Category: music

“While the Americana Music Festival and Conference, which wrapped on Sunday in Nashville, primarily focused on artists from the States, a good number were from Britain, where the genre is becoming better known and where artists are feeling more enabled to play music that appeals to their sensibilities for string-based music that harkens back to traditional country icons, from Hank Williams to Dolly Parton.”

Anna Picard: “Precision has never been part of the Gergiev-Mariinsky rough magic package. While not exactly sight-reading, the orchestra played as though rehearsing for the first time, without stopping to correct infelicities of articulation, intonation, blend, balance and ensemble. If authenticity is sounding like a mutinous scratch band in Cherepovets, this performance had plenty of it. You could argue that Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony benefits from a casual approach. But oh, the vinegar! You could souse herrings in chords like these.”

“Days before what was to be his final surgery, Shankar outlined his vision for the complete opera” – titled Sukanya – “to his longtime collaborator David Murphy, who, with the help of Shankar’s daughter Anoushka, has since brought the opera to fruition. ‘He’d written the whole piece in outline – the entire raga structure and almost all the melodies, so it was just a matter of filling in the gaps, which were small,’ explained Murphy.”

Assink has been executive director for 17 years. “Running an organization presenting more than 220 concerts a year, with an operating budget close to $70 million (and including the crisis years of the Great Recession), Assink guided the orchestra through many challenges, saved it from going deeper into debt, even during the unusually expensive season celebrating the Symphony’s centennial in 2011, and allowed it to maintain high standards.”

“A computer scientist and a composer have restored an ancient recording of the first ever computer-generated music. Jack Copeland and Jason Long remastered a recording of three melodies, including “God Save the Queen,” made by the BBC in the labs of computer pioneer Alan Turing in 1951.”

“Eddins, who lives in Minneapolis, Minn. and spends about 14 weeks of the year in Edmonton, joined the ESO in 2005. Under his tenure, the orchestra worked with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and soprano Renée Fleming, started a late-night series of performances, and played unconventional works by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů and weirdo genius Frank Zappa, among others.”

First he felt a “tick” in his vocal cords during a live simulcast of Rigoletto from Vienna (he had to bow out mid-opera), then his doctors told him he needed thyroid surgery. “Luckily it was a false alarm, but they had to take some out, and they did a bad job. That stopped me dead in my tracks. I couldn’t sing a note for five, six, seven months. Nothing.”

When the concert hall was approved in 2006, the projected cost was €173.1 million; the final cost as of 2015 was €534.7 million, an overrun of 208%, according to a report from the regional auditors’ office for Ile-de-France. (in French; Google Translate version here)

“Young singers usually build their careers by taking on gradually longer and more demanding roles. But the metallic colors and lower vocal center of gravity of prospective Tristans often make them an awkward fit for traditional young tenor repertory.”

“Much remains uncertain about the future, with orchestras everywhere battling to stop declining attendance figures. In these rapidly evolving circumstances, the relatively short three-year extension to music director Osmo Vänskä’s contract, announced in May 2015, was probably the sensible option for management and conductor. It does, though, snap sharply into focus the real possibility that Vänskä could be gone by August 2019.”