“Feinstein is scheduled to start his new job as principal pops conductor in the 2013 season. He will also have the newly created title of Marvin Hamlisch Chair at the Pasadena Pops. Feinstein told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday that this will be the first time he will lead an orchestra as conductor.”
Category: music
In The Game Of Symphony, Your Music Makes The Enemies (And A Lot More)
“Everything is presented in bright, flashy neon lights to complement your selection of music. Enemies explode into tiny glittering music notes when they die. You can shoot music notes.”
Dear Academy: How Jazz Improv Really Works
“Improvisation is still a mystery to many non-jazz trained musicians and intellectuals who want to quantify, and possibly codify, the elements and techniques that go into it.”
Thomas Hardy Comes To The Opera, But The Adaptation Was Violent
“There are times when murdering someone else’s darlings is a more harrowing process than murdering one’s own. Adapting for the opera stage probably involves more blood-shed than usual, but the nature of that transformation does require – and therefore offers – greater freedoms.”
Is This What They Call Winning?
What happens when a songwriter claims her work was stolen, represents herself, and doesn’t provide solid evidence? The case turns into a New York version of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.
A Whip, A Gag, A Dildo, And Some Handel
“‘The power of the operatically trained voice, it’s a superpower to get audiences engaged,’ said [director Ross] Manson, contrasting good and bad opera productions he had recently seen. ‘I was really intrigued to see if I could use this superpower for good rather than for evil.'”
John Cage – No Offense – Wasn’t Really A Composer
“There’s a legitimate question of whether these works merit the term ‘composition’ at all, given that the composer’s responsibility for what you finally hear is reduced to the minimum. Anarchy would be a better word.”
Colorado Symphony Fires Violinist Who Pled Guilty In Sex Abuse Case
“David Waldman, a longtime violinist with the Colorado Symphony, was officially terminated Thursday, two days after news of his guilty plea in two child-sex cases.”
Is Opera Ailing? A Conversation About The State Of The Art
NPR’s Tom Huizenga talks with Washington Post critic Anne Midgette, Opera News editor F. Paul Driscoll, and fast-rising countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo.
Two Movies Have Ruined Opera In The US: Moonstruck and Pretty Woman
Zachary Woolfe: “Though both films have been given credit for helping to popularize opera, the idea of the art form they have popularized has profoundly damaged it in this country. … In the two movies the vision of opera is the same: lush, static, stale. It is less a living encounter than a trip to Madame Tussauds.”