Category: music

The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Live Nation and PromoWest each want to develop a concert venue at The Banks, each arguing they’ll bring the acts young people want to see. Most of the decision makers have dismissed Live Nation’s bid since the proposal would require $36 million in public money.  So that pits the CSO and PromoWest against each other.

For generations the Philadelphia Orchestra was one of few institutions in this town that could claim a world-class status, and even for the many citizens who could care less about classical music, this was a source of pride. Today, it’s hard to find similar pride in an organization so attached to a nostalgic, often reactionary vision of its own history. There is room for lots of different kinds of music in our big city, and maybe it is for the best if the Philadelphia Orchestra is no longer at its center.

“[Stephen] Cleobury’s announcement that he was retiring from the position – which he had held since 1982 – sparked speculation about who would step into the prominent and demanding role. Aside from singing daily services in the extraordinary chapel, the choir have been prolific recording artists over many year, most recently releasing albums on its own label, launched in 2012. Meanwhile, the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols reaches audiences of millions both on radio and television.” Cleobury’s successor will be Daniel Hyde, currently director of music at St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Only in Ontario? “According to [local police in the town of Erin], the man broke-in to the unlocked residence, drank a bottle of wine from the fridge, then proceeded to play the family’s piano until he was caught. There were two residents located upstairs at the time of the break-in.” (One shudders to think how this might have played out in Florida.)

A 22-year-old bassoonist was in a church parking lot in the town of Springfield, sitting on his trunk and playing scales while waiting for a rehearsal to start, when he was slowly approached by police wearing bulletproof vests. It seems a nearby citizen, worried by mass shootings in the news and unfamiliar with large double-reed instruments, had called 911. Said the young man, “In the right kind of light, it looks like a bazooka, but I don’t think it was the right kind of light.” (Again, one shudders to think how this might have played out in Florida.)

In the past several decades, performance art—or at least the evocation of “performance art”—has somewhat unexpectedly wormed its way into popular music. The union began, perhaps, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, with Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s bed-ins for peace, and reached a sort of apex with Lady Gaga arriving at the 2011 Grammy Awards inside a giant egg.

“In his classic book, The Maestro Myth, Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power, first published in 1991, Norman Lebrecht described how ‘sexual rapacity’ added to the mystique of many conductors. … As though the touchy-feely nature of the performing arts, with that odd sense of a creative imperative for artists, is actually an entitlement, especially for those who are socially inept or nerdfully ignorant. … Moreover, the hierarchical nature of symphony structures insures that, even with a code, the allocation of power remains unchanged. And so this all becomes another argument for the kind of horizontal structures that you find with the likes of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.”

It has long been considerably less expensive to spiff up and repackage an existing recording than to make a new one. The first stereo albums of Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, for example, sound as though they were recorded yesterday, although some of them are nearly sixty-five years old and every person associated with them is either dead or long retired. Brilliant young performers now have to compete not only with their contemporaries but also with a host of legendary ghosts. Through technology we have established a permanent pantheon of great performances, one that can be very difficult, perhaps impossible, for newcomers to crack.

“The deal values EMI Music Publishing at $4.75 billion including debt, more than double the $2.2 billion value given in 2011 when a consortium led by Sony won bidding rights for the company. Sony, which has run the business since then, will buy a 60 percent stake owned by [UAE sovereign wealth fund] Mubadala Investment Company, lifting its ownership to around 90 percent from 30 percent currently.”