Category: music

When Bramwell Tovey steps down after 18 years at the end of next season, stepping up will be Dutch conductor Otto Tausk.

The $770 million venue, which opened just this past fall, caught fire during work on its roof. Authorities say there were no casualties.

Like many of us, conductor/composer Craig Hella Johnson was shaken by the story of Shepard, the young man who was gay-bashed to death in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998. For years, Johnson had an inchoate desire to create a response – an urge that ultimately led to a full-length work for Johnson’s professional choir, Conspirare.

“Opera remains far too white-dominated an art form. And operatic stereotypes and conventions are valid subjects for ongoing re-evaluations. Opera companies everywhere are wrestling with shifting expectations. We all have our personal and racial hot buttons and blind spots. But we should be wary of letting them distort our perceptions of historic works of art—and a 30-year-old opera about events 45 years ago is now a product of history.”

“Most of the venue closures that have lately bedevilled the local music scene stem from similar circumstances, highlighting the downside to Toronto’s cultural communities of the city’s ongoing growth and economic prosperity. In North America’s third-largest music market, venue proprietors — who, in most cases, don’t own their buildings — are suddenly hit with 300-per-cent rent increases or browbeaten out of existence by complaints of noise, congestion and insufficient parking as condos spring up on all sides.”

“So what is that enigmatic theme that supposedly runs through the entire work but is never played? Elgar, who died in 1934, never said. It has been understood to be a well-known melody that would harmonize with the music if played along with it. For decades, musicologists, cryptologists and music lovers have offered up innumerable solutions for the phantom melody.”

The classical station has been purely HD, and the FM station will share its programming, but it’s now back to standard receiver land. The station’s general manager: “We have been waiting several years for the opportunity to restore classical music to the FM band. … As resources grow, we aim to record and broadcast local performances by New Orleans-area classical music organizations.”

That’s partly because of “the wild dispersion of technology and musical ideas that creates surprising scenes all over the world. … Moroccan Berber folk-pop expresses traditional conservative values while being ‘saturated with full-on cyborg Auto-Tune’ – applied to singers’ vocals in the same ramshackle studios where they’re recorded.”

Never let it be said that German musicians have no sense of humor: “In the first video, the musicians imitate sounds such as the sizzling of fries and sausages getting cooked and the ketchup squirted over them at one of the most popular eating spots in town.”

Steve Reich and John Adams have been more innovative; Michael Nyman writes Hollywood film scores, too. But Glass is the one who gets name-checked in Gilmore Girls and made fun of on The Simpsons and South Park. Why is this? Dan Ruccia has an explanation. (It’s not because of Cousin Ira.)