Category: music

Actually, you will hear the musicians – on a recording they made six weeks ago, to which they must mime during the opening ceremonies for the London Olympics.

Keating: “You have to give yourself permission to play your own music. It doesn’t seem valid somehow; it doesn’t seem like real music. It’s like, ‘Well, I’m just playing. I’m making up this stuff.’ And I had a really long period of that, of feeling like there were all these different buckets. There was the music that I would play that was classical–the stuff that I was learning, or that I was being judged on, or graded for. Then there was music that I listened to, which was mostly popular music, that I would sometimes try and work out on the cello. And then there was the music that I would improvise or that was just my own. And they were all very separate.”

While there have been several attempts (notably by Daniel Barenboim) to break the longstanding unofficial ban on live performances of Wagner’s music within Israel, the orchestras involved were foreign. This performance – part of a daylong symposium sponsored by the Israel Wagner Society (yes, there is one) – will be given by 100 or so Israeli musicians contracted just for this event.

This new setback “is on the heels of a previously announced one year delay. The refurbishing was originally supposed to be finished by October of next year and now the theater is scheduled to open in the Fall of 2015.” The company, led by conductor Daniel Barenboim and director Jürgen Flimm, is currently housed across town at the Schiller Theater.

William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who has developed a sideline in staging opera, called Theater an der Wien Intendant Roland Geyer the l-word this week (causing a storm in the Viennese press) during a dispute over the company’s revival of Friedkin’s production of The Tales of Hoffmann.

“Guards at Guantanamo Bay tried to coerce inmates into talking with songs from Sesame Street played on repeat, according to a new Al-Jazeera documentary. … What’s the best kind of music to use when you’re trying to break someone’s will?”

“The amount of money made from digital music services has outstripped the sale of traditional CDs and records for the first time, according to first quarter revenue figures from music industry trade body BPI.”

“One step therefore we might take to make classical music less boring again is simply for audiences to quit being so blasted reverential.”

“A former finance director at the Royal Academy of Music has been sentenced to 20 months in prison after defrauding the institution of £236,000. Janet Whitehouse, 56, admitted to three counts of fraud, including faking paperwork to boost her pension fund.”

“The internet is filled with people saying that blah blah classical music is dying blah blah. Chances are, they are being paid to say this. … I just don’t buy it. Classical music is urgent and vibrant because we are making it that way, and I don’t see how Beethoven 7 being used to disperse people is symptomatic of any bigger problem.”