoln Center recently received a $5 million gift from Ann S. Bowers of Palo Alto, earmarked for its CMS Two residency program, which develops the next generation of young musicians. … Bowers’ gift is the largest individual gift in the society’s 48-year history. If that wasn’t newsworthy enough, consider the source of the gift. Bowers has the distinction of being the first woman to hold a vice president title in Silicon Valley while working for Apple. In a giving space where tech donors remain less than enthusiastic about the arts, Bowers’ gift is a notable outlier — and an encouraging one.”

“Violence and social pressures have not deterred members of the country’s nascent orchestra of mostly young girls from using music to ‘heal wounds’ and promote women’s rights in the strictly conservative Muslim society. The ensemble, known as Zohra, was founded in 2014 as part of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) in Kabul.”

The Auckland Philharmonia has reportedly complained to the national ministry of culture about an increase in the number of performances scheduled for Auckland next year by the New Zealand Symphony, the national orchestra, which is based in Wellington (the capital) but gives an equal number of performances in Auckland, which has three times Wellington’s population.

At first, it lived primarily on pirate radio, that great British tradition in which people scale the tallest building they can find and hide makeshift transmitters. In the eighties and early nineties, new strains of dance music, like hardcore rave and jungle, evolved on such stations. In part, grime was a reaction to how posh the world of dance music had become by the late nineties.

David Frost controls the soundboard for all of broadcasts for terrestrial and satellite radio, for the company’s in-house records, and for the HD cinema simulcasts. Joshua Barone watched him work on opening night: “He sits in a booth, following along with a conductor’s score and constantly adjusting several dozen faders, dials that control the levels on microphones set up onstage and throughout the orchestra pit. With the appearance of an organist juggling complex polyphony, he aims to match the high quality of studio recordings — only in real time.”

“Mr. Honeck’s contract [as music director] was to expire in 2020. He has been with the orchestra since 2008 and has led the PSO to its first Grammy win since 1992. The contract extension” — through the 2021-22 season — covers the orchestra’s 125th anniversary season (the PSO was founded in 1896) and the 50th anniversary of its tenure in Heinz Hall.”

“Wilkins has been music director for the 65-year-old orchestra since 2006, and is the sixth conductor.”

“One year into the conductor’s tenure as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, Gary Ginstling, the orchestra’s executive director, announced a four-year contract extension, through 2024-2025. Also announced was “an in-house digital media initiative, meaning that the NSO will record its own performances for streaming and for physical CD and DVD.”