Category: music

“What’s always challenging is there’s so much scrutiny, and I do think the language the press and other people use is different. I got called steely, I got called formidable, I got called tough. I wanted to embrace those words, but every time someone said something like that to me, a little part of me died, because that is not how I meant to be.”

The tuba, the biggest and lowest-pitched among the brass family, can run from around $2,000 for beginner band models to more than $20,000 for specialized professional versions, says Martin Erickson, a past president of the International Tuba Euphonium Association. People with “nefarious” intentions, he says, probably try to resell tubas or use them in other bands. “You don’t expect tubas to fall into that sort of thing.”

Anne Midgette meets the composer, who’s about to make his Kennedy Center performing debut – at age 81 – with some of those keyboard pieces.

“The two stars recently took a break from their intense final weeks of rehearsals” – Fleming as Nettie Fowler in Carousel and O’Hara as Despina in Così fan tutte – “to sit down at the Met and talk about what they had learned about each other’s turfs, share some of their insecurities and, at times, swap a little advice. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.”

NME (for New Musical Express), something like Great Britain’s version of Rolling Stone, had a circulation in the hundreds of thousands in the days of The Beatles and Rolling Stones and through the eras of punk, New Wave, and Britpop. In 2015, its print sales figures down to 15,000, NME made itself free and got its circulation back up to 300,000 – for a while. (NME will continue as a web-only title.)

Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston responds to an article arguing that we might soon be seeing female tenors on the opera stage: “‘Looser gender divisions in casting’ may well be possible in Shakespearean theatre, where speaking rather than singing voices are involved, but there are no female professional opera singers, even those of us who sing in the contralto range, begging to sing tenor roles such as Rodolfo (in Puccini’s La Bohème) or Alfredo (in Verdi’s La Traviata) at pitch.” (Or even transposed, for that matter.)

Billy McFarland, 26, pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud and agreed to pay restitution of $26 million to the Fyre Festival’s investors. He faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years for each count, though he will probably get eight to ten years.

The well-funded company, among the world’s busiest and considered among its best, has engaged Jurowski, currently chief conductor of the London Philharmonic and formerly music director of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, beginning in 2021. He will be joined at the company by a new superintendent, Serge Dorny, who currently runs the Opéra national de Lyon in France.

With a statement that “due to the prevailing socioeconomic environment, it has proven very difficult … to raise enough funds to cover all operational needs,” Gauteng Opera announced that, after 19 years in operation, it will close at the end of this month.

“It’s no shocker to say that the choral and instrumental worlds have evolved quite separately over the past century. Highly chromatic or atonal music is rarely written for choirs, and the deep exploration of timbre found in instrumental pieces from later in the 20th century has mostly been ignored in favor of the pervasive choral sound inherited from the English cathedral tradition. Not only have the two worlds evolved separately, but their cultural importance is weighed differently as well.”