Category: music

This opera might be the one that works for her: “If she never quite found her footing in the rigid conventions of bel canto, there is more in common with her theater work in the later, dreamier, more epic ‘Rusalka.'”

To draw the connection between Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmélites” and this very moment: “When mosques have been burned in Florida and Washington State, when a Muslim can be removed from a plane for reading or speaking in Arabic, when a registry for U.S. Muslims is being discussed as a real possibility, it’s worth looking back at the anti-religious hysterias of earlier times. The intolerance is the same; only the clothes and the book are different.”

The composer/conductor has signed a rolling contract with the Philharmonia, where he will celebrate his tenth season as principal conductor and artistic advisor in 2017-28.

Recent winners of the annual lifetime achievement award from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts include Mariss Jansons, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Christoph Eschenbach, and Per Nørgård.

“Getting people through the doors into local venues is getting tougher so VR is being seen as a new form of potential income.”

Meet Morris Robinson. At 30, in finally attempting to sing professionally, he tried out for the chorus of “Aida” at the Boston Lyric Opera, the biggest company in New England. A week later, the music director handed him music for a solo role, accompanied by a plea: ‘Please don’t screw it up’. “A lot of the purists, they don’t believe my story,” Robinson said. “They don’t believe it until they witness it themselves.”

Says the study’s lead author, “These results suggest for the first time that long-term musical training reduces simple non-musical auditory, tactile and multisensory reaction times.” (But the study included no singers – what could that mean?)

“With this new contract, the Jacksonville Symphony season will expand from its current 35 weeks to 38 weeks during the 2017-2018 season, 39 weeks in the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 seasons, and finally 40 weeks beginning in the 2020-2021 season. The symphony is also increasing the number of full-time musicians from 53 to 60. Musicians’ weekly salaries will increase 19 percent over the term of this agreement, and with the added weeks, annual salaries will rise 37 percent.”

“The Colored American Opera Company was born at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church – the first all-black church in the nation’s capitol – where an Italian priest invited a white Spanish-American veteran of the U.S. Marine Band … to teach a French style of Opéra Bouffe to an African-American choir. In doing so, in 1873, just a decade after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, together, they created the first American opera company – black or white – in the nation.” (podcast)

Eastman earned some renown during the 1960s and ’70s as a singer of avant-garde music; through the ’80s, he gradually slipped out of sight as addiction and mental illness overtook him. But these days his music is getting some serious attention, and Ross explains why.