Category: music

“I was by no means always an opera fan, and it was the singing that got me in the end. My grandmother and parents had taken me to see a couple of productions when I was younger in the hope of firing some latent interest, but it didn’t really grab me. Then, one day in my 20s, I heard a CD of my wife’s of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. I had no story to go on, no costumes, no set, no visuals at all, just a series of the most extraordinary voices singing insanely beautiful music. Hooked, I was. So hooked that all these years later I practically begged Glyndebourne to let me help present this weekend’s inaugural Glyndebourne Opera Cup competition for young singers.”

“Amid the manifold campaigns to make classical music more accessible, less patriarchal, to take itself less absolutely seriously and to crack a smile – if not a joke – the outdated term is getting slightly grating to read. … [And] ‘maestro’ doesn’t fool anybody. If anything, it reveals a kind of uniquely fragile masculinity that sips time and again from the elixir of self-proclaiming ‘greatness’ in order to reaffirm its own status. The musicians, at least, don’t fall for it.”

“Gone are the days of classical repertoire standing alone and just being enough,” James Williams said. “This approach would cater for less than half the new audience that wants to learn more about the genre. Classical music for a modern British orchestra has a new name – it’s simply called orchestral music.”

“It is difficult to envisage a world in which every recording was practically unique: popular recordings are defined by their reproducibility.” Yet, in the early days of Edison’s phonograph and Eldridge Johnson’s gramophone, had become good enough to be sold for home entertainment, “no reliable and commercially viable method for duplicating recordings was developed. For about ten years, most recordings released commercially were one-off items.” Music historian Eva Moreda Rodríguez recounts some of the ingenious (and not) ways that record companies handled that limitation.

It looks like we owe Yoko an apology. New research finds rock bands have more critical and commercial success if they contain a mix of married and single musicians.

Dreamer, with music by Jimmy López (the opera Bel Canto and text by Nilo Cruz (a Pulitzer winner for the play Anna in the Tropics), was commissioned two years ago by Cal Performances in Berkeley. In those two years, of course, quite a lot about the situation of the Dreamers has changed, and, as reporter Michael Cooper found out, that changed the piece itself.

With the appointment, Hope, a virtuoso soloist who also directs other ensembles as concertmaster, becomes New Century’s fourth music director, following Stuart Canin (1992-99), Krista Bennion Feeney (1999-2006) and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg (2008-17.)

“Chad Smith, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief operating officer, … will take over in Ojai for Thomas W. Morris, who is retiring in 2019 after 16 years in the position. Smith will continue to serve in his post at the L.A. Phil while beginning work with Ojai’s 2020 music director, Matthias Pintscher.”

“[The work] is hung on a musical frame. But more saliently to most audiences, perhaps, it is religious, it is social, it is political. … Maybe the technical term for it all is simply this: groovy.” Peter Dobrin considers the new recording of Mass, released for the Bernstein centennial, by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra (and a whole lot of others).