Category: music

“It had been a star-crossed organization for years, beset by strikes, warehouse fires, financial woes and the devastation of the early years of AIDS. Beverly Sills–the company’s biggest star, its long-time general manager and most effective fundraiser–estimated that the troupe lost more than 100 people to AIDS in the space of a decade: directors, conductors, singers, and others at the peak of their youth and sexual urgency, cut down by a mysterious new malady.”

“Music will be mixed to create full 3D immersion over headphones long before 2050.”

Bernstein’s letters are “full of vibrant, funny, excited, spontaneous, sometimes, you know, crazy ideas” and expose the fault lines for an extroverted composer.

Last week the opera house’s incoming superintendent leaked to Corriere della sera that Riccardo Chailly would become music director there when the incumbent, Daniel Bareboim, departs in 2017. Chailly then responded that nothing was settled at all. Now someone else (evidently an orchestra member) has told La Repubblica that Fabio Luisi is the preferred candidate.

“The orchestra’s parent body, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, reported record-breaking fundraising for a third consecutive year, along with record ticket sales.” The organization did post a deficit for the year, though it was down 87% from the previous year.

“In an age of personalized everything – from medicine to marketing – personalized performing arts is increasingly in vogue. “

“The service, designed with mobile listening in mind, will have a free component and a premium tier that offers unlimited access to a full catalog of tracks similar to what’s already available via YouTube’s parent company, Google Inc., via its All Access subscription music service.”

“Compared to the current creative confidence of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Scottish Opera is in danger of being run into creative and cultural irrelevance – and at just the time when this proud, historically ambitious, over-achieving company could and should be making the case for itself as the single cultural jewel of which the country should be proudest.”

“New revelations about ancient Greek music have emerged from a few dozen ancient documents inscribed with a vocal notation devised around 450 BC, consisting of alphabetic letters and signs placed above the vowels of the Greek words.”

“Why is it that musicians (particularly union musicians) are so quick to gripe about playing new music and blame contemporary works for an institution’s sour financial situation?”