Category: music

The 78-year-old conductor, largely sidelined from performing in recent years by ill health, will continue to serve as the festival’s general director, though the festival orchestra (with which Ozawa has made some of his finest recordings) will keep the Saito Kinen name.

“No-one should be too surprised by the National Opera Review which promises to take a good look at Opera Australia, Opera Queensland, State Opera of South Australia and West Australian Opera. Governments want to know their money is well spent, and the conservatives have shown that they are not afraid to be radical in their approach to arts funding – and opera in particular.”

“Beethoven really liberated the cello. In most classical symphonies the cellos are just sawing along with the basses, and Beethoven, more and more, gave them independent parts.”

“To me, the Strad is not just a violin, but is an extension of myself, allowing me to communicate all my musical ideas.”

“Ask them to name a favorite band and the point is moot. They have carved no room into their lives for any music. The way someone might not feel a connection to movies, they feel toward a medium so fundamental to most societies that many believe it is part of what makes us human.”

“The Metropolitan Opera and two of its unions have agreed to hire an independent financial analyst to assess the company’s finances, postponing a threatened lockout by another week, officials said Saturday. The deal was brokered by a federal mediator who arrived Thursday to jump-start fractious talks.”

“About 2,400 of the Met’s 3,400 employees are union members. They cover a broad swath of activities ranging from singing in the chorus, playing in the orchestra, dancing, painting sets, running the box office, singing solo roles, working in the call center, posting bills (advertising posters), running cameras and taking tickets.”

It’s a “breathtakingly crass, spectacularly point-missing wave of pop-classical crossover. It makes one fantasise about re-education camps for the compulsory internment of whoever’s listening to this brazenly misguided bilge.”

Peter Gelb is “right that opera in its current form is not sustainable — something of a given in a field that has literally no independent commercial viability, relies entirely on donations, can’t hope for significant European-style government funding in this country, and is paying hundreds of people very large salaries. The unions are also right that the problem is partly artistic.”

“The Metropolitan Opera postponed a threatened lockout late on Thursday night, saying that it had done so at the request of a federal mediator who was brought in at the 11th hour to try to salvage its contract negotiations with the unions representing its orchestra and chorus.”