Category: music

He bought the starling and, when it died, wrote an elegy for it. Yes, really. “He paid a few kreuzers for a starling in that notebook. And he called the bird Vogelstar.”

“The paradox in Canadian music is that we have so many superstars and very few developmental channels to build future superstars. We cannot expect to continue to have globally relevant Canadian pop stars without examining (or creating) the mechanisms needed to sustain pop chart ascension.”

VO moved to a festival model to ensure the future viability of the company as it deals with universal challenges facing the opera world. Kim Gaynor says tickets are selling, but she concedes the buzz has been slow to build.

“The sounds frequently referred to as elevator music are, at least officially, no more; over five years ago the company folded in a deal with its new owner, Mood Music. Muzak often amounted to the sonic equivalent of a Pan-Am smile, inspiring the listener to a bland, blinkered contentedness. In part, its reputation has obscured much of what made the company viable, and the extent to which its style fed others in its wake.”

Overall, “Music of the 1940s was preferred to music of its neighboring decades, and the same was true for music of the 1960s. The music of the 1980s also showed a peak, but … only for the younger participants.”

We should raise a cheer to the woman who contributed so much, with so little fanfare, to the history of 20th and 21st Century music. Don’t take my word for it. “Nadia Boulanger,” says Quincy Jones, “was the most astounding woman I ever met in my life.” And he’s met a few.

“We [conductors] are the ears of the singer. But if we tell singers to please fit into a little box that I’m trying to create … then the conductor is like a teacher, and that is not what it should be.” David Patrick Stearns does a Q&A with YNS as he prepares for the opening of The Flying Dutchman, his first production at the Metropolitan Opera since becoming music director-designate.

Lindsay Kemp visits Kobe to talk with the founder/director of the Bach Collegium Japan about the extraordinary (and excellent) 55-CD, 18-year project that Suzuki didn’t expect he’d be undertaking when he started it.

America’s favorite orchestra CEO talks about arts funding, what she achieved in her 17 years in L.A., and what she hopes to achieve in New York. And Tavis (based in L.A.) literally gets on his knees and begs her not to go. (video)

“The opera, Harry Somers’s Louis Riel, tells the story of Riel, who led two 19th-century uprisings against the young nation of Canada, helped found Manitoba and was hanged for treason.” Missing from the score, and from its early stagings around Canada’s centennial, were the voices of the country’s First Nations. The Canadian Opera Company’s new production (for Canada’s 150th anniversary) has found a poetic way to address that absence.