“All the same, the news comes as a conceptual shock, because no one under the age of fifty – myself included – can remember a time when Levine wasn’t the frizzy-haired man on the Met podium. He was always there, eyes alight, sweat on his brow, hands caressing the air.”
Category: music
James Levine To Retire From Met Opera At End Of This Season
“The announcement about Mr. Levine, 72, capped a difficult year in which he struggled to hold on to his position amid a variety of health problems, including Parkinson’s disease.”
Opera News Lays Off Publisher, Editor
Brian Kellow, “features editor since 2000, has been laid off as of April 12. So has Diane Silberstein, from the relatively new position of publisher. Both appear to have been cost-cutting moves. No further changes in staff, or the magazine itself, are anticipated at this time.”
Did McCarthyism Drive Aaron Copland To Write 12-Tone Music?
“What caused Copland’s shift from populist to abstruse? Was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy to blame? Or the Modernist influence of the composer Pierre Boulez? For decades, listeners and scholars have offered a range of answers.”
Reviving 18th-Century Paris’s Version Of A Broadway Musical Revue
Opéra-ballet, “a frothy, sometimes louche amalgam of dance and singing, was wildly popular in early 18th-century France but then largely disappeared, arousing interest again only in recent decades.” William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, with stage director Robert Carsen, are bringing to the US the most popular example of the genre, André Campra’s Les Fêtes Vénitiennes.
Yannick’s Montreal Orchestra Gives Homeless Man New Violin To Replace Stolen One
Mark Landry plays for passing commuters most mornings at the Joliette Métro station. But he awoke Tuesday morning to find that his instrument had been taken, and he sat in his usual spot with a cup asking for change to help buy a new one. Enter the Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand-Montréal. (includes video)
Good News: Sales Of Music were Up In 2015
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said global revenues from recorded music rose 3.2 per cent between 2014 and 2015, to $15 billion, as an industry decimated by the digital revolution returned to growth. The group said the rise marks “the industry’s first significant year-on-year growth in nearly two decades.”
North Carolina: Do Musician Boycotts Do Any Good?
“Although performers have been using their power to appear—or not—to send political messages for decades, the efficacy of the gesture in fights over North Carolina and Mississippi’s laws remains unclear. But musicians played a very public role in fighting segregation in the U.S. and apartheid in South Africa.”
For Its Next Principal Conductor, Santa Fe Symphony Chooses An Old Friend And Neighbor
Guillermo Figueroa, who begins his term this fall, was music director of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra in Albuquerque from 2000 to the orchestra’s closure in 2011.
Unknown John Cage Piece Turns Up In The Middle Of Another Composer’s Score
All Sides of the Small Stone, for Erik Satie and (Secretly Given to Jim Tenney as a Koan) lay undiscovered for 38 years; Cage evidently slipped it into the pages of a work by his former student.