Category: music

Sure, the casting may have been ill-starred, but backstage, in the “opera factory, … the company’s army of artists and artisans started work nearly a year before its opening night, on New Year’s Eve.” Photographer Todd Heisler and reporter Michael Cooper give us a look at what the troops have been whipping up.

There have been plenty of star-crossed productions in Met history, including the premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra” that opened the Met’s Lincoln Center home in 1966 (amid serious last-minute technical glitches and labor woes) and Robert Lepage’s recent “Ring” cycle (built around a 45-ton set that had a habit of breaking down). But Mr. Gelb said that he had never before had to recast all the leads in a new production. “Luckily, there are only three principal roles,” he said dryly.

“The group of donors set to take over operations of the San Antonio symphony has backed out of the deal after discovering a potential $8.9 million pension liability, leaving the future of the orchestra in doubt. … The Symphony Society of San Antonio has been running the orchestra since 1939 and was supposed to relinquish control to the new group earlier this year.”

“The most obvious explanation was that the newfound dominance of digital streaming scrambled the entrenched hierarchies, elevating voices that had long puzzled or offended gatekeepers. With physical and digital album sales as well as track downloads all in free fall, and hip-hop and R&B setting the pace for streaming, major labels and major stars alike were often left scrambling to earn the honors that once came so easily. Because the rules and norms of this era are still coalescing, the systems could also be gamed and manipulated.”

“Now researchers from the Turing Archive at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand have used old recordings to recreate a now-lost 1951 BBC broadcast of a couple of [those] Christmas carols.” (includes sound clips)

“There are about fifty-eight thousand homeless people in Los Angeles County. To walk through the streets of Skid Row to the Midnight Mission is to feel shame for the state of the city and the state of the country. Block after block, the sidewalks are crammed with tents, boxes, broken furniture, and shopping carts full of possessions. To enter the mission, you have to step over people in sleeping bags. It is, however, a different experience to visit the Midnight Mission with Vijay Gupta, an L.A. Phil violinist, who, in 2011, founded Street Symphony. He greets both residents and staff with smiles, handshakes, banter, and an explosive laugh.”

The NYT‘s music reporters almost never get to be as unbuttoned and joyful as they are in this piece, wherein four of them went out into the city and paraded, participated, or otherwise enjoyed four of the many, many music-making opportunities on the Solstice.

“Rumours about Dutoit’s behaviour were rampant for years. I confess straightaway to having done precisely nothing with them. Possibly the first reference in the Gazette to the Dutoit dark side, thickly veiled, was in the column I wrote last week on the case of disgraced former Metropolitan Opera music director James Levine.”

“The orchestra has released a statement saying that it, along with Dutoit, ‘have jointly agreed to release him from his forthcoming concert obligations with the orchestra for the immediate future,’ adding that it is ‘committed to the highest standards of ethical behaviour’. … He has been sacked from other positions at the San Francisco Symphony, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, while orchestras in New York, Chicago and Cleveland have all cancelled appearances from him.”