Peter Eötvös’s The Golden Dragon, “based on a play by Roland Schimmelpfennig [and set in a Chinese restaurant], has a cast of five who perform multiple roles that include ‘Chinese mother’, ‘Chinese aunt’, ‘Old Asian’ and ‘An Asian’.” Music Theatre Wales, generally a respected touring company admired for its unconventional productions, has fielded an all-white cast for the piece and is drawing criticism for it.
Category: music
Think You’d Like To Hear Beethoven’s 5th As It Was First Played? Think Again!
“Now is a good time for me to rephrase the original question: Do we really want to hear Beethoven’s Fifth as it was heard at its premiere? Do we want to listen to 50 unevenly trained musicians, give or take, playing for four hours on weak instruments that are hard to play, in an unheated concert hall conducted by a deaf man on one rehearsal?”
Seattle Symphony Hires Thomas Dausgaard As Next Music Director
Meet the new boss, same as the old substitute boss: Dausgaard, a 54-year-old Dane who takes over from Ludovic Morlot in 2019, has been the SSO’s principal guest conductor since 2014. “It was his 2015 Seattle Symphony Sibelius Festival performances,” writes Melinda Bargreen, “that made the tall, silver-haired Dane a popular figure among the city’s classical-music lovers, with standing ovations after every performance, and the kind of connection with players and audiences that conductors dream of.”
New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center Give Up On $500M Renovation Of Geffen Hall
Both organizations have new presidents – Debora Spar at Lincoln Center and Deborah Borda at the Phil – who did not like what they saw when they looked at the plan’s costs, schedules (which were getting longer), and fundraising prospects. Said Spar, “There was a general sense that the project had just gotten too complicated.”
Lang Lang Prepares To Give His First Piano-Five-Hands Concert
For Wednesday night’s Carnegie Hall season-opening gala with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chinese superstar was booked to play Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Chick Corea in a seldom-heard two-piano version. Then, this past spring, Lang Lang injured his left arm – he says it was by practicing Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand too hard. So he’s bringing in a 14-year-old protégé to play the left-hand part alongside him.
Today’s Pop Music Charts: Completely Transformed (And Largely Without Women Artists)
“The spots on the Hot 100 that aren’t occupied by rappers, DJs, or Imagine Dragons largely belong to interchangeable young men playing R&B for campfires: Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber of course, but also Charlie Puth, Shawn Mendes, and the second wave of One Direction solo efforts—Liam Payne, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson. The pose they strike is of the nice-guy seducer, the suave but puppy-eyed everyboy. It’s true that Cardi B and Taylor Swift have broken through lately with brash, campy cries of war. But it remains to be seen whether their success remains an outlier in an era when pop’s women have often needed to quiet down in order to be heard at all.”
How Jazz And Classical Music Could Reconnect With An Audience
“Never in human history have people had easier access to music. As studies such as the 2016 Music Consumer Insider Report and Nielsen Music 360 Study of 2015 have revealed, a large portion (over 90%) of the U.S. population listens to music beyond 20 hours each week, and young people are especially engaged with music. While there is broad engagement with music, there are two musical genres which have increasingly moved to the periphery of ordinary life; the very two genres that I would argue have become unusually comfortable ignoring emotional connection between music performer and the general-public listener.”
‘The Star-Spangled Banner’: A Radical History
“Last weekend’s NFL drama touched on many issues, including police brutality, racism, and free speech. For many who opposed the protests, however, it all came down to one thing: respecting the flag and our country’s national anthem. But while critics claim that the anthem is above politics, radical uses and re-writings of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ are, in fact, older than the song as we know it.” (audio)
The Second Brand-New Festival In A Month – This One For Alt-Classical And Jazz – Debuts In Philadelphia
About ten days after Opera Philadelphia’s successful O17 festival wrapped up, the October Revolution of Jazz and Contemporary Music begins, with artists ranging from John Luther Adams (with a piece for 24 horns), Claire Chase, and So Percussion to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, saxophonist Anthony Braxton, and the inimitable Sun Ra Arkestra.
Finally (With The Help Of Kickstarter) Copies Of Recordings On Voyager’s Golden Record Are For Sale
From the very start, many people on the production team expected and hoped for the record to be commercially released soon after the launch of Voyager.c”Carl Sagan tried to interest labels in releasing Voyager,” Ferris says. “It never worked.” Timothy Ferris says that’s likely because the music rights were owned by several different record labels who were hesitant to share the bill. So — except for a limited CD-ROM release in the early 1990s — the record went largely unheard by the wider world.