The Starbucks store manager who recently won the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs gets a call to sub for Helene Grimaud at a prestigious chamber music festival. Christopher Basso will fly in after his day job at a Manhattan Starbucks to play the recital, replacing Helene Grimaud, who canceled her appearance due to a sinus condition. – Boston Globe
Category: music
THE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE
Seattle’s Experience Music Project opens this week. So the building was designed by Frank Gehry and it’s colorfully blobby – just how do you experience the music in this “non-museum” museum? Why point and click, of course. This is a Paul Allen production after all. – New York Times
Gehry’s EMP building is startling, —
— but no one will rank it with his best work. It has been described as the architect’s rendering of one of the guitars Hendrix regularly smashed in performance, but it looks more like a pile of melted metal. – Boston Herald
NEVER TOO OLD TO DEBUT
Violinist Ida Haendel “is in her early seventies; her exact age is a matter of musicological confusion. As a child star in London before the Second World War, she sold out the biggest concert halls and never had need of the bijou Wigmore. In mid-life, she migrated to Canada. Now, playing as richly as ever, she is shunned by sexist orchestras that insist on female soloists (only females) being wrinkle-free. It is four years since she last played in Britain.” Now she makes her Wigmore debut. – The Telegraph (UK)
JUST ANOTHER DAY IN TENORVILLE
The care and feeding of the Three Tenors. “Ho-hum. No tempers flare; no chairs are thrown. Evidently, there has never been an instance when one tenor has screamed at the top of his Lloyd’s-of-London lungs, “Hold on, buddy. You sang Nessun dorma’ last time. It’s my turn.” – The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
PARIS OPERA REOPENS
France reopened its renovated Paris Opera Tuesday, after a 12-month revitalization project to restore the 1867 Charles Garnier building, which had long suffered from acid-rain and pollution damage. – New York Times
THE MUSIC OF REBELLION
Twentieth Century classical music is built on the idea of the maverick – the composer rebelling against the conventions of what came before. So just what defines a maverick? – Sonicnet.com
CARROT BEATS STICK
The recording industry isn’t going to win the digital music wars by suing everyone in sight. The companies need to figure out how to entice consumers. “Music as a service holds an incredible opportunity for the recording industry, but the industry isn’t going to grow by selling CDs, it will grow when the labels begin to think about this business as a service.” – Wired
NO HOME TO OPERA
Believe it or not, Canada does not have even one theater dedicated to opera. Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company – the country’s largest – has been trying for years to build one. But the obstacles are fierce, and Canadian governments, which will have to help out if a house is to be built, seem to be hurting the cause, not helping it. – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
THE BATTLE OF BRITTEN
From about 1945 up until the ’60s Benjamin Britten was lionized as the Great English Composer. But as he failed to embrace the more intellectual rigors of serialism and atonality he was demoted in critical reputation. But these many years later, Britten is more performed than any other 20th Century English composer. “Though not all of Britten’s music is of the first rank, much of it is comparable in quality to the finest compositions of the giants of modernism.” – Commentary