Category: music

“The scheme, costed at £278m, appeared derailed in November when the [national] government unexpectedly announced it was withdrawing money it had pledged for a detailed business case to be made. On Thursday the City [of London] said it would provide the money, up to £2.5m, needed to complete it.” The move comes just as Hamburg has opened its new concert hall to ecstatic reviews.

Rick Fulker: “From my vantage point, the stage was far below, but despite the distance from the source of the music, I had the sensation of sitting amidst it. … [The program] spanned five centuries of Occidental art music, and the interior space played along. Soloists and small ensembles sometimes performed from the upper balconies, but whether five or fifty meters away, they sounded equally vivid as the orchestra down there onstage.”

“Composers across the country have been outraged over a competition launched by the Canadian House of Commons in honour of [the confederation’s sesquicentennial].” The main issue is award money so stingy that even former prime minister Stephen Harper might be embarrassed.

Markus Rhoten grew up in Germany with American parents who were professional musicians themselves. (He didn’t take up his father’s instrument, the trumpet, because “I was worried it would make me a bad kisser.”)

The legendary art collection in Philadelphia has an in-house curation team planning the events, “aiming to elucidate the paintings and sculptures while exploring the concepts behind them.” For one of the series, the museum is even assembling its own ensemble “for intensive two-weeks-or-more workshops and performances [exploring] complex modern works.”

The combination of miniature, struggling, and titanic companies makes for an operatic ecosystem that is as rich as it is fragile. The question is: can the city sustain it?

What a change from the strike back in 2010! The three-year agreement includes a bit more money for players, more flexibility, and a brand-new stipend.

That quote is from PSO president Melia Tourangeau, who says the new contract offers “some breathing room right now” but that the orchestra badly needs to expand its donor base.

Robert Moody joined the orchestra in 2005; he says that he and the board “all felt really strong in our belief that a decade, give or take a few years on either side, was about the right amount of time.”