Category: music

Catriona Morison, a Scottish mezzo who didn’t win any of the semi-final rounds and made it to the final in the wild-card slot. Morison, the first Briton ever to win this competition, also shared the Song Prize (the main prize is for operatic repertoire) with Mongolian baritone Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar.

Just a month after the CEO who led management through last fall’s bitter strike, Amy Adkins, resigned, the orchestra’s board has engaged David Hyslop, whom Michael Granberry describes as “the Mr. Fix-It of troubled arts organizations. He swoops in to clean up the mess and then goes back home to Minnesota.”

Lidiya Yankovskaya, an alumna of the first-ever class of The Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute for Women Conductors who currently leads two new-music institutions and a small opera company in metro Boston, starts in Chicago with the 2018-19 season.

“The [¥50 million] Kyoto Prize, given annually since 1985 by the Inamori Foundation, recognizes three winners in a rotating array of subcategories under the headings of Advanced Technology, Basic Sciences, and Arts and Philosophy.” Taruskin is the first musicologist (as opposed to composer or performer) to win the award.

Why make sure every child has the opportunity to learn music and to play an instrument? “Learning to read and play music gives you access to a new language, other worlds. It is one of the greatest gifts, along with security and self-belief and simple love, that a child can be given.”

Soprano Kristine Opolais, who was supposed to play the title role, has now withdrawn, a few months after star tenor Jonas Kaufmann withdrew. The show “is being closely watched in the opera world. Early in his tenure Mr. Gelb replaced an opulent, beloved old production by Franco Zeffirelli with a starker, more sexually charged one by Luc Bondy, alienating large swaths of the audience. So there is a lot riding on the new staging.”

In ‘La Mère Coupable,’ a lot more secrets come to light. “It takes these people everybody knows and transplants them to a Raymond Carver story.”

Advanced sampling technology allows it to sound like any one of dozens of vintage electric or acoustic guitars at the touch of a button. A player can also quickly shift among any number of conventional and unconventional tuning setups at the touch of another button. And thanks to automatic tuning technology, one will never worry about it going out of tune. And that’s barely scratching the instrument’s high-gloss surface. “This has got more technology than you can shake a stick at.”

“During the machine’s heyday, the Hupfeld Company developed around 900 different music rolls for it. They sold thousands of the Phonoliszt-Violin, mostly to opulent hotels and restaurants that used them for background entertainment. But by the mid 1920s, the popularity of automatic instruments cratered as phonographs and radios spread throughout the world.”

“Many pundits say he did all the right things – modern music, standard repertoire, plus staged operas. In a world that’s being dazzled by high-personality Gustavo Dudamel and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the question is whether Gilbert did them right enough, with the personal magnetism to pull it off. Or with a fighting spirit, which, he suggested in exit interviews, was in shorter supply.” Or, asks David Patrick Stearns, “might the unanswered question be, at least in part, the New York Philharmonic?”