Category: music

Nick Van Bloss says that his involuntary tics disappear while he is playing and that he has concertized successfully abroad, but that the orchestras in his home country have gotten together to blacklist him. The Telegraph has obtained correspondence between some of those orchestras on the matter.

So “none of this old tired stuff done in the same way” could really be the festival’s motto. But this year’s installment, O18, which began on Thursday and runs through Sunday, is most successful when it’s most traditional. Two of the four shows I saw over the weekend were proscenium productions with orchestras in the pit: opera as you imagine it. These were far more satisfying than the pair of out-of-the-box entries.

Is American opera as a whole in a terminal condition? Or are the collapse of the New York City Opera and the Met’s ongoing struggle to survive purely local matters of no relevance elsewhere?

How the LA Phil became the envy of classical music may be what everyone wants to know. It’s maybe even more useful, though, to ask why as well. The story of the LA Phil feat is ultimately about a reason for being. Every great orchestra has had its heydays when it has been uniquely true to its place and population and purpose and art and era.

Is it good for indie musicians? Maybe. It’s probably going to be great for Spotify: “This might be a way to lure more influential users away from competitor platforms, something that’s been a difficult task until now since once a user has made a decision on a platform it’s hard to get them to change. With content that’s more or less exclusive to Spotify, fans of the artist will have to subscribe to listen as well.”

Yay? Yes, good: “The company has asked Missy Mazzoli to write an opera based on George Saunders’s ghostly novel Lincoln in the Bardo, and is planning to stage Jeanine Tesori’s opera Grounded, based on the George Brant play about a fighter pilot sidelined by pregnancy who goes into drone warfare. They are the first two women commissioned to write operas for the Met, which has only performed two operas by female composers in its history.”

Teju Cole is a novelist, essayist, photographer and photography critic – so naturally he’d team up with composer and jazz pianist (and trained physicist) Vijay Iyer. Cole: “It’s a high-wire act. .. It doesn’t have a set text.”

The stories of the 45-ton set’s missteps are legion, but, “after spending months in the shop, it should be ready to go for another spin this spring, Met officials hope.”

“I would describe us now as being in a relatively stable space but also a very creative space, where we have good relationships, a good contract in place, good operations and we’re in the midst of a strategic planning process that will help us drive the direction for the next five years.”

“The challenge is to find an integrated approach that enlarges the number of people who are in our orbit,” he says. “As demographics change and people become more distracted, the notion of how you create compelling experiences on stage and how you build vast community around them is, I think, the next frontier. I don’t think we fully know how to do that yet.”