Category: music

“The ensemble has lost more than half its members since the start of the year, when the government issued a directive barring state employees with two jobs from receiving two salaries. The anti-corruption measure was suggested by the World Bank and should affect only about a third of the orchestra’s musicians, but because of delays in carrying out the reform wages have been withheld from the entire group.”

For a performer like Brendel, balancing chaos and order requires a capacity for both seriousness and playfulness, and a comfort with some overlap. He holds that a totally logical world would be very regrettable, that there needs to be a balance between the rational and the irrational, the finite and the infinite. The performer and the listener each can think of this productive tension as that between sound and silence. Loving music, Brendel suggests, means embracing its fleeting moments as well as the silence out of which they come.

Judging from the seven events I saw this year, OBF 2018 was below the standards of years past. Nothing distinguished it from an ordinary lineup of classical fare. No artistic vision unified the schedule or oversaw the standards of performance. Engaging with how a particular conductor thinks about music was no longer possible for devoted audience members. Following that conductor’s musical talent (first Rilling, then Halls) from year to year and piece to piece has been the most important feature of OBF. With the absence of a world-class musician heading the festival, I felt a profound artistic void.

“Classical music aficionados: Go away. This article is not for you. Instead, it is for everyone who sees classical music as a private club and who feels they’re standing outside the clubhouse.”

Stephen Langridge, currently director of music and drama at the opera house in Gothenburg, Sweden (and son of the late tenor Philip Langridge and mezzo Ann Murray), will join the festival in early 2019.

In Moses, a production of the Bavarian State Opera’s youth program and cast with a mixture of recent refugees, the children of immigrants to Germany, and native Bavarians, and set to “a mixture of new music by Benedikt Brachtel and adapted excerpts from Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto, the teenagers tell the story of Moses — common ground for followers of the Bible, Torah and Quran — with Brechtian interludes about refugee experiences and current events.”

Few could have foreseen a battalion of flannel-clad Seattleites, backed by an upstart zine-turned-label, becoming one of the biggest pop-music disrupters of a generation. Nor could one have predicted that, 30 years later, you could access almost every record ever made from a telephone-computer-camera in your pocket.

The institution somehow came back from trying to cancel the 2017-2018 season to go bigger than ever, and remain relevant to its city. “Over the coming season, it will play free concerts at every branch library in the city, collaborate with the Guadalupe Dance Company, attempt to stage a performance with a Mexican orchestra, deliver a series of free concerts for children and play Veterans and Memorial Day shows.”

The Passepartout Duo aren’t kidding with their name: They go everywhere, landing (for good) nowhere in particular. “At this point, we’ve completely given up location-dependent life. That’s to say: we’re homeless, and we’re happy about it. We have four small bags: one backpack and one instrument case each. We each have one pair of shoes and we use them for everything, until they fall apart; then, we pick up a new pair and keep going.”