Category: music

“Fabiani’s many clients have included Lance Armstrong, who hired Fabiani during the doping scandal that plagued the cyclist; and Goldman Sachs, for whom he worked when the firm faced fraud charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

“‘We have tried for many years to come to grips with the Vienna Philharmonic’s past and face up to our responsibility to make good historical injustices,’ orchestra director Clemens Hellsberg said.”

“In the symphony’s plan, there’s even a section of a timeline labeled ‘difficult decisions.'”

“By now, Cultural Studies has infiltrated nearly every corner of the humanities and social sciences, and so a generation of educated, internet-addicted music listeners has spent their formative university years questioning the primacy of their own tastes and interrogating bricolage in early-nineties hip hop.”

“The question was, how would Górecki follow the Third when he came to write his Fourth Symphony, three decades later? At his death, the Fourth was completed only in short score – a composer’s shorthand rather than a full-fleshed orchestral version.”

Karen Cohn: “We are exploring every possible idea for creating an economically sustainable way to preserve the current opera company in some form. And if that proves to be impossible, we all stand ready to do whatever we can to help preserve opera in a new form for San Diego.”

“Forty-two percent of Americans think that this decade has the worst music compared with the other four most recent decades. Next in order are the 2000s (15 percent), 1990s (13 percent), 1980s (14 percent) and the 1970s (12 percent).”

“Our ultimate criterion is supreme musical excellence, over a period of time, preferably in the opera house as well as in the concert hall, and here there can be little argument – the VPO consistently produces playing of the utmost musicality and technical assurance, with my own vote being cast on the strength of blazingly vivid memories of performances at the Salzburg Festival over the last 15 years.”

“The idea of a celebrity getting paid for attending something that normal people are paying to attend — the general admission cost this year was $375 — is infuriating, especially when it’s something like a music festival, that’s meant to be down-to-earth.”

Birgit Nilsson Foundation president Rutbert Reisch said the choice of the orchestra fit the award’s criteria for artists “who have made the biggest contribution to classical music.” The Birgit Nilsson prize adds to the list of honors accorded to the Viennese ensemble, which is recognized as one of the world’s greatest.