Category: music

“Arild Remmereit has been named artistic director of the Rochester Chamber Orchestra for next season. The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra board, in a controversial move, fired Remmereit in January from his position as music director.”

“The lack of transparency from management is troubling to the Musicians, the public, and Minnesota’s legislative auditor, Basic artistic and financial information about the Orchestra is being withheld to seemingly to stall negotiations.”

“A concert in a car factory using parts of a luxury sedan as percussion instruments is one thing, but a Volkswagen suspended above the New York Philharmonic creates another level of musical drama entirely.”

“In Wagner’s opera, the mortal Tannhäuser sins by loving the goddess Venus. Today the story can no longer be told as a scandal that leads to expulsion from society. I’m interested in the great archaic theme of guilt. Why then shouldn’t Tannhäuser be made into a perpetrator, into a war criminal? In my staging Tannhäuser is forced by members of the Wehrmacht to shoot a family. The production deals with individual guilt under National Socialism and during the development of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

“Judges said the performance in a former chemical plant was ‘bold in imagination and brilliant in accomplishment’. It was one of three London 2012 festival events honoured at the ceremony.”

“After 15 months of negotiations, the Seattle Symphony players organization and the SSO board of directors have approved a new contract, through August 2015.” The terms include a “temporary” reduction in the orchestra’s size, salary concessions and a less expensive health insurance plan.

“I think opera is experiencing the most creative period it’s ever experienced in the last half-century; certainly I would say forever on this continent. …. “There is still huge audience interest in this multimedia art form called opera.”

“To some commentators, the Dusseldorf Tannhauser was a stretch: the opera is set in the Middle Ages and based on a ballad about a bard called Tannhäuser. Yet the intention of the director, Burkhard Kosminski, had a logic that many could understand. In the month of Wagner’s bicentennial, he wanted to link the opera to the Holocaust – an event which the composer’s own ardent anti-Semitism seemed to presage.”

Journalist and editor Jaime Green recently went to Carnegie Hall – for only the second time in her life, she says – to hear Gabriel Kahane and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Unsure what to make of the experience, she contacted a friend her age who works in classical music. Read their exchange here.

“The oldest-surviving English grand piano, one of the first ever made, was built by the piano maker Americus Backers in London in 1772 and has now been returned by English Heritage to the home of its former owner, the Duke of Wellington.”