Category: music

“What Shostakovich’s music had to do with history has been one of the most fraught questions in the history of music. He lived through the most terrifying decades of the Soviet Union to become its most celebrated composer.”

For 15 years, the Progetto Martha Argerich in Lugano has had a devoted following of audience members, famous musicians who want to collaborate with Argerich, and the label warner Classics, which issues a 3 CD-set of highlights from each year’s festival. But the event’s main sponsor has been the now-scandal-plagued Banca della Svizzera Italiana, which has discontinued funding.

“In 1955, a teenage violinist from Hoover High School played her first concert with the San Diego Symphony. On Sunday, after 61 years with the orchestra, she played her last.”

The 61-year-old American composer, who recently ended a five-year term as artistic director of Opera San Antonio, “will work with Tulsa Opera General Director and CEO Greg Weber on overall artistic vision for the company, selection of repertoire and production teams, and casting of singers.”

Heresy, we know, but clever nonetheless.

“While officials have described the plan as likely to cost around $500 million, Ms. Farley said that the actual figure could be different. ‘It’s a number that passes the sanity test — it’s not a budget,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what it’s going to cost until you know what it is.'”

“Nobody would ship there, so we either had to source everything locally or take it as check-in luggage on the plane. We had to be extremely frugal with what we were taking out to Cuba, but even then our small core team ended up taking 745 kg of additional check in luggage on top of our personal suitcases, including a 92-kg Roland M-5000 mixing desk.”

“The fandango at the border did not start out as an overtly political act. But through the years, as the national debate over immigration has become ever more divisive and as violence in Mexico has continued, the event’s symbolism has deepened and grown more bittersweet.”

“Copland was pretty good. He eschewed the modern fast tempos and loud playing. He’d say to the brass, ‘Noble, gentlemen, noble. I don’t understand why everyone takes this so fast.'”

“What what the paper archives make clear, through [Arthur] Russell’s personal notes — often written in small music-composition notebooks — is how much he sought to incorporate a conscious sense of openness and flexibility into his work. Some of his most useful notes, probably from the early 1980s, deal with ‘World of Echo.’ Here he wrestled with the idea of form and completeness in fascinating ways, often using the notation ‘p Idea’ (the p may have stood for parenthetical).”