Category: music

“Scottish Opera’s music director is to step down in 2013 after extending his contract by a single year to see out its 50th anniversary season. … The company was keen for him to stay on, but Corti had been considering his future ‘in the light of resources at the company’, one source said.”

“Here’s why it’s so important for ensembles to make sure they keep living composers apprised of performances of their own works: performances are as much the bread and butter of a composer’s career as the performer who actually brings the new work to life onstage. They are the reason we make notated scores at all.”

“Michigan Opera Theatre officials are breathing easier after the bank consortium that holds its $18-million debt agreed to shift its deadline for payment from May 31 to June 30.” Now they have a simple task: Raise $8 million in June.

“Over the past half-century, pop hits have become longer, slower and sadder, and they increasingly convey ‘mixed emotional cues,’ according to a study just published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.”

“Glenn Dicterow, the longest-serving concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, has decided to step down … following the 2013-14 season, after 34 years, and will become a professor of strings and chamber music at … the University of Southern California.”

Terry Teachout: “Mr. Fischer-Dieskau was also one of the most controversial artists of his age, or any other. For every vocal connoisseur who praised him to the skies, another dismissed his singing as ‘mannered’ and ‘croony,’ and it was not until after he retired in 1993 that the carping ceased and he came to be regarded as above criticism.”

“Marcelo Lehninger, the young Brazilian German maestro who serves as an assistant conductor for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, has been named music director of the New West Symphony, which is based in Thousand Oaks.”

“The Merritt Mountain Music Festival attracted crowds of nearly 150,000 campers in past years and stars like Vince Gill and Crystal Gale. But organizers of this year’s event, scheduled for July 19-22, say in a statement they have cancelled the 2012 festival because of low ticket sales.”

“In further progress toward a new lease agreement, leaders of the Philadelphia Orchestra Association and Kimmel Center Inc. have signed an amendment to their existing lease that reduces the base rent … the orchestra pays to the Kimmel, from about $2.5 million to $1.5 million annually. The rent will increase each year through 2017, to $1.74 million.”

The conductor recounts how he asked his 16-year-old son, “‘You like classical music, but why don’t you go to concerts?’ He said ‘but none of my friends go to concerts’. I said ‘why don’t they go to concerts?’ He thought about it and said ‘they don’t want to be seen with their parents’. A little light bulb went off in my head: Let’s have late concerts where parents aren’t allowed.”