Category: music

“So, what happened to change the dismal mid-20th-century outlook into the flourishing field of today? An entire history is in the making, with many channels.”

Says the orchestra’s CEO of 35-year-old Andrés Orozco-Estrada, “From the moment he made his debut with us in October, there was an instantaneous chemistry that we hadn’t yet felt or seen between a conductor and an orchestra.”

“ENO’s problems will intensify debate about how to share out increasingly scarce resources among the arts in England. Opera accounts for 11% of Arts Council England’s total investment, a slice of the cake that its detractors see as unfairly large, though its defenders argue that opera is by its nature a large-scale art form, and concomitantly expensive. ”

“HMV’s problem wasn’t just that it was expensive, compared with the online retailers. It was that, by and large, it had become an awful shopping experience. Where once it was a byword for music shopping, it became – from this music buyer’s perspective – a place of last resort.”

“Despite HMV’s inability to make high street music retailing pay, many independent record shops are already reporting higher demand and sales, due partly to a backlash against Amazon’s tax set-up and the difficulty of stumbling across unexpected gems online.”

“HMV’s collapse means that nearly 200 retailers have collapsed over the past 12 months, including the electricals chain Comet just before Christmas and the sportswear retailer JJB in the autumn. It is also last remaining nationwide entertainment chain, following the disappearance of retailers such as Our Price and Zavvi.”

“It’s a great shame for the people whose jobs may be at stake. It’s also a shame for the rest of us. A download’s all very well, but it’s not magic. Record shops were magic.”

“New evidence comes from brain scans of 36 highly skilled musicians, split equally between those who started lessons before and after the age of 7, but who had done a similar amount of training and practice.” It’s all about coordination.

Composer Gabriel Jackson: “And singing is what Latvians do. I don’t know what percentage of the population is in a choir but it must be pretty high; it’s certainly taken very seriously and every Latvian I know can sing, and does. … But it’s not just the ubiquity of singing and the skill of its practitioners that’s impressive, it’s the sheer sound of Latvian choirs that is so remarkable.”

“Audiences who are interested in geopolitics, the history of the 20th century, the economic situation [can find] a route via these things, for them to care who Bela Bartok was.”