Category: music

“With the concert halls of Beijing and Shanghai bursting with top-drawer international orchestras who make regular visits, Mr Jeffes said the Sydney Symphony had decided to make its Chinese and Asian base in Guangzhou, in its new opera house designed by renowned British architect Zaha Hadid.”

“Murray “Sandy” Johnson, 63, was sacked in 2008 after 34 years because his playing was judged to be a risk to the orchestra’s reputation. An employment tribunal ruled he was fairly dismissed in 2010 but that decision has now been overturned by appeal court judges.”

“A Stradivarius violin – possibly worth several million euros – was handed in at a Swiss lost-property office after a hapless musician left it on a train … The owner had lent the precious instrument to a musician friend who took it on a train on Friday but forgot it when he got off at Bern … Police did not disclose the names of anyone involved, nor the value of the instrument.”

“The value of used pianos, especially uprights, has plummeted in recent years. So instead of selling them to a neighbor, donating them to a church or just passing them along to a relative, owners are far more likely to discard them, technicians, movers and dealers say. Piano movers are making regular runs to the dump, becoming adept at dismantling instruments, selling parts to artists, even burning them for firewood.”

“There has been a pernicious fallacy that music sets up moods and can be used for the control of the masses, a tenet that equates the arts with government and/or religion. Again, the arts can enhance the methods used to shape the thinking and actions of groups of people, but cannot be equated as a method for doing so.”

Don’t think. Just play.

“Great cities have long taken pride in supporting their orchestras and the musicians who dedicate their lives to the music. That we could lose ours is simply unthinkable. No, we cannot allow that to happen.”

“The value of used pianos, especially uprights, has plummeted in recent years. So instead of selling them to a neighbor, donating them to a church or just passing them along to a relative, owners are far more likely to discard them, technicians, movers and dealers say. Piano movers are making regular runs to the dump, becoming adept at dismantling instruments, selling parts to artists, even burning them for firewood.”

“What! No more wandering up and down those creaky-floorboard aisles tucked below the high-octane din of Music Millennium’s bigger, brassier boom of sound next door? Entering Classical Millennium was – is – like tumbling into a particularly inviting rabbit hole, with rarefied attractions so exotic and alluring that you might not reemerge for hours. And when eventually you do, you’re likely to be ever so slightly, and fortuitously, changed.” But not after September, when the Portland, Ore., institution folds into its parent company.

“Nothing had prefigured the opera’s Bacchus as she sauntered toward the audience: an immensely large, nearly naked woman — so large that my first thought was that her enormous breasts were prostheses. When she had nearly reached the edge of the stage, she stopped, silent and self-satisfied, as the chorus stood around her and caressed her, rubbing her breasts as they invoked the god in song. This was not the Baroque of waistcoats and powdered wigs, of delicate dances and imperiously raised index fingers.”