Category: music

“How do you discover new music? Some companies have bet on human editors, while others put their weight behind clever algorithms. One company thinks the solution is actually more like a pendulum that swings back and forth between the two.”

“Recently hired general director Rob Tannenbaum has resigned as head of the Sacramento Region Performing Arts Alliance – the merged organization formed out of the Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera … for ‘personal and professional reasons’.”

The Met “filled just 79% of the seats in that huge, red-velvet covered house, and made only 69% of their projected box-office revenue. For all the millions who watched the cinema broadcasts, those are astonishingly low figures for the world’s most expensive opera house.”

Posting on her Tumblr, a self-described “huge nerd” called Amelia explained that she and a friend had been examining a copy of Bosch’s famous triptych, which was painted around the year 1500. “[We] discovered, much to our amusement,” she wrote. “[a] 600-years-old butt song from Hell.”

The company’s music director, still in his first season back after a two-year sick leave, will double his conducting load next season as his health continues to rebound. Also, the Met will stage a major contemporary opera that caused some ferocious public battles not all that long ago.

Today, opera is routinely styled as the antithesis of everyday life. The clash of opera (assumed to be “posh”) with “ordinary people” is a formula wheeled out repeatedly in reality TV series such as From Pop Star to Opera Star and Maestro at the Opera.

Here’s what three hypothetical artists of different sizes might be pulling down for each album they make, based on musician interviews and industry gossip.

“After asking why everyone in their house was so glum, [his young daughter] said: ‘The violin? Why are we still talking about the violin? That was five days ago.'”

Currently the chief conductor of the Zurich Opera House and the Orchestre National de France, and frequently considered a frontrunner for a major post in the U.S., Gatti is suffering from inflamed shoulder tendons.

“The first standing ovation of the evening began before Frank Almond set foot on the stage. He stepped out without the violin to thank the audience, the Milwaukee Police Department, the FBI, any other law enforcement agencies that worked on the investigation as well those who had shown him an enormous outpouring of support over the past two weeks, saying very little about the robbery.”