“Retailer HMV, which has doubled the floor space it allocates for vinyl in recent years, said it had sold a record player every minute in the past week, as the popularity of the classic system continues to grow.”
Category: music
Rare Beethoven Manuscript Turns Up In Connecticut House
The sketches “went from being a curio in a Greenwich home to a $100,000 windfall when it sold at auction last month. For music scholars, it’s become an exciting addition to the Beethoven canon.
Dallas Symphony Calls Off European Tour Over Fear Of Terrorists
The orchestra’s board and management said, “After careful deliberation, we believe that there is an elevated risk to the safety of our musicians and their families, guest artists, D.S.O. personnel and traveling patrons, and therefore will not be proceeding with the tour at this time.” A spokesperson added that the tour was not being cancelled for economic reasons.
Fort Worth Symphony Cancels Tour Of Spain Because Venues Can’t Afford Them
The six-city trip, which was to have been the orchestra’s first overseas tour in 27 years, “was canceled last week after several concert halls dropped out of the tour, partly due to the lack of government funding and the falling value of the euro.”
2015: The Year Jazz Roared
“Jazz soundtracked this tumultuous year not within its own confines but in how it escaped to infiltrate other genres.”
Aix Festival Director To Step Down
Bernard Foccroulle, the Belgian organist, composer and administrator who has run the Aix-en-Provence Festival since 2007 “and has led it through a number of artistic successes, said in a statement that he felt ‘the need to start a new chapter’ after spending nearly a decade in his position, and 15 years at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels before that.”
An Opera (In HD) Buff, At The Met For The First Time
“She longed to see the Met’s home for herself, to hear the singing without the intermediaries of broadcasting — the voices that introduced the voices, the cameras that focused on what the director decided to focus on. It was a longing that had begun when she was a girl.”
Should Legacy Groups Like The Hartford Symphony Learn To Innovate?
“Is this folly as Rome burns? The symphony is bleeding $1.3 million a year and nearing the end of its cash reserves. It’s asking for pay concessions from the musicians’ union, which is, to say the least, not thrilled with this new digital scheme, as some musicians fear it could divert money or devalue their skills.”
How Did This Depressing Joni Mitchell Piece Become ‘A Traditional Christmas Song’?
“Perhaps it’s ascended to holiday-hit status precisely because it’s an antidote to all those ‘songs of joy and peace.'”
The Trumpets Of Handel’s ‘Messiah’
“In a brass player’s equivalent of scaling Everest without oxygen, some trumpeters take pride in playing — and meticulously tuning — Handel’s solo on so-called natural trumpets without holes.”