Category: music

The Metropolitan Opera said on Tuesday that the new production of Verdi’s Otello that will open its season next month will not use blackface makeup on the white tenor singing the title role, breaking with a performance tradition of more than a century.”

“Nineteenth-century Black singers like Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield and Sissieretta Jones sang opera but gave recitals, because the opera houses weren’t hiring them. Black churches were doing Verdi’s Requiem with all-Black casts and musicians.”

A federal lawsuit filed by a group of independent artists is trying to change that, and lawyers in the case, in a filing last week, said they had found evidence in the yellowed pages of a nearly century-old songbook that proves the song’s copyright — first issued in 1935 — is no longer valid.

“There’s a live Bob Marley concert and Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, John Coltrane recordings and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, part of a collection that for years the DJs wouldn’t discuss for fear that the bosses would order them to destroy them or ship the collection off the island, like other radio stations in the Defense Department broadcasting system.”

“On Monday, the orchestra announced it has extended its contract with Nelsons through the 2021-2022 season. The contract, which had previously run until 2019, also includes an evergreen provision allowing Nelsons and the orchestra to add additional years.”

The executive committee of the [San Luis Obispo Symphony’s] board of directors voted unanimously to terminate Feingold’s employment and he was let go Friday … Feingold’s departure comes less than three months after the ouster of former Music Director Michael Nowak, who had held that post for 31 years and was widely considered the public face of the symphony.”

“Andre Gremillet comes to Northeast Ohio by way of Australia, where he has served as managing director of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra since November 2012. The distance notwithstanding, the administrator brings from there experience doing much of what the Cleveland Orchestra is still in the midst of doing here: connecting more deeply with its hometown while simultaneously raising its profile worldwide.”

“AEG and Live Nation [are] trying to buy every festival out there that can be bought. What you’re seeing now is a race to control the content of festivals. The competition shows how much the $6 billion North American concert industry—long focused on arenas, amphitheaters, and stadiums—is tilting toward music festivals, which offer dozens of artists, specialty foods and other amenities.”

Using the “endangered species” model employed by the World Wide Fund for Nature, campaigners are highlighting the scarcity of bassoonists and paving the way for the promotion of some other orchestral instruments that are under threat, such as the oboe, French horn, viola, trombone and double bass.