Category: music

Music Theatre Wales has been catching fire for its current touring production of Peter Eötvös’s opera The Golden Dragon, which uses an all-white cast in a work set in a Chinese restaurant and featuring Chinese characters. Now the London venue for the tour, the Hackney Empire, has cancelled its scheduled performance (October 31) and disavowed all connection with the production.

Janelle Gelfand: “On opening night, listeners were still taking in the elegant new décor and patron-friendly amenities, which include cup holders for the first time on new, wider seats. Now, however, there are about 1,000 fewer seats in a hall that formerly seated more than 3,400; the audience for this gala re-opening was 2,282.”

The October Revolution in Jazz & Contemporary Music was something like a State of the Union for free improvisation and avant-garde composition, and also a statement of potential. An intergenerational sweep of experimentalists — including younger acts as well as many of free jazz’s first-generation heroes, now in their 70s, 80s and 90s — appeared on a well-appointed stage in a city not known for high-budget jazz presentations. It was a rare institutional moment for the improvising avant-garde and maybe proof that in a moment when jazzis surging, the United States can respect its fringes on a level that only Europe historically has.

A reporter climbs up to the equivalent of the organ loft (which looks “more like an air traffic control booth”) at Fenway Park to watch Boston Red Sox organist Josh Kantor and his high-tech equipment at work.

“After a five-year fundraising campaign, the Kansas City Symphony announced Wednesday that it had accomplished its goal of raising $55 million for its endowment fund, which will now total more than $100 million.”

Mikhail Klein, a pianist from the Siberian city of Irkutsk who was proficient in both classical and jazz repertoire, suffered cardiac arrest while playing a concert in his hometown’s Philharmonic Hall.

“The orchestra was established in London in 1976 but the British vote to leave meant it had to come up with a plan for a future outside the UK. … The orchestra said on Wednesday it had accepted an offer from the Italian culture ministry to be based in Ferrara and Rome.” As EUYO chief executive Marshall Marcus says, “You can’t ask for EU funding and then not be in the EU.”

The Metropolitan Opera opened the season with its hundred-and-fifty-seventh performance of Bellini’s “Norma.” The New York Philharmonic began with its hundred-and-nineteenth rendition of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. This is the safe course that many performing-arts groups are choosing in precarious times: the eternal return to the world that was. Both works are masterpieces that deserve to be heard repeatedly. Yet the implicit message is reactionary. As the nation contends with its racist and misogynist demons, New York’s leading musical institutions give us canonical pieces by white males, conducted by white males, directed by white males.

Anne Midgette looks at how filmmakers employ well-known classical scores as signifiers and, occasionally, plot points.