Category: music

It’s not easy, obviously – especially when you know nothing about opera. Harriet Scott Chessman writes about how she met the challenge when composer Jonathan Berger invited her to write the text for his opera My Lai.

In response to extensive financial difficulties that led to a musicians’ strike this past fall, the orchestra has launched this fundraising campaign with three large gifts totaling $6.5 million.

“In response to asking whether it was possible for his jazz band to attend the festival, the Israeli musician Alon Farber was informed that Copenhagen Jazz Festival did not accept Israeli musicians due to ‘political reasons’.” Farber posted this on Facebook, word got around the internet, Copenhagen’s deputy mayor demanded an explanation and made noises about city funding – and the festival’s director is claiming that this is all due to a misunderstanding of what he meant by “political.”

“After 11 seasons of fizzle-outs, it doesn’t look like The Voice is in the business of really making superstar dreams come true. But it has perfected the art of selling the glittering El Dorado promise of the American Dream, a myth so enticing that it still draws seekers, though all evidence suggests they probably won’t find what they’re looking for.”

In January the company cancelled the second half of its current season after racking up $200,000 in debt. General director Mark Beudert lives in Indiana and ran Eugene Opera on a part-time basis – a situation about which the board chair said, “We’ve just reached a stage where that as a model is not going to work for us.”

David Patrick Stearns talks with orchestra percussionist Chris Deviney about the concerto he’s fashioned out of three cuts from Metheny’s album An Imaginary Day.

The Chicago Blues Experience, scheduled to open in spring 2019 just a block from Millennium Park, will include three floors and a lounge with music by a house blues band.

Conductor David Robertson: “For example, I love the way in which he sets the line ‘A new sepulcher.’ In the background he has this slow tintinnabulation of cowbells and plate gongs, which seem to invade the whole space with an otherworldly, numinous visionary quality, as if already pregnant in this scene is the possibility of rebirth — even though we’re talking about a sepulcher.”

Interesting question. But it’s not just musicians: “A product’s worth is often linked to the perceived ethics of those who produce it. When it comes to music, this means that artists are viewed as part and parcel with the work they create.”

Soprano Diana Damrau and bass-baritone Nicolas Testé, who travel with their two home-schooled boys, ages 4 and 6, have a match made at an oratorio. Damrau: “The aim is that we are together, that we can make family life and life as a couple possible in our profession. As traveling opera singer-soloists, it’s really hard to find the right partner. It took both of us a long time. You meet a lot of villains and also Don Giovannis and Giuliettas.”