Category: music

“He is leaving a fixer-upper on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a sleek new home in Hamburg, Germany. Alan Gilbert, the departing music director of the New York Philharmonic, announced Friday that he would be the next chief conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, whose striking new $843 million concert hall overlooking Hamburg’s harbor opened earlier this year.”

“Finland has one of the best education systems in the world, where teaching music and learning to play an instrument are the foundation of children’s schooling; it should be the model for us to follow. The principle is that a child is never too young to start a relationship with music; creative play is the key and it should never be a chore; musical exploration will feed into other disciplines; children should be allowed to develop at their own pace and go into music as deeply as they wish. It is fantastically successful, and Finland has produced a stream of extraordinary musicians over the past 30 years – making it surely per capita the most productive country for churning out great classical conductors and soloists.”

Philippe Auguin, 56, will have completed eight seasons with WNO by the time he steps down from his post. Having made his company debut in 2009 as an 11th-hour replacement for his ailing predecessor, Heinz Fricke, in a concert version of Wagner’s “Twilight of the Gods,” he has particularly excelled in Wagner, leading “Tristan and Isolde” in 2013 and Francesca Zambello’s “Ring” cycle in 2016, which counts as one of the company’s great triumphs.

“It was after seeing the sharp distinction in approach, methodology and effect between Rancid and the concert’s headliners, Green Day, that a theoretical superstructure for punk rock struck me – one which can be linked to the history of art.” Noah Charney – who grants that “normally you don’t find ‘punk rock,’ ‘theoretical superstructure’ and ‘history of art’ occupying the same sentence” – makes the case.

Vireo is the first opera designed for episodic release, both on television and online, and the culmination of an artist residency project at the Grand Central Arts Center at California State University, Fullerton. “My hopes for Vireo,” says center director John Spiak in a promotional film about Vireo’s making “is that 30 or 40 years down the line it will be seen as one of those groundbreaking things that made a difference in the artistic world. We’ve taken a live entertainment, opera,” adds the director, Charles Otte “and shot it as a piece of film, as opposed to finding an opera, staging it on a stage, and shooting it with three or four cameras.

The ornate Belle Epoque theatre had lost its luster, visually and artistically, by the end of the last century. But the house’s director, Olivier Mantei, is determined to bring excitement and audiences back. So he’s overseen a meticulous restoration of the building to its original splendor, reopened it with a spectacular revival of a grand opera not seen in Paris for 246 years, and even commissioned a patisserie to create a new cake for the occasion.

Vulgamore, 59, said she will take some time to decide what to do next. She previously spent 16 years running the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and arrived in Philadelphia during a time of crisis. The Philadelphia Orchestra was running chronic deficits, had exhausted most of its unrestricted endowment, and had spent several months without a permanent president, board chairman, and music director before Worley took over as chairman.

“Musicians strive their whole lives to become like alchemists, healing the world with their music, turning the world’s pain to beauty. But we haven’t yet learned how to save ourselves. If we remain passive bystanders, I believe we will watch the music that we most value slowly silenced. Just ask the 80 percent of songwriters who have left the profession in Nashville.”

After many more glowing reviews, the Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA) has named Breaking the Waves winner of its first Award for Best New Opera in North America. The award, which recognizes musical and theatrical excellence, will be given annually to a fully staged work that received its world premiere in the preceding calendar year. “Of the new operas that I saw in 2016,” said Heidi Waleson, opera critic of the Wall Street Journal,  “I would say that Breaking the Waves was the most original, the most harrowing, and the most moving.”