Category: music

For a start, it’s not the group that sang Pharrell’s “Happy” and the theme from Skyfall on YouTube. (That group is the successor to the KGB’s house choir.) The Alexandrov is altogether more prestigious. An explainer from Zachary Woolfe and Bolshoi Confidential author Simon Morrison.

“You’re not going to luck into this career. … You have to work for it, nonstop, even once you have a job. And you have to be careful not to let that change your love of music.” (Ricky is the cello, y’all.)

“A big part of what makes Williams’s music so resonant is his consistent, masterful use of shifting themes—across all of the films—to carry ideas and represent characters. In that way, the franchise has more in common with Wagnerian epic opera than with your standard action movie, where sound is so often used to trigger a quick emotion.”

And social media is to blame: “People just want to share what they’re experiencing, even if it’s unsharable.”

David Patrick Stearns considers the strong and weak points in the music of the world’s most-performed living composer. (He also offers “the only theory I have on why hipsters will listen to Pärt meditating on the baptism of St. Augustine.”)

When he steps down in October 2018, Mehta will have been the orchestra’s music director for 40 years.

The headline makes it seem like United Record Pressing is shutting its Nashville plant down. Not at all: while the company is leaving its old facility, where the Beatles’ first US release was pressed and Berry Gordy had Motown records manufactured, United Record Pressing is moving to a new factory that’s at least the size of two football fields.

Known in the West in Soviet days as the “Red Army Choir” and praised in post-Soviet era as “cultural paratroopers and “Russia’s singing weapon,” the Alexandrov Russian Army Song and Dance Ensemble lost 64 members – more than one-third of the total, including all but three of its singers – when a military transport plane crashed into the Black Sea shortly after takeoff from Sochi.

“It’s like when you want to make a dish in the kitchen, you have good prime materials. Good tomato, good zucchini, good fish. Everything is so fresh. You just need to put it on the grill. Me, Diana, a good conductor, a good director: The ingredients are so good that it’s going to come out something nice.”

The quiz is cheeky but smart – for instance: “‘A civilisation that conserves is one that will decay’ said which composer, whose life and music nonetheless were celebrated throughout the year?”