Category: music

The group’s Facebook page lists as one of its goals “to protect our community and neighbors from the dangers that oil and gas development poses to our health, the quality of our air and water, and our agricultural heritage.” They had already stated their opposition to contributions the BCO received from Extraction Oil & Gas, which describes itself as “a domestic energy company focusing on the exploration and production of oil and gas reserves in the Rocky Mountains.”

Conductor Deborah Wiseman: “We’re recording straight onto vinyl. As we are playing, the little grooves of vinyl are being created, so really, what you play is there forever.”

Her son conveyed the news to The New York Times to forestall speculation. “She defied so much for so long: depression, alcoholism, age. Mr. LeGrant said, on the phone and over lunch a couple of days later, that she had decided to put out the word about retirement. ‘The public hasn’t seen her in months,’ he said, ‘and somebody would go ‘Oh, my God,’ and it would be on Page Six.'”

There’s been some success – most recently, tech companies working with Adele so that perhaps only 2 percent of her Wembley Stadium tickets were scalped – but it’s ugly out there. Very, very ugly.

Responses from the company, who were putting on a concert sponsored by Extraction Oil and Gas, were pretty much like “look, taking money from private funders is the only way we get to do music; please deal with it.” The protest group did not blow their whistles during the performance, “but the whistle-blowing prompted a response from University of Colorado police, who stayed through the second movement of [Beethoven’s Ninth] symphony.”

Before conducting the heck out of Schubert’s First Symphony, written when he was of a similar age to the student who was killed, Dudamel “said the violence in Venezuela is unacceptable, and he dedicated the concert to the slain student and to all the victims of violence. ‘We play for all our children,’ he concluded, ‘to build a better future for them with peace and love.'”

To date, 251 productions have been mounted in the Lincoln Center opera house, which has staged 164 different operas and given more than 11,000 performances.

Mind you, the instrument wasn’t spit out whole by the printer: individual parts of the instrument, carefully copied from the 1677 “Sunrise” Strad violin, were printed out and carefully assembled by hand. Here’s a video of the new copy being played, along with video of an original Strad (played by a different violinist with a different style) for comparison.

“The School District of Philadelphia has over 1,000 broken musical instruments, from flutes with bent keys to trombones missing slides. Some of their fixes are easy, others complex, yet due to funding cuts in the city, the district doesn’t have a budget for either.” But a Temple University professor had an idea for making music with them as-is, using that as a way to raise money to start fixing them.

Bernard Labadie, founder of the Quebec City-based chamber orchestra Les Violons du Roy. He takes over from Pablo Heras-Casado at the podium of New York’s leading freelance orchestra in 2018. Michael Cooper talks to Labadie about his plans for the band and his recovery from lymphoma.