Category: music

“The piece, ‘Lied vom weissen Käse‘ (‘Song of the White Cheese’) – which was written for a Weimar-era musical revue and sung by the actress Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife – was recently found in an archive unrelated to Weill at the Free University of Berlin and is the most significant discovery of the composer’s music since the early 1980s. The song previously existed only in Lenya’s memory and was written off as chimerical.” (includes video)

Just a couple weeks after the jam company gave $1.1 million to the Akron (Ohio) Art Museum, the company’s executive chairman and his wife have pledged the second largest donation in the Cleveland Orchestra’s history. That executive, Richard Smucker, is the new chairman of the ensemble’s board of directors.

“The Grammy Music Education Coalition has launched a fund-raising initiative aimed at benefiting music programs in the school districts of Philadelphia, New York City, and Nashville. … GMEC hopes to raise $5 million over three years for Philadelphia, with that money going toward both the district as well as programs run by partner education and outreach organizations.”

“Music therapists often recommend songs with a personal association: the first dance from the patient’s wedding, a song their mother used to hum. When Joey Ramone left us in 2001, he was listening to U2’s In a Little While. A professional psychic in Florida has provided a list of songs “people seem to universally enjoy”. They range from Celine Dion to Enya to Susan Boyle – so it might also be worth specifying what music you don’t want to hear on your deathbed.”

Some 332 violins, 76 violas and, 73 cellos and 19 double basses are available to view, along with hundreds of other stringed instruments from around the world, and thousands of wind, keyboard, percussion and electronic examples, spanning 5,000 years of human history.

Stepping into the newly-created position is jazzman and Late Show with Stephen Colbert bandleader Jon Batiste, who will work “on a range of projects, from writing, to video, to live events.” His first project: an essay on and “reimagining” of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

RTÉ, the national broadcaster, has let 20 positions in its two ensembles – the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra – remain vacant, and sources say one in five posts will be unfilled by next summer. Critic Michael Dervan is one of many observers wondering if the RTÉ is trying to merge its orchestras without admitting to it.

“Brief as it is, the A above high C that the soprano Audrey Luna reaches in Thomas Adès’s new opera, “The Exterminating Angel,” is so high, it has never been sung in the 137-year history of the Metropolitan Opera.”

“The roster of tasks facing the next San Francisco Symphony music director will be daunting and varied. It includes finding new ways of making the standard repertoire speak directly to a younger and more diverse audience, including many for whom the music of Mozart or Brahms is terra incognita. It includes embracing a broader range of contemporary music — including works by women and composers of color, a point on which this orchestra has lagged woefully behind organizations like the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Music Director Gustavo Dudamel.”