Category: music

“Michael Attenborough, the son of Lord Attenborough, has ditched the annual opera festival that was once a mainstay of the Almeida, the theatre he runs in north London.” Says Attenborough, “Modern opera studiously avoids anything so old-fashioned as melody or emotion, which seems to me a contradiction of what music is all about.”

The highly-regarded company is a joint venture between the old industrial city and its larger, wealthier neighbor, Düsseldorf. But Duisburg’s culture budget has a €7 million shortfall, and the municipal authorities doubt the company’s viability on a budget the city can afford.

“An international musicians’ group has called for a global boycott of recruitment by the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), saying the symphony sacked nine members without cause. The Paris-based International Federation of Musicians (IFM) posted on its website a strongly-worded attack on the sackings, in a rare note of discord in the usually genteel world of symphony music.”

“The Russian bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin, who resigned from the Bayreuth Festival over body art, wants his American audience to know his side: What appeared to be a swastika tattooed on his chest was just the first stage of a star with a heraldic crest.”

“For the versatile Suzie LeBlanc, financial necessity’s invention has proved to be a strangely welcome change. … The Canadian singer is seeking $60,000 to record newly commissioned settings of poems by Elizabeth Bishop.”

“On Sunday night I reviewed half a Proms concert for theartsdesk. The reason I didn’t make the second half wasn’t illness, displeasure at the performance, or end-of-weekend malaise, but rather that a few members of the audience made it impossible for me to return.”

“The violin turned up Sunday in the lost-property office at Bern station. Police did not disclose the names of anyone involved, nor the value of the instrument.”

A federal judge “approved the association’s reorganization plan June 28, but with the writing of checks and completion of other administrative matters Monday and Tuesday, the curtain officially has come down on perhaps the most perilous episode in the history of the organization that supports and presents the storied ensemble.”

On a commission from the Centre for Baroque Music at Versailles, instrument maker Antoine Laulhère and violinist/conductor Patrick Cohen-Akenine have set out to recreate to string orchestra that played for the court of Louis XIV. The major challenge: that band’s instruments came in five sizes, three of which have since disappeared.

Yes, for years it was the Jewish-American party tune, heard at numberless weddings and bar mitzvahs. But those years were the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, and now the song is profoundly uncool. Says one mother-of-the-groom, “‘Hava Nagila’ at a wedding is like pouring sour milk on cereal.” An ethnomusicologist calls it “a really crummy little tune” that became “the equivalent of a knish.”