Category: music

The annual awards were presented in New York.

“The Lenox Lounge, where Billie Holiday had a table, Dizzy Gillespie played his trumpet, and James Baldwin soaked up the scene, where the burgundy leather couches, Art Deco light fixtures and zebra-print wallpaper stir up memories of other eras, and where, even now, everybody knows everybody, will close on Dec. 31.”

Music (or app)-loving audiences can now participate – via computer – in the creation of a piece for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

“You did not have to be a world-class musician to walk in and run your hands over the products that carry the most famous name in the piano world. It was a showroom — a very ornate showroom.” And now its future is in doubt.

“The theatre’s decision to opt for Wagner, whose pounding operas were the soundtrack for German unification, over Verdi, whose uplifting works inspired Italy’s own Risorgimento, comes as Italians feel the bite of austerity policies they see as dictated by Berlin, a humiliation lightened only by Italy’s beating of Germany in the European championships this summer.”

“As expected, the Minnesota Orchestra has posted an operating deficit of $6 million for fiscal 2012. It is the largest deficit in the orchestra’s 110-year history and twice as large as last year’s shortfall.”

“Representatives from organizations of higher education, city groups, the community and musicians themselves will all work together in a partnership in which they all share some financial risk.” As one local official put it, “The musicians have a lot more skin in the game. They’re all stakeholders in the new model. They’ll get paid when there’s money.”

Among the more notable nominees are soprano Renee Fleming, the group eighth blackbird and composer Steven Stucky.

Conspicuously missing from that field is a middle-of-the-road rock, jazz or country album by a firmly established industry veteran akin to Santana’s “Supernatural” in 1999 or Herbie Hancock’s “The Joni Letters” in 2007, giving this year’s album category a decidedly younger, hipper cast.

“About 90 percent of the contents of its New Jersey warehouse will be put up for auction, with the company saving generic props and costume items: weaponry, top hats and shoes, for example.”