Category: music

“The Great American Songbook Foundation is around 10 years old and has an annual budget of less than $1 million, so accepting the donation of the $30 million Asherwood Estate is … well, complicated.” The gift isn’t cash: it’s an actual estate with mansion, pool and golf course – and there are restrictive covenants attached to the property that will complicate a sale.

Lahav Shani, a 29-year-old conductor and pianist from Tel Aviv who first performed with the IPO at age 16, will become music director in 2020. Mehta, who joined the orchestra in 1969 and became its Music Director for Life in 1981, announced just over a year ago that he would step down in 2019.

What’s new, though, is not the level of output. It’s the commitment to Irish talent. As INO’s artistic director Fergus Sheil explained, the company “wants to give pride of place to Irish singers and celebrate their work at home in Ireland the way it is celebrated in leading opera houses around the world. We want to bring our creative talent to venues large and small, to communities around the country, and create thrilling experiences that will attract new audiences to our uniquely multi-faceted artform.”

“A first-of-its-kind study from Japan reports men with higher testosterone levels are less likely to enjoy sophisticated music, such as classical, jazz, and avant-garde. Its findings raise the intriguing possibility that musical taste may be significantly influenced by our hormones.”

“When I’m pinned to the back of my seat by the mind-warping rhythms of a drummer, or the harmonic ingenuity of an improvising guitarist, I often have the feeling that my body ‘gets’ things in a way my brain can’t. I find myself physically responding to nuances in the musical texture that have been and gone before I have time to formulate thoughts about them. I can speculate to some extent about what I’ve heard after the fact – that snare hit was perhaps a shade early; that cadence resolved just a fraction too late ­– but in the moment, I can’t quite articulate what it is that I’m reacting to. My grasp on what I’m hearing doesn’t seem cognitive. It seems visceral.”

At the end of a new production of the Bizet opera at the Maggio Musicale theater in Florence, instead of being knifed by Don José, Carmen steals his gun and shoots him. By German standards of Regieoper this is very minor, but “afterwards theatrical purists, media pundits and conservative politicians derided the change as an example of political correctness going too far. … With a general election due in Italy in early March, this debate quickly moved to the political stage.”

“Seven or eight years ago, she started making waves with her chamber-ensemble-cum-girl-band, Victoire, a group with a funky alt-classical vibe that she formed as an outlet for performing her own music. Listening to the band’s post-minimalist drones overlaid with expressive spasms of melody in an electronic haze, playing at the Atlas on H Street in 2011, you might not have guessed that Mazzoli’s work was going to veer into the world of mainstream opera. But on Friday, the Washington National Opera will be presenting the world premiere of her third opera, a 70-minute piece called “Proving Up,” and the opera world counts the company lucky to get it.”

“A California native, [John] Mangum comes to Houston from the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, where he worked as president and artistic director since 2014. He’s also worked for the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic.”

“It was amazing, yet also absurd; strangely captivating, yet also campy and ridiculous. And in a way, it made the most sense of any of the musical holograms produced so far. More than rock or hip-hop fans — and even more, you could say, than fans of instrumental classical music — opera lovers dwell in the past. We are known for our obsessive devotion to dead divas and old recordings; it can sometimes seem like an element of necrophilia, even, drives the most fanatical buffs.”

The soundtrack “is No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for a second week, with the equivalent of 104,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen. The album, released by Atlantic, was helped by the Golden Globes on Jan. 7, where it won best original song for “This Is Me.” It’s the first time a soundtrack has been No. 1 for two weeks in a year and a half, since “Suicide Squad” reached the top in August 2016.