Category: music

“There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Even identifying the problems facing artists as universal is wrong. Circumstances change, and artists are usually some of the most adaptable people on the planet.”

“Asked to fill in for the Joseph Calleja, Michael Fabiano rushed to New York, was fitted for costumes and a few hours later, wowed the audience.”

“As a radical new two-string violin goes on display in New York, Clemency Burton-Hill looks at some more odd instruments, from the octobass to the theremin.”

“A bomb destroyed some of our sets that were stored in a warehouse near the airport, we’ve lost 20 percent of our staff — or 150 people — and we are short of cash,” said the weary head of the theatre, Yevgeny Denisenko. “Tomorrow I will pay the salaries (that were due in) December.”

“Even though it’s not clear how long it will take the majority of people to subscribe to an on-demand streaming music service, it’s almost certain to catch on. It’s coming—record labels want people renting their music, and consumers want access to it all.”

“As Italy’s unofficial national symphony for more than 100 years,” the orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia “has long commanded respect and attracted the finest conductors. And while it is regularly ranked among the world’s top orchestras, it has had its ups and downs, like most such groups.” Over the past ten years, things have been up, thanks to music director Antonio Pappano.

“When you buy a Spirio—not you, necessarily; they run upwards of $110,000—it comes with an iPad loaded with a Spotify-like app. This app communicates with the piano via Bluetooth, prompting the piano to play any one of the 1,700 songs recorded specifically for the instrument. New songs will sync every week. By itself, an iPad-controlled piano is nifty, if not exactly a technological marvel. What makes Spirio different is that it can play songs with an unprecedented level of accuracy and nuance.”

“Today the debate about the soul of country music has extended far outside Nashville, and it’s now safe to say that the genre has a serious image problem. It’s not just stalwart country fans that see country being overrun with chauvinist posers in skinny jeans – it’s everyone.”

“By the beginning of the twentieth century, because of Schubert, song had become a musical form to rival the symphony, the string quartet, and the piano sonata. … Its aesthetic claims are complex and multifaceted: the response to text, the compression of drama (the thrill of the opera in a matter of minutes), a melodic sweep and harmonic language as worthy of attention and analysis as anything in Western classical music. In this sense the lied is a standing rebuke to classical music’s hierarchies, in which the biggest – or most expensive – is best.”

Graham Parker: “What has frustrated me more in all the articles I have read since Alan Gilbert announced his conclusion as music director, was the complete lack of considering the audience in the short listing of candidates. The audience, in this case, are: current patrons of the New York Philharmonic; future audiences who like classical music but don’t buy tickets; folks who don’t yet like classical music but have a latent reason to like it at some point; and then the wider audience of New York and all that it stands for as a leading cultural capital of the world.”