Category: music

A court in Bermuda has ruled that the trust controlling the estate of the Swiss magnate Christof Engelhorn may not renege on the pledge he made before he died to donate 130 million Swiss francs toward the construction of a modular opera house near Lucerne’s famous Cultural Center.

The 29-year-old New Jersey native first came to notice as (arguably) the anti-hero in the documentary The Audition, about the 2007 Met National Council Auditions.

Colin Fleming: “And it is absolutely bonkers, mad, brave, cheekily pugnacious, punchy, and akin to what Lear’s Fool, Samuel Beckett, and a young Mozart might have come up with if those three ever got together to have a musical bash.”

“The message is clear: streaming music is good for British record labels, after a decade of declining sales. Yet it’s fair to ask another question: whether the rapid growth in streaming music payments to labels is as good news for the companies making those payments.”

Zoë Keating, the cellist, self-releases her music rather than work with a label, and “has made a habit of sharing details of how her earnings break down between different sources, for the benefit of her peers and the wider debate around digital music payouts.”

“It is largely a portrait of what Ms. Callahan calls ‘unique personal style,’ or sartorially inclined ordinary folk. Recent posts include a man clad in form-fitting, head-to-toe leather, and a blonde bombshell whose off-the-shoulder dress showed off her extensively tattooed back.”

Leonard Slatkin: “When it comes to the African-American sector of the classical music workplace … there remain but a few who are in the forefront of the industry. Many attempts to alter this situation have seemed patronizing, and, in many cases, unfair.”

“Tito Muñoz, who currently serves as music director of the Opéra National de Lorraine and Orchestre Symphonique et Lyrique de Nancy in France, will take the baton at Phoenix’s Symphony Hall for seven classics concerts in the 2014-15 season. A native of Queens, N.Y., he is 30 years old — the same age of his predecessor, Michael Christie, when Christie came to the Valley in 2004.”

Since the Nazis’ concept of “degenerate music” was driven mainly by racial ideology, the works they suppressed cover a wide range of styles, from atonal modernism to idioms influenced by cabaret and jazz. The Soviet notion of “socialist realism” was sufficiently elastic that almost anyone who didn’t pass muster politically could be targeted as an anti-Soviet composer.

Late in the ’00s, the Australian dramatic soprano was going through a vocal crisis so severe that she expected never to sing in public again. Now she’s back at work, thanks to determination, physical therapy and Botox. (She’s lost quite a bit of weight and founded a vocal academy to boot.)