Category: music

Concert Companion – Orchestra Tests App To Enhance Your Listening Experience

“At a time when most orchestras are policing interruptive phones during concerts – in China, red lasers zap offending users – here smartphones were not only kept on but encouraged, though the specially designed darkened screens created by the app are theoretically not distracting to nearby patrons, and repeated messages appear on phone screens reminding everybody to turn down the ringtones.”

After A Century, Wisconsin Orchestra Is Going Silent

The Green Bay Symphony “has survived world wars, the Great Depression, financial troubles, years-long closures, the introduction of television and the rise of rock ‘n’ roll. It has performed under different names in various venues, and morphed from an amateur community group to a professional one. And now, amid donor fatigue and declining ticket sales, the farewell season is in full swing. Musicians, though, remain hopeful that they can drum up support to keep the symphony intact.”

Lincoln Center and New York Philharmonic Move Into Opera (Look Out, Met!)

“For years, the Metropolitan Opera has gently encroached on the symphonic terrain of its Lincoln Center neighbors with orchestral concerts at Carnegie Hall. Now the shoe is on the other foot: Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic said on Wednesday that they would join forces to mount several fully staged opera productions” of acclaimed new works from Europe that the Met seems too risk-averse to touch.

Paris’s New Concert Hall, Meant To Bridge Divides, Has Created New Ones

The location and programming of the Philharmonie de Paris, perched right on the city line next to the ring road, are aimed to reach out toward the four million people living in the capital’s northern and eastern suburbs. But they – many of them immigrants or their French-born children – are wary, even as many in the city’s established classical music audiences object to the hall’s remote location.

The Philharmonie de Paris’s Architect Boycotted The Hall’s Grand Opening

In an editorial in Le Monde, Jean Nouvel alleges that he has been sidelined and ignored, and that key decisions about the hall, made with no input from him, have compromised the building. “The contempt these last two years for architecture, for the architect’s craft … prevents me from expressing my agreement and satisfaction with attending the opening ceremony.”