Category: music

“‘We’re Not Gonna Take It,’ by the hair metal act Twisted Sister, was once named among the ‘Filthy 15’ songs singled out for offensive content and brought before Congress by concerned parents in the 1980s. It’s also an indelible hit, whose instantly recognizable hook practically invites the listener to shout along.” By now it’s been used by everyone from the striking schoolteachers of Oklahoma to the New York Yankees to Paul Ryan (?!?).

This spring, composer Wieland Hoban pitched the third in a series of pieces addressing the 2008-09 Israel-Gaza war to the Donaueschinger Musiktage. Last month, artistic director Björn Gottstein responded that he would allow no piece critical of Israel to be performed at the festival. Hoban went public, and the new music community in Germany (and beyond) has been arguing ever since.

The Philharmonia Orchestra and the period-instrument English Concert have inked five-year partnership agreements, beginning in 2020, with Garsington Opera in Buckinghamshire. The Philharmonia will perform for two to three productions, with the English Concert playing for one or two; they will replace the current pickup group in the pit.

A couple of years ago I did some recon at ground level, meeting with players like Spivey, guitarist Andy Reiss and saxophonists Jeff Coffin and Evan Cobb. Everybody told me the same thing: that Nashville has always nurtured a small but serious jazz culture, and that its constituency, like so much else in this booming city, is growing at a prodigious rate.

“James David Christie, widely regarded as one of the greatest organists of his generation, has resigned his post as distinguished artist-in-residence at the College of the Holy Cross … He has also left Oberlin College and Conservatory, where he was a professor of organ and chair of the organ department. Christie has played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra since at least 1980, and he served as Wellesley College organist for years. A group of former students wrote Holy Cross president Rev. Philip L. Boroughs earlier this month, charging that Christie ‘is an imminent danger to students on your campus.'”

“It’s the lederhosen that grabs you first. Two gents were walking down the street ahead of us in full Alpine rig … Among the flowerbeds and fountains that surround the main theatre of the Bad Ischl Lehar Festival a posse of young women crossed our path, all wearing embroidered dirndls and laughing. By the time we took our seats in the auditorium, we were grappling with a deeply un-British notion: that none of this was ironic. We weren’t at Glyndebourne any more.”

With Stephen Langridge’s appointment, managerial responsibility has been split for the first time in many years. As artistic director he will share the task of steering the organisation with long-term insider Sarah Hopwood, until recently the company’s finance director but appointed managing director in May. Recent predecessors – such as Anthony Whitworth-Jones, who held the job from 1989 to 1998, David Pickard (2001-15), who now runs the BBC Proms, and Sebastian F Schwarz, who disappeared almost before he began in 2017 – held the top job alone.

The folks at Spotify think so. Their valence scale (higher = happier, lower = sadder) has “been used to develop a ‘gloom index’ of Radiohead songs, to reveal the most depressing Christmas song, [and] to find out which European countries prefer sad songs (Portuguese fado really is a downer).” So data journalist Miriam Quick took the 1,080 songs that have held the top slot on the Billboard Hot 100 and looked at their Spotify valence scores – and she found that what the algorithm identifies as sad doesn’t quite track with what most humans think of as sadness.

“Now 77, well past the age at which most star singers retire, Mr. Domingo has performed nearly 4,000 times in a six-decade career, recorded more than 100 albums, and become a household name as one of the Three Tenors and in appearances on Sesame Street and The Simpsons. And he has continued to add voraciously to his repertory” – as well as to conduct, an endeavor in which his reviews have been mixed.