Category: music

“The Nashville Symphony Orchestra suffered an $11.7 million loss in the fiscal year ending July 31, 2012, as its revenue plunged by more than 50 percent to $21.5 million.”

“He noticed someone up in the choir seats filming the concert on their smartphone. We think it was probably an iPhone,” said Ruhr Piano Festival spokeswoman Anke Demirsoy. “He asked them to stop, but they didn’t. So he interrupted the recital and walked off stage.”

“Three days of clashes between protesters and riot police in Istanbul have prompted the Istanbul Music Festival to call off its opening night gala concert, scheduled for Tuesday.” For now, organizers say that the remainder of the festival, Turkey’s largest classical music event, will continue as planned.

“Later this month, Paris will become the latest in a string of international cities to pipe classical music into its train stations in an effort to chase off vagrants and youthful toughs who loaf about and ostensibly make life unpleasant for rail travelers.” But the French national railroad is asking passengers to help choose the playlist.

“I see the whole concert hall paradigm as a way to lease entitlement to a leisure class. Like the restaurant, where diners can pay a nominal to exorbitant fee for being served a repast as if they were royalty, concert goers get an ersatz Esterházy experience where they time share the services of their own orchestra that will give them the same sense of disassociation from the hard work experienced by the rest of humanity.”

“What we see is not the finished images, but a little boy dressing piglets up in clothes. It’s a slightly weird, more David Lynch than Disney bit of America.”

“Since a major amendment to the century-old [Lacey Act] was passed in 2008, vintage instruments as well as newer ones made from old stockpiles of exotic woods have come under increased scrutiny by customs officials when musicians enter or re-enter the U.S. with those instruments.”

“The president of the American Lyric Theater, led a discussion with the capacity audience, whom he invited first to give short statements about the work they had just heard. One listener described the score as ‘a vivid smear of humanity against a mechanical background.'”

The orchestra’s artistic performance grew in the past decade. But its financial performance underperformed in significant, puzzling ways. Questions about the orchestra’s management mount.

Nine musicians on the Philadelphians’ current tour were also there for the band’s visit to the People’s Republic in 1973, the first by any U.S. symphonic ensemble. They tell David Patrick Stearns their memories of a China without skyscrapers, Madame Mao ordering a last-minute change in the program, and the Chairman’s fly-swatting quota.