Category: music

Alex Ross, Greg Sandow, pianist and educator Orli Shaham, and Peabody Institute dean/former St. Louis Symphony CEO Fred Bronstein talk issues and strategies with public radio host Diane Rehm. (audio)

“The way we look at this violin, from an investment point of view, is that this is a store of value,” Allain said. “We are big investors in gold. That’s a store of value, to the extent that someone is saying it’s worth something, just as we think bitcoin is worth something. This Stradivarius—it’s a finite supply. It’s musical gold.”

Judith Weir says there is still a sneaking suspicion that the world of classical music is carved up by a few big institutions and a handful of powerful cultural leaders. That really is an establishment; but Weir does not need the role of the master for access to classical music’s top table. The opportunity of the role, she says, “is to avoid all that – and go and meet the other people”.

“Between low royalties, opaque payout rates, declining record sales and suspicion that the major labels have cut deals with the streamers that leave musicians out of the equation, anger from the music business’s artier edges is slow[ly] growing. … The shift to digital is also helping to isolate these already marginalized genres: It has a decisive effect on what listeners can find, and on whether or not an artist can earn a living from his work.”

“The American conductor David Zinman is a small man, physically – conductors often seem to be – but with a giant profile in the Swiss city of Zurich. People recognize him on the sidewalk. Waiters hover. Strangers wave.”

David McVicar, in town to rehearse a new staging of Don Giovanni: “I think they thought about the outside before they thought about the inside. The problems of the Joan Sutherland [Opera Theatre] are extreme. It’s a very quirky space, it is inadequate for opera, it just simply is.”

“The military is one of the largest employers of musicians in the Washington area; indeed, the Army’s Web site claims that the institution is “the oldest and largest employer of musicians in the world.” The combined budget for the nation’s military bands was projected, in 2013, at $388 million (before sequester-related cutbacks).”

“The fact that a public work like this [is] going ahead in the very centre of one of our most famous concert series, on the BBC … there’s a sense of making up and making good, of expunging a lot of what was so bad about the old world.”

“They fully listen to both themselves and other people’s needs as they learn to enter their ‘musical world’ (when they get in touch with people and their inner music).”

“At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction. The New York City Opera was forced to close its doors last year after seven decades of introducing nonrich New Yorkers to big-house opera. That could happen to the Met, too, unless Mr. Gelb—or his successor—takes a searching look at the company’s artistic policy.”