Category: music

“The Dallas Opera responded Thursday to the recent departure of former general director and CEO Keith Cerny by appointing longtime board and executive committee member Kern Wildenthal as interim general director and CEO. Wildenthal, the announcement noted, ‘will serve in a volunteer capacity, with no compensation, until a permanent director is appointed.'”

“Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Levine has gone from living legend to pariah. NPR has refused to broadcast his performances; movie theaters have canceled holiday screenings of the Met’s “Magic Flute” with Levine conducting. The age-old discussion of whether you can separate art from the artist has once more been ignited. There is something deeply disturbing about all this. What I am about to say is going to be controversial, so let me make it clear from the start that if these allegations prove true, Levine will have caused indefensible harm.”

“Water flooded the basement and subbasement of the Curtis building at 1726 Locust. There appeared to be extensive damage to those two levels, where the school has organ studios; a workshop for repairing and maintaining pianos; practice rooms; and a recording studio, said Larry Bomback, senior vice president of administration.”

“Since the eruption of the latest Levine scandal two weeks ago, a distinctive shift is taking place. Whether this shift makes or breaks the opera industry will depend on how opera companies choose to acknowledge and deal with it. With concerned colleagues emboldened and supported to speak out, audiences becoming more discerning about the character of the artists they are supporting, and the industry depending more than ever upon the public for its livelihood, it is clear that the policies that have allowed known abusers to fly under the radar in the past must radically change.”

In his courses at Harvard, Iyer pushes his students not to think of the West as the center of the world as they study music history. Iyer is making the case, onstage and in the classroom, that jazz is a genre to watch in its push for justice and equality in 2017.

“The opera star … spent two hours in the scanner to help researchers tease out what brain activity is key for singing. How? First Fleming spoke the lyrics. Then she sang them. Finally, she imagined singing them. ‘We’re trying to understand the brain not just so we can address mental disorders or diseases or injuries, but also so we can understand what happens when a brain’s working right and what happens when it’s performing at a really high level,’ said NIH researcher David Jangraw.”

“‘About this time last year, one of our oboists looked through our employee directory and looked through people’s interests, particularly in classical musical instruments, and he just sent out this massive email, asking ‘Hey, who wants to start an orchestra?” recalls Beau Curran, a technical account manager on Amazon’s digital music operations team and an oboist in the Amazon Symphony. ‘The first day of rehearsal, we were really wondering whether we’d just end up with a saxophonist and a keyboardist, and that would be our orchestra.'”

Musicologist Ellen T. Harris wrote an authoritative book on this opera three decades ago – a book she has had to completely revise and reissue based on all the info scholars have uncovered over those years. Yet “we know even less [now] than we did then, or at least less than we had imagined. We can no longer say with certainty in what year the opera was written, where it had its premiere, who performed it or even what the original score contained.” In this essay for the Times, Harris explains what it turns out that we’d wrongly assumed and what we’ve learned that upended those assumptions.

Well, it’s barely visible to the average audience member in her seat at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, but the backstage machinery has been replaced and greatly upgraded, the orchestra pit has been enlarged and enhanced, and acoustics have been improved. Angus McPherson goes backstage for a look.