Category: music

As Drake, Kanye West, Justin Bieber and Frank Ocean sit them out, “this year’s Grammys promise to draw out only more skepticism of the long-standing ceremony.” Maybe the awards have aged themselves out.

“The Canadian star achieved millions of sales and billions of streams with his fourth album, Views, which topped the charts around the world. He managed to beat Adele and Coldplay, who also achieved big sales last year.”

“Even chamber music, thrash metal and hymns ranked higher in a survey of more than 2,000 people conducted by Birmingham’s Symphony Hall.”

Critics the world over flocked to New York in 1966 for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center – and they hated the piece composed for the occasion, Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra. The work’s reputation never recovered (and neither, in truth, did Barber himself). But after listening to a radio broadcast of the original production, recently released by the Met as part of a box set, David Patrick Stearns says that “Barber’s fall from grace is confounding” and that, 50 years on, Antony and Cleopatra deserves a reassessment.

For the new Royal Opera House, built to celebrate the wedding of the then-Dauphin to Marie-Antoinette in 1770, three composers adapted Lully’s 1682 tragedy Persée so that it would be grand enough for the couple and the venue – a cast of 15, an 80-piece orchestra, a chorus of 95, 80 ballet dancers, five sets. In this video, conductor Hervé Niquet talks about reviving and recording the piece.

“The first new record-pressing machines built in over 30 years are finally online. The brainchild of some Canadian R&D guys with a background designing fancy MRI machines, the Warm Tone record press is everything that its vintage counterpart is not: safe, fast, fully automated, reliable, run by cloud-based software, and iOS-controlled. These $195,000 whiz-bang machines, the homegrown product of a Toronto company called Viryl Technologies, are the next-gen record presses our 21st century vinyl revolution has been waiting for.”

“The music industry’s most prestigious awards, which take place Sunday in a star-studded gala in Los Angeles, this year for the first time considered releases that were only streamed online.”

“Ultimately, artists of integrity will have no choice in how they respond to the Great Besmirchment. Those who thrive on politically charged material will continue in that vein. (In contemporary classical music, Ted Hearne is a master of that mode; recent works have addressed WikiLeaks, race relations, and the Supreme Court.) Yet those who devote themselves to numbered string quartets or painterly abstractions should not feel pressure to forsake their destiny. The task of the audience is to absorb art’s conflicting messages and remain alert to unexpected revelations.”

In a Q&A with Gabe Meline, Adams explains the difference he sees between the two men that makes the one more opera-worthy, talks about the other politically oriented work he has written and is still writing, and why his latest arrival at the airport reminded him of the ’60s.

The conductor’s current tour with his Budapest Festival Orchestra hit a big snag just before it started: one of the cellists has dual citizenship in Hungary and Iraq and was initially denied entry to the U.S. Then Fischer sprang into action.