Category: music

Seriously, why? “The ‘St. John’ problem has become ever more troubling in the decades since World War II and the Holocaust. With the horrible potential latent in anti-Semitism ever more apparent, any performance or hearing of this work must be cause for sober reflection, not mere mindless pleasure.”

Ukraine banned Russia’s entry from competing because the singer had once visited Crimea, the part of Ukraine that Russia “annexed” in 2014. That comes after Ukraine’s singer won the 2016 competition with a song that appeared to explicitly discuss some of Stalin’s misdeeds in Crimea during WWII. That’s a lot of meaning for a pop song contest to carry.

“The inertia of state funding, allied to the lack of imagination of arts centres, has sapped the fizz from London’s halls, like champagne bottles left uncorked for too long. Where once we were cocks of the concert walk, audiences in Munich and Milan cannot tell one London orchestra from the next. That’s how low we have sunk in five short years. So what’s to be done?”

“Dr. David DiChiera, founder and artistic director of Michigan Opera Theatre and the man responsible for saving and restoring the Detroit Opera House, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.”

Steven Osborne: “The only thing I’ve played in the last 20 years by Chopin is the Cello Sonata. I enjoyed doing it, but it was hard work finding my way into the style: I worked out what gestures were going to work and did my best to make it organic. With the music I love playing I don’t have to think in those terms because the gestures come immediately from the feeling I have about the piece. Some day I might suddenly fall in love with Chopin – but the world doesn’t really need another Chopin pianist.” (He doesn’t have much use for Haydn, either.)

“Following the Pulitzer news this week, some wondered whether the all-female lineup might signal a permanent shift in the stodgily male profession.”

“Whatever numbers you look at, women are underrepresented at the top levels of the orchestral world. When asked about this, women refer over and over again to the same issues that face women in leadership positions in business and other fields: it is more difficult for women to be taken seriously as strong leaders.”

“Function, a video series from Fractal NYC, outfitted two piano players with special glasses that track the movement of their eyes. … Insight pianists gain from eye tracking can be an excellent tool to help them perfect their playing. That is, if they can watch without getting dizzy.”

Given all the particular, er, associations attached to Wagner and his operas, the reopening of his own opera house and festival six years after Germany’s defeat was a fraught, touchy affair. Yet conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler pulled it off, forgoing any of Wagner’s own operas in favor of everyone’s favorite German expression of uplift. Sappy? On the contrary, argues Colin Fleming: the performance, newly reissued on disc, “is as viscerally intense as 20th-century classical recordings get … simultaneously draining, in what it pulls from you emotionally, and emboldeningly triumphal.”