Category: music

“Florida Grand Opera has postponed Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde for a season and will be performing Massenet’s Thaïs in its place for the 2013-2014 season. The decision to wait was made when the company could not find large enough stages in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.”

“I talked to them after the show, at the CD signing. But you can also tell by the ambient noise in the room during the performance, the coughing. I’m highly attuned to that sort of thing.”

“His music was seen not just as a symptom of the physical and sexual pathologies associated with a nervous modernity – everything from neurasthenia [nervous exhaustion] and degeneration to perversion and fatigue – but also as the direct cause of these.”

The orchestra plays in a local bar. And the customers like it.

“A Brooklyn Supreme Court judge has denied an attempt by the Brooklyn Philharmonic to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the composer Nathan Currier, who alleges that the orchestra broke a contract by abruptly terminating the premiere of his oratorio mid-performance at Avery Fisher Hall.”

El crepusculo del ladrillo (“Twilight of the Brick”, alluding to the final opera of Wagner’s Ring cycle) “takes on Spain’s ongoing economic crisis, which started to unfold in 2008 after the country’s real estate bubble burst. The story involves a village seduced into property ownership and consumerism before imploding in chaos. Despite the tragic subject matter, the tone is surrealist and often comic.”

“The new music community needs to make less of an emphasis on premieres and put more energy into making less familiar repertoire (e.g. recent compositions) more familiar by programming the music tons of times. A new piece should get programmed several times during the course of a season, not just one time or for a single consecutive run of performances.”

The researchers found a modern work on the program has roughly the same impact on ticket sales as a lesser-known piece from the romantic era. This suggests exchanging the “risky” First Symphony of John Corigliano with the “safe” First Symphony of Brahms will have little or no impact on the bottom line.

“Experts who know the hall’s acoustics are worried that the listening experience in the main auditorium could suffer when subway trains begin running 125 feet below the parking garage in 2020.”

“A total of 4.4 billion tracks were streamed in the last twelve months from sites including Spotify, We7, Zune, Napster and Deezer.”