Category: music

Violinist Hahn announced the winner on her Facebook page, but there’s more to the Encores Project than winning. “There are so many great composers out there who either aren’t on the forefront of what people are aware of or whose works I wouldn’t necessarily have come across or students who I would not have had the chance to hear their music. I also wanted people to think about writing encores. The miniature form is challenging in a different sort of way and I thought it might be fun for composers to work on.”

“‘I’m not really interested in how Bach played it,’ [Simone] Dinnerstein says on a sunny morning in her Brooklyn living room. ‘I’m playing Bach in 2012. It’s an entirely different world than the world that he lived in. It would be impossible for me to imagine how he would play it.'”

But could they start (re-)learning the skill?

“The process is a little like inkjet printing, but instead of ink squirting out of the print head, successive layers of plastic or metal powder are deposited according to the CAD file’s instructions.”

The other shoe has dropped at the Washington National Opera: Christina Scheppelmann, the company’s director of artistic operations … [who] has been largely, if not exclusively, responsible for WNO’s artistic profile in the past few years, particularly as Placido Domingo’s tenure drew to a close … will step down at the end of November.”

“The CSO sent out an e-mail Wednesday for a June 25 event in which the media was ‘cordially invited to meet the new artistic leadership of the orchestra.’ No names were attached. But the subject line of the e-mail read: ‘You are invited to the Andrew Litton press conference’.”

Elaine Calder “leaves the Oregon Symphony in better financial shape than when she arrived in 2006. For the past three years, the orchestra has ended the fiscal year with a small surplus. When she came, it faced a $1.6 million deficit and had long-term debt of $7.2 million. ‘Privately, we were talking to bankruptcy lawyers,’ she said. ‘It looked really, really dark.'”

“With the loss of Palestine after the formation of Israel in 1948 there was no revival in the West Bank of the cultural scene that had been so vibrant in cities like Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa. … All this has changed. … Classical music in Palestinian society is no longer the reserve of the privileged classes.”

“Deepening its pledge to advance the art form, the Opera Company of Philadelphia, in collaboration with Gotham Chamber Opera and Music-Theatre Group in New York, has appointed a second composer in residence” – 31-year-old, Brooklyn-based Missy Mazzoli, a greater Philadelphia native.

The Leeds-based troupe, which is presenting one opera a year in four cities, is offering an enhanced concert-style staging not unlike Bill Viola’s Tristan Project, with singers in modified concert-dress performing fully-staged movement and an elaborate video “commentary” shown on screens above the orchestra.