Category: music

“The violin world is a world based on lineage, secrecy, and the ‘war’ between authenticity and deception inside an elite group. It consists of a cloister of craftspeople, dealers, and ‘experts’ passing very specific knowledge down to the very few willing to take the time to learn this time-intensive skill that for centuries has been based on copying old fiddles.”

“Cage wanted a contemporary art that reflects life as it was led. To the Black Mountain traditional modernists, and especially for the émigrés, memory must always be honored, one must never forget.”

“The extra scenes include a passionate sex sequence and, after the audience are led to understand Lucia was pregnant, a miscarriage on stage.”

One day after unionized staff narrowly voted to reject cost-cutting measures to reduce debt of €25 million, the board of the Fondazione Arena di Verona, which operates the popular summer festival, voted unanimously to ask the national culture minister to shut the organization down. Verona’s mayor claims that this action won’t affect the actual performances this summer, though a new, privatized entity will have to run the festival. (in Italian; Google Translate version here)

“The group is instituting [one new] program, increasing others, and packaging them under an umbrella acronym: HEAR, which stands for health, education, access, and research. … The initiatives are part of a changing institutional direction, [orchestra president Allison Vulgamore] said, taking the orchestra more heavily into social-mission work. ‘I want to be off stage as much as we are on stage.'”

“A rising lyric soprano who won the 2012 Richard Tucker Award, Ms. Pérez, 36, … [has won the annual] $50,000 prize to help foster the careers of young singers who have appeared in solo roles at the Metropolitan Opera.”

“It took artist Gerard Gauci a week to paint the whimsical portraits of sopranos Meghan Lindsay and Peggy Kriha Dye, which grace the stage of the Elgin Theatre in Opera Atelier’s Lucio SillaLucio Silla. But it only takes one minute for them to be destroyed when enraged dictator Lucio Silla punches one painting and stabs the other.”

“Not every composer writes music with medicinal effects. Mahler’s darker symphonies could make a bad day even worse. Yet Bach … is described by passionate advocates as music for times of modern-day crisis. Says pianist Alexandre Tharaud, “When I play Bach, my hands feel better, my body feels better, and my heart feels better.”

“Finnish conductor Susanna Malkki will become only the third person ever appointed principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.” Her two predecessors are Simon Rattle and Michael Tilson Thomas.

Kasper Bech Holten’s tenure as artistic director, which ends in March of next year, has seen more controversy over stagings than is usual at Covent Garden. So, he says, “what could be more fitting for my last show in London than to do a comedy about how hard it is sometimes for audiences and artists to find the right way to communicate with each other?”