Category: music

The acquisition by the Brussels-based indie rock label group PIAS, effective Oct. 1, includes all of Harmonia Mundi’s subsidiary labels, catalogues, inventory and other assets in classical, jazz, and world music, but not HM’s book publishing business or retail outlets.

The orchestra is presenting a multimedia, three-year “Pelleas and Melisande” project that will combine live music, a site-specific installation and – in the third year – the performance of a full opera.

The Tianjin Juilliard School is expected to open in 2018 and will offer U.S.-accredited master of music degrees in orchestral studies, chamber music and collaborative piano. The school will have its own permanent faculty; guest artists from the New York campus will also teach there.

“Now we know that there is something anatomically different about them.” Their ability to keep time gives them an intuitive understanding of the rhythmic patterns they perceive all around them.

“Have I mentioned that one thing a critic learns, over time, is that there is not a single Right Way to hear music? … And that brings us to the slippery notion of taste. No matter what critics may assert, taste is both individual and fluid. Yes, there are rules and standards separating the tasteful from the crude, and in theory, there are absolutes and boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. But if you listen long enough, you’ll hear a good many of them crossed after all.”

“The Los Angeles Philharmonic has launched a virtual reality project in which people don VR goggles and Samsung headsets that give them a 3-D, 360-degree experience of four minutes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, performed by the orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The VR goggles and other equipment were put aboard a bus, dubbed Van Beethoven, and sent out to tour the county through October.”

Says the company’s director, Dominique Meyer: “No, during my second term there will be no music director” to succeed Franz Welser-Möst. (in German; Google-translated version here)

” Lost in Thought is an opera, but its plot is simpler than The Marriage of Figaro. The card reads: ‘Sit. Walk. Sit. Eat. Wash up. Sit Rest. Waking up. Sit. Play. Walk. Chant. Sit. Breaking the silence.’ It is suggested we meditate in the next four hours on what it is to sit, what it is to walk, what it is to eat.”

“Until now, the French haven’t really done galas in the focused way of American organizations. In a largely state-subsidized cultural system, fund-raising has not been an imperative and the cultivation of a circle of patrons has been discreet and elite.”

Mark Wigglesworth: “If you get the work right and you get your promoting of it right, then filling this building shouldn’t be a problem, but I completely agree that we have lost our way a little bit — in terms of people coming, frankly. You can’t deny that the work [at ENO] is good and you can’t deny that the box office has become more challenging. And that’s not a price worth paying.”