Category: music

Birgit Nilsson, the Swedish soprano, had a “voice at full throttle [whose] sheer projectile force has been often and aptly compared to that of a steel blade.”

Reicha, a theorist and composer who taught at the Paris Conservatory – and influenced Berlioz, Liszt, Franck, Gounod – was a quirky, unconventional thinker whose theories presaged Ives and Bartok. “Reicha was driven by a desire to bring the same structure and logic to music education that he saw in other sciences.”

The Philadelphians got some heavy criticism earlier this year when it came out that they hadn’t programmed a single piece of music written by a woman for the coming season. So they quickly added a couple of short pieces to the schedule and then planned a reading session of scores by emerging women. Now, reports Peter Dobrin, the orchestra is taking serious steps to address the issue in the next two seasons.

Timothy O’Leary comes to the company from a very successful decade running the Opera Theater of St. Louis, writes Anne Midgette. “The companies in St. Louis and Washington are very different animals. St. Louis is a festival, where an intense five- or six-week season, attended by audiences from around the world, is followed by a whole year of planning and gestation. Washington, by contrast, has a year-round season but plays more to local audiences. … When the season is longer, carving out time to be creative, to come up with new ideas and initiatives, is a challenge.”

Aidan Lang, who succeeded longtime general director Speight Jenkins in 2015, will complete the coming season before heading to Cardiff. In his tenure so far, he has seen Seattle Opera’s mainstage attendance increase by 27% and launched a new series of contemporary chamber operas, many linked to current social issues.

Company general director David Devan, on the O17 and O18 festivals devoted to new work as well as about changes to regular-season programming: “Our industry is hanging on by a thread to models that were created in the ’50s-’70s. A subscription model focused on excellent performance in the traditional repertoire … This would be like ignoring the streaming movement and sticking to network television. We wanted to be the HBO of opera.”

The viola is an inherently quixotic instrument. Its construction is a compromise between an acoustic ideal and human limits: For its sound to bloom as effortlessly as that of a violin or cello, its neck would need to be impossibly long. For most of the instrument’s history, composers have conspired to keep it out of the limelight, assigning it a supporting role. And chamber music conventions dictate that on the rare occasion that a viola does get the melody, it’s facing the wrong way.

“Perhaps then, pleasure and music are connected in some way further removed from both the obvious sonorous tickle that music affords or the formal demands that music places on the listener. Perhaps we haven’t gone far enough when we suppose that pleasure in music derives from the recognition within it of a passionate utterance, or an imitation of nature, or an intense game of challenging listening to be played. Perhaps we’ve been asking too many questions about what in music is pleasurable, and too few about how pleasure is a phenomenon with musical qualities.”

That’s brief in two senses: the instrument had a heyday of just a generation or so in the second half of the 18th century (only about 20 instruments survive), and the decay of the sound is quick enough that, as musical instrument historian Cleveland Johnson puts it, “on the tangent piano, one hears not only the beginning of every note, but the end. The instrument allows [its player] to play with this space between notes.” (includes sound clips)

Last month, Germany’s national rail operator announced that it would start broadcasting atonal music from the speakers at Berlin’s Hermannstrasse station in order to repel drug dealers and homeless people who were congregating there. The city’s new-music community rose up in protest. Lisa Benjes of the Initiative Neue Musik writes about how she organized a concert of atonal music at the station that convinced the powers-that-be to abandon that plan.