Category: music

When he resigned this week, Stanley Romanstein wrote that his continued presence would be “an impediment” to ending the lockout. But, says the leader of the musicians’ union, “Stanley was never empowered to negotiate an agreement with the Musicians of the ASO; neither this negotiation nor in 2012.”

“The head of the Hungarian National Szechenyi Library’s music collection has stumbled across a rare discovery.
As he looked through a folder of unidentified music scores, among the many copies and unremarkable scores he suddenly noticed a page that made his heart jump.”

“The thing about composing, nobody can tell — even Beethoven couldn’t tell until he had composed quite a bit of music and it got better and better — the degree of talent. You can’t get up one day [and say], ‘I’m going to be talented today and write a great piece.’ The only thing you can do is start composing and work your buns off working on it and studying the great music of the past and learning from it and then try to create sort of your own language.”

I… “want them to come away with an overview of the nuts and bolts of an orchestra, what it takes to run and fund an orchestra like this. This is not a management program, but we want to give them the tools to ask the right questions as they start their own careers, probably inside an orchestra as performers.”

With the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari having cancelled its fall productions after posting a €2 million deficit for 2013, the house’s young chief conductor, Daniele Rustioni, has said he won’t renew his contract when it expires next January. (in Italian)

“The hall was so packed that when the students who accompanied Bell performed an opening set, people in the back of the crowd kept clapping after the students left the stage, not realizing that the music they were then hearing was a recording.”

“The World Piano Competition will now be known as the Cincinnati World Piano Competition. The Artist Division, which has a top prize of $20,000, will be held every three years, instead of annually. And on alternate years, there will be a Young Artist Competition and an all-new Amateur Competition.”

The cluster of streets southwest of downtown Nashville has long been the spiritual and commercial center of the nation’s country music business — a concentration of record companies, small-time showbiz strivers and studios that Christine Kreyling, a local writer, once called “the Vatican City of country music.” But “If we let certain musical touchstones go, these centerpieces of collaboration between artists and engineers, then what’s left that makes Nashville’s music scene unique?”

“I believe that my continued leadership of the ASO would be an impediment to our reaching a new labor agreement with the ASO’s musicians,” said Stanley Romanstein in a press release.