Category: music

“About 15 years ago, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra underwent a dramatic transformation. It hired a new music director, Miguel Harth-Bedoya. It launched the Millennium campaign, which eventually raised $28 million for an orchestra endowment. … And then the recession hit during the 2008-09 symphony season.” And while the stock market and the economy, nationally and locally, have bounced back since 2009, the FWSO’s endowment and annual revenues have not, despite increased ticket sales and new contributors.

Ben Ratliff: “What is sadness in sound per se? Nothing. It doesn’t exist. There is no note or kind of note that in and of itself is sad and only sad. … But the construct of sadness, and the attendant contract that it helps build between musician and listener, has to do with how we might recognize it person-to-person.”

“Young children have a remarkably selective sensitivity to shared cultural knowledge. Children both prefer others who know songs they themselves know, and avoid others who know songs they do not know.”

The summer event, “which conductor Lorin Maazel founded on his private estate in Virginia in 2009 and nurtured until his death in 2014, … [will] take a year-long hiatus. … ‘I have no finances anymore,’ said Dietlinde Maazel, the actress and widow of the conductor, who took over the festival after her husband’s death.”

‘Classical includes a range of new artists and sounds: from the minimalism of Steve Reich to the percussion of Inuksuit Ensemble. Contemporary artists like Maya Beiser, who transforms our expectations of the soloist by using technology to layer her own playing of different parts on the cello, and Max Richter, who merges violin, orchestra and synthesiser, should be considered no different to the Stravinskys and Schuberts of eras past. Such artists create a valuable entry point for new listeners, whatever their age.”

“Nearly 670 people had bought roughly $323,000 worth of tickets for performances that were canceled when City Opera went bankrupt in 2013” – and they’ll be getting their money back from NYCO Renaissance, the group that’s reviving the company.

“Since she joined NCCO in 2008, Salerno-Sonnenberg led the orchestra over a robust period of growth, including a Featured Composer program, commissioning eight new works and expanding the string orchestra repertoire, going on three extensive national tours, publishing three live recordings on her own NSS music label.”

“Chamber orchestras too often cede the limelight to their larger cousins. Composers today tend to want to go large, ruling out smaller groups like ours approaching their work. That’s a critical mistake, not only in terms of possibilities of performance but also in the development of the composer.”

“I actually think there is a great new word for Classical Music, one that’s been hiding in plain sight, as they say. So with a bow of gratitude to Leonard The Great, who helped me and millions of others experience great music on its own terms and in all its wonder, I hereby propose it.”

Opera Orlando, formerly Florida Opera Theatre, “will announce this week that two professionals with national reputations will take the helm full-time – a level of commitment to the genre not seen since the collapse of Orlando Opera in 2009. After that company went bankrupt, a small but fiercely devoted group of volunteers formed Florida Opera Theatre to stage small-scale productions and recitals.”