Category: music

The layoff notices anticipate the sale of the entire college next spring to an undisclosed buyer, or the school’s potential closure. The potential buyer is described publicly only as an Asian corporation that runs for-profit K-12 schools. The buyer has no accreditation in higher education.

“This year’s honorees – conductor William Christie, mezzo-soprano Fiorenza Cossotto, tenor Vittorio Grigolo, soprano Hei-Kyung Hong, and soprano Sonya Yoncheva – will be celebrated at a black-tie gala celebration on April 22nd, 2018 at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.”

“The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association posted an operating deficit of $1.4 million for fiscal 2017, compared to deficit of $1.1 million the year prior.” It’s the CSO’s seventh consecutive year in the red. On the other hand, endowment and investments are up more than 6% to $373.4 million, and the subscription renewal rate is 90%. (For a more optimistic take on the same fiscal news, see the Chicago Tribune report here.)

The local authority hopes to save as much as £383,000 through the closure of the school, which helped launch the early musical careers of Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson and Celtic fusion star Martyn Bennett.

It is rare enough with American orchestras to appoint a principal guest. The reason for the post more often than not is to fill in something lacking in a music director. The last time the L.A. Phil had principal guests was three decades ago, when it brought in the especially versatile and tuned-in young conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Simon Rattle to complement an old master, Carlo Maria Giulini. In the case of Mälkki, the natural first reaction may be that she’s a woman. While American orchestras have begun hiring female music directors, this is the biggest crack, thus far, in the increasingly fragile glass ceiling about to crash down on top-tier orchestras.

For all a director’s authority, film is the most collaborative art form, and Glass is surely the most collaborative artist in history. His dozens of movies are only a small part of his prolific output, which includes music for well over 50 operas, dance works and music theater pieces; 11 symphonies; hoards of concertos and other orchestra and chamber pieces. All that and the reams of music for the Philip Glass Ensemble, which he founded 49 years ago and is still going strong, as it demonstrated at the Ace on Sunday.

In Part II of an extended profile of the new-music powerhouse (see Part I here), Allan Kozinn gives an overview of the now-renowned composers and ensembles that Bang on a Can spawned and/or nurtured – not to mention a record label, a summer festival (popularly referred to as “Banglewood”), an educational program, and an avant-garde marching band – and considers the changes that the Bangers wrought in the entire U.S. musical ecosystem.

“For most of the work’s duration, twenty-four subwoofers, placed with their cones pointed upward, emit electronic tones that vibrate at a frequency of 10.67 hertz, or around ten oscillations per second. … Human ears can’t detect sounds much below twenty hertz, but you register their presence all the same. … The body is listening even when the ears tune out.” Alex Ross checks out Ashley Fure’s “opera for objects,” The Force of Things.

“The move … is scheduled to coincide with both the end of Thomas’ 25th season at the organization’s helm [in the summer of 2020] and his 75th birthday in December 2019. He will remain with the Symphony in the newly created post of music director laureate, conducting at least four weeks each year and undertaking a variety of special programming projects.”

“Almost my entire adult life I’ve been the music director of some organization or another. I have volumes and volumes of almost-completed compositions and stories and poems and collections and all sorts of things. For years I’ve been thinking that if I’m going to be able to devote time to making sure that these things are in good shape before I’m outta here, this would be a kind of good moment to think about doing that.”