By the time this most recent contract extension (three years) is fulfilled, Jansons will have been chief conductor of this orchestra (widely considered Germany’s only real peer of the Berlin Philharmonic) for 21 years. Considered crucial to Jansons’s agreement to extend was a government commitment to build a new concert hall for the orchestra, which performs at the acoustically poor Philharmonie am Gasteig. (in German)
Category: music
How Music Fans Helped Build The Intenet
Just as industrialization and digital media changed the work of being a musician, they changed experiences and opportunities for audiences. While musicians dealt with the challenges of building and maintaining careers in the face of the new realities of their field, audiences developed new histories of participating with one another on their own terms. Now, even as musicians struggle to find their ways in an internet-mediated music world, audiences flourish.
This Year’s NEA Jazz Masters Awards Recipients
This morning the NEA announced four new recipients of the prize: pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim, composer-arranger-bandleader Maria Schneider, critic and novelist Stanley Crouch, and singer-songwriter and pianist Bob Dorough.
‘Football’s Coming Home’ – Unpacking England’s World Cup Anthem
Rebecca Mead has a go at the 1996 song whose official title is “Three Lions”: “It has been suggested that the song is about the heartbreaking condition of being a fan, which, in soccer-centric terms at least, it is. But it is also a song about English defeat — or, to put it more precisely, English defeatedness. … It’s a song about decline and regret and loss, about the tempting allure of resignation — the English emotional default — and the terrible pain of hopefulness.”
Here We Go Again – Reviving The Mozart Effect
A common test that detects electrical activity in the brain reveals “there is an anti-epileptic effect of Mozart music,” reports a research team led by Eliza Grylls. Three pieces of contemporary popular music did not have the same positive impact.
Rediscovering The Value Of CDs?
Many things once thought worthless—vinyl records, Brutalism—have grown in value. The Internet, which leaves no take unturned, has been predicting a compact disc comeback for years. After seeing what my lost Felt CD was now selling for, I began checking the prices of the CDs I’d held onto. A solo album by Kevin Rowland, of Dexys Midnight Runners, turns out to be worth $100 to $200 on Amazon. A couple Alex Chilton discs fall within the same price range. I was pleased, but scandalized too; I’d been so negligent with this treasure.
Why “Hamilton” Is The Opera Of Our Time
The irony is that what “Hamilton” represents now is exactly what opera used to be: a thrilling, contemporary, immersive stage presentation that’s a union of story, text, music, image and movement, and that gets under the skin and into the blood of a wide audience that feels it speaks profoundly to them. There’s something addictive about “Hamilton,” and that’s partly a result of spending three hours fully concentrated on sound and spectacle, straining to get every word, alongside hundreds of other people doing exactly the same thing. You don’t get that from a recording. Nor, often, do you get it in an opera house
The Composer Premiering A Classical-Pop WWI Commemoration Piece At The BBC Proms
Anna Meredith: “It’s five short pieces about the first world war using a big-ass orchestra, young musicians, a choir and the spectacular, eye-boggling visuals of 59 Productions. It’s not soldier’s stories but the mechanics of how they communicated: codes, redaction, field postcards.”
Ireland’s Extremely Cool Orchestra Members Play David Bowie In Their Wellies
The Trinity Orchestra plays everywhere, including summer music festivals (which can be rather damp on the Emerald Isle). “‘The priority is not to lose your instrument when you’re camping,’ says Kellie O’Neill, nodding. ‘Yep. That would be pretty bad.'”
In Santa Fe, ‘Doctor Atomic’ Is A Very Local Opera
Peter Sellars, who is re-creating the 2005 opera for a run in Santa Fe, says he’s also reconsidering elements of it. “Here the story is, of course, the Los Alamos laboratory, … but also the ‘downwinders,’ the people living with all these cancers from all the test sites — and the pueblos that are 10 minutes away from Los Alamos, where most people and their families were employed.”