“The question of Mr. Levine’s status has exposed tensions at the Met, dividing supporters who would like to see him stay on and members of the company and board who believe it is time for him to relinquish his role. They fear that the lack of a strong musical hand could leave the house adrift as opera struggles for relevance and the Met’s finances remain precarious.”
Category: music
The English National Opera Is Still In Major Trouble
“It requires the wisdom of Solomon to work out how cutting one of the finest opera choruses, and possibly an orchestra too, can conceivably be the only honourable deed.”
How Do We Trace Influence In Music?
“As listeners, what are we attached to? At what point in life have we made up our musical minds? Do we have to eat our musical vegetables to grow strong? Listen to Bach, Blind Willie, Carnatic music?”
Opera Is A Product Of Its Time. Should It Be Politically Correct For Our Time?
“Opera is a complex, historic art form, with its own arcane formal language. Rather than think of it as entertainment, it makes more sense to conceive of it as a vast archive of emotional, historical, social and theatrical data. Opera allows us to enter into, understand and actually feel emotions that are culturally and historically extremely distant from our own time and sensibility.”
Roberto Alagna Learns New Role In Two Weeks, Saves The Met’s Bacon
“Jonas Kaufmann, one of the biggest stars in opera, had just withdrawn from a coming new production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. Would Mr. Alagna step in? ‘My first thought was to say no,’ [he said]. … And he would have just 16 days to nail it before opening night, which arrives this Friday.”
After Dark Season, Sacramento Philharmonic Makes A Comeback
Said executive director Alice Sauro. ‘Two months after we sent out renewal forms, we got 876 subscribers. By October, we had over 1,000. … We never expected the response would be so positive.”
Boston Classical Orchestra To Close (New Orchestra Rises)
“Small ensembles like BCO face an uphill battle in Boston’s crowded musical ecosystem, especially as institutional funding falls far beneath the levels present in other cities. Still, as Boston loses one ensemble, it will be gaining another.”
SoundCloud (Used By Podcasters And Musicians) May Be Forced To Close
The report makes it clear that while the company had “adequate resources to continue in operational existence for the forseeable future,” SoundCloud was heavily reliant on “further capital investment” to continue operating in 2015.
Salonen, Hannigan, Uchida – Ojai Music Festival Names Directors Through 2021
“The coming directors include Vijay Iyer, the jazz pianist and composer, in 2017, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, the composer and conductor, in 2018 … [as well as] Barbara Hannigan, the soprano and conductor whose star has been rising because of her performances of new works, in 2019; Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the searching violinist, in 2020; and, in 2021, Mitsuko Uchida, the pianist and conductor who was last a co-music director of the festival in 1998.”
America’s Orchestra Mid-Life Crisis – A Reinvention More About Repositioning The Deck Furniture?
“The main thrust of orchestral initiatives in the 21st century — in which the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is a national leader — remains not finding new ways to approach the art, but rather new ways to perpetuate the existing tradition — that is, finding new audiences for the same thing.”