Category: music

During the transition from Helmut Rilling to Matthew Halls, OBF attendance dropped by over 50 percent : 2011 had 44,148; 2014 had approximately 20,000. There are no figures for recent years.

“It’s to her as much as anyone that the Philharmonic owes its success. Now the L.A. Phil, as it calls itself with deliberate Californian informality, must decide who will succeed her — a member of the respected team she built, or an outsider? — and how to continue her legacy of innovation, outreach and prodigious fund-raising.”

Extracts from a 1980 BBC interview in which Lennon said that Ms. Ono should share credit for the song were aired as part of the event. The song “should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song, because a lot of it, the lyric and the concept, came from Yoko,” Lennon said in the interview.

Frank Oteri thinks so: “I’ll say unequivocally that the 2017 edition of Classical:NEXT (c:N) was the most vital music get-together I’ve participated in in the last 12 months, quite possibly even longer. And, more importantly, I think c:N has the potential to be the most viable international gathering place for open-minded music-focused people, despite its name.”

Harrison’s score was always recognized for its good qualities, but the story of the youthful Julius Caesar’s possibly-mythical affair with a foreign king was plagued by an overlong, repetitive libretto to which Harrison refused cuts. John Rockwell tells the story of the 46-year-long effort to create a Young Caesar that could captivate and hold an audience.

“Jonathan Martin, 60, a native of Atlanta, is coming from Dallas, where he has served as president and CEO of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra since 2012. He also served for nine years as general manager of the Cleveland Orchestra, including the period when the Ohio orchestra moved back into Severance Hall following a major renovation.”

“The idea for Monterey Pop, a model for subsequent rock music festivals from Woodstock to Bonnaroo, emerged from a conversation in early 1967 among Paul McCartney, the record producer Lou Adler and the folk rock band the Mamas and the Papas. They weren’t thinking of the war; they were thinking of music — in particular, why rock wasn’t considered an art form alongside the likes of jazz.”

Rebecca Lentjes: “You might think I would be getting disgruntled input from women composers who felt they deserved to be placed on the list, but every single negative message I have gotten has been from a man.”

Hey, she’s a notorious famous fashion figure, right? In any case, most of the interview, however brief, is about music and how she performs it, not her outfits.

The prog-rock pioneers embraced extravagance: odd instruments and fantastical lyrics, complex compositions and abstruse concept albums, flashy solos and flashier live shows. Concertgoers could savor a new electronic keyboard called a Mellotron, a singer dressed as a batlike alien commander, an allusion to a John Keats poem, and a philosophical allegory about humankind’s demise—all in a single song (“Watcher of the Skies,” by Genesis).