Category: music

“What can you think, as a jazz musician, when somebody comes up and asks you to write an opera? For a little while, I was so intimidated I stayed away from it.”

The proposed class action asks a federal court to declare the song to be in the public domain and that Warner/Chappel Music Inc, the music publishing arm of Warner Music Group, return “millions of dollars of unlawful licensing fees” it has collected for reproductions and public performances of the song.

“The state Legislative Auditor’s Office has found no improprieties in how the Minnesota Orchestra Association used state money – both general operating funds and a $14 million bonding grant to help renovate Orchestra Hall.”

“None of the people I met in D.C. last week were content to create music in a society that doesn’t value it, either aesthetically or economically. We should not be content either.”

“Management and musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra have settled a new contract more than a year before the current one expires. The agreement calls for a 4 percent wage increase for the 2013-14 season, a wage freeze in 2014-15 and a 3 percent increase in 2015-16.”

But a commenter responds: “If you want to keep saying that it’s totally normal for a major American symphony orchestra to have two dozen empty seats, well, then I don’t know what to say. We don’t live in the same reality.”

“A ‘spectacular blow-up’ between conductor Richard Mills and a senior cast member of the Melbourne Ring cycle was due to Mills’s inexperience in conducting the massive opera,” according to an unnamed backstage source.

During a recital the mezzo gave at La Scala last weekend, just as she was the quiet ending of a Rossini aria, someone’s phone went off. She finished like the pro she is, but when she came back for a bow, she asked the audience if it had been Rossini calling to check in.

“There’s got to be a period of study, from age 16 to 22, and then it moves along. You can’t just think: ‘Oh, I can sing in the bathroom, I’ll be fine tonight on stage.’ Not at all. There is such a demand on the voice for it to be able to produce night after night.”

“When contemporary critics complained that the three-hour opera was too long, composer Luigi Cherubini blacked out its coda, according to legend. Now musicians have the full length of the original 1797 piece.”