Category: music

Fortunately, one thing we have a lot of in this organization is risk capital. Our board allows us to take chances — artistically and monetarily. Not every piece we commission is going to enter the repertory. Most work we commission is not. So, why do it? We do it as an investment in the art form, to push the boundaries forward, and keep our audiences informed and inspired.”

The Swiss maestro, who lost his positions with several orchestras earlier this year in the wake of multiple accusations of sexual assault, will become principal guest conductor of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, one of Russia’s top orchestras, as of May 2019.

Called Primephonic, the platform claims to have nearly all classical music ever recorded, with over 1 million tracks available at the push of a button.

The first day we busked in Manchester with the double bass, we broke £100. Part of the key to our financial success was having a “bottler” – someone who would walk around the crowd with a hat while the band were playing, ensuring that no pocket went unemptied. Legend has it that the word “bottler” came from a tradition whereby someone would go from table to table in pubs collecting money for the musicians, with a hat in one hand and a bottle in the other.

“Since I was a little kid, I was interested in figuring out other people and why they did the things they did. Even when I was doing purely instrumental work, I always thought of the melodies and the form as a kind of interplay between characters. Different forces in the piece, maybe chords, were working with each other or against each other. I was putting human dramas onto this music all the time, even if I was the only one who ever knew it.”

“His charisma was indeed potent, but as Bernstein recedes into history he seems more a product of his time than an agent of transformation. … The aspirational America of the mid-twentieth century was looking for a Bernstein — a native genius who could knock off Broadway tunes as fluently as he conducted Brahms — and one was duly found. There will not be another, not because talent is lacking but because the culture that fostered him is gone.”

“More people in the United States listen to and enjoy jazz or near-jazz than any other music. Jazz is of tremendous importance for its quantity alone.” That was Marshall Stearns, one of the founders of academic jazz studies, writing in 1956 to argue why his subject was worthy of serious scholarship. As Nate Chinen says in his fascinating and vital new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, that passage now sounds bizarre, like a report from “a vanished culture.” In fact, the music’s status today is the complete opposite: Most people vaguely recognize jazz’s cultural importance, but no one’s expected to get too excited about it

With astonishing speed, female musicians in Brazil have in the past couple of years begun breaking into the male realm of samba circles, taking a seat at the table both literally and figuratively. Just a few years ago, the musicians playing in a samba circle jam session used to be almost all male. In 2018, though, a clutch of all-female samba groups have set out to change that, and in doing so, they have generated what could be a sea change for this beloved Brazilian musical genre.

Of course, it had to be the adaptation of Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto. The movie, which comes out on September 14, “is the rare film that does not use opera to comment ironically on bloodshed, or signal sinister depravity, or provide the sonic equivalent of a heart-shaped box of chocolates in a moment of slightly cloying Valentine’s Day-style romance.”