Category: music

“Since the U.S. embargo of Cuba began in 1962, the ability of Cuban and American musicians to travel back and forth has shifted with the political winds. The late ’70s saw a brief but notable loosening of tensions. In 1985, President Reagan took a hard line. In the late ’90s, under Clinton, the doors opened again, especially for artists, to encourage “people-to-people exchange.” George W. Bush reversed that policy. Following a memorable December 2003 engagement by Chucho Valdés at Manhattan’s Village Vanguard jazz club, no other musician living in Cuba played in the U.S. until 2009, when the Obama administration began loosening travel restrictions.”

It’s in the Daily Shouts section and is a fine example of that particular piece of the New Yorker. The headline is: “Thoughts While Attending the First Symphony in the Series my Wife Wanted To Buy.” However, we see no lie in this particular sentence: “You’d think, for what these tickets cost, the seat would at least be comfortable.”

James Oestreich: “Neither a composer himself nor active in contemporary music, he was as radically fixated on the musical past as Mr. Boulez was on the future. Yet he exerted a powerful influence on the present, having helped to negotiate a fruitful truce between mainstream practice and the early-music movement with his historically informed performances. The evidence lives in his recordings, said to number more than 500.”

It’s an unwieldy “low-register behemoth that requires voluminous breath, careful control and formidable stamina,” and here are many minutes of its best moments so far.

A new study commissioned ahead today’s announcement by UMG, entitled “Global Insight: The Appeal of High-Res Audio (Studio Quality Sound)” presents a variety of data supporting a growing market for hi-res audio. The findings claimed that 85 percent of U.S. consumers say audio quality is “very important” to them; 48 percent of U.S. consumers are willing to pay more for better audio quality; and perhaps most significantly that “71 percent of existing music streaming subscribers are interested in the option of studio quality sound.”

It’s already been nearly a decade since the paper laid off its critic, Lawrence A. Johnson; since that time, the Herald has licensed reviews and articles from Johnson’s subsequent venture, South Florida Classical Review. Now the paper has abandoned even that.

“I had probably the most rigorous routine I’ve ever had in my professional life for this role. There was a lot of physical conditioning I had to do. It’s a monster role, and the emotional stakes just get higher and higher and that takes an incredible toll physically.”

Great – but vinyl sales only accounted for about two percent of the market. Still, it shows that “people want tangible objects – it’s human nature, and there is still nothing as satisfying as cracking open a new record, placing it with care on the turntable, and letting the sound take you away, as you look at the album sleeve. Formatting a Spotify playlist will never compete with that, no matter how many millions of songs are at your disposal.”

“There was a time, within relatively recent memory, when buyers of new-music albums had a good idea what kind of music they would hear – and not incidentally, what kind they would not hear.” Kozinn surveys the current scene.

Joana Carneiro has just withdrawn from her third straight program there in four months – and for the previous two, no reason was given. Now we know why – and, fortunately, it’s good news.