Category: music

“New York City Opera, which filed for bankruptcy protection last month after years of management missteps, won court approval to auction some assets, including costumes, wigs, props and about 60 musical instruments.”

Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities just completed an acclaimed run amidst the crowds at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, and the creators say several other cities, starting with Bordeaux, want the production staged in their railroad depots.

In 2007, philanthropist Christof Engelhorn pledged, through a Bermuda-based trust fund, 120 million Swiss francs (roughly $131 million) for the construction of a new adjustable opera/concert venue called the Salle Modulable for the Lucerne Festival. Since Engelhorn’s death in 2010, the trust has refused to honor the pledge, maintaining that it was not formally contracted. The Lucerners sued, and the case has now gone to trial in a Bermuda court.

“Ornstein was considered among the most influential composer/performers in the decade before World War I, and maybe the most sensationalized. … Though [he] arrived in the 1930s as one of the most famous pianists of his day, he departed so quietly in the late 1950s – by choice – that nobody quite knows when he left. His death in 2002 at age 107 … was noticed, but not widely.”

“The extant network of orchestras and opera houses is an artifact of a very different America. City Opera, a pet project of Fiorello LaGuardia, emerged from the ethos of the New Deal, when government funds were allotted to the propagation of the arts for the masses. These days, political leaders are largely absent from the discussion, and the winner-take-all economy is as prevalent in the arts as everywhere else.”

Jeremy Polacek: “Rather, we’re more apt to ridicule something for being overly emotional or mock someone who is. … Characters in opera don’t share their feelings so much as disgorge them. Performances teem with huge, unburdened emotions. To [a generation] ironically allergic to such unalloyed sentiment, opera can seem a most strange, outlandish thing.”

The Berlin-L.A.-Minnesota co-production by Barrie Kosky and experimental British troupe 1927 “is an interactive, nontraditional reinvention that combines live performance and hand-drawn animation; it weaves throughout visual references to silent films of the 1920s and 1930s, specifically the comedy of Buster Keaton and the kitschy horror of the 1922 German Expressionist film Nosferatu.”

“Well surprise, surprise. If you take a system, pick it up, shake it about, put it down again and give it a silly new name, the only difference you’re going to make is more of a mess and more work for teachers, who are already sick to death of non-stop government initiatives written in gibberish.”

“Unfortunately, ‘new’ has become one of the most loosely and overused words in popular music. The term is most problematic when used to justify programming policies or the supposed altruism of the music industry.”