Category: music

“Sheepskins were traditionally prepared by fellmongers in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK. But over the last decade rising costs and legislation to reduce pollution have seen fellmongery businesses close down or their machinery shipped to purpose-built joint-venture plants in China and Morocco.”

“The Detroit Symphony Orchestra has hired violinist Yoonshin Song, a 30-year-old native of South Korea, as its new concertmaster. … Landing Song is a major artistic coup for the DSO as it rebuilds after last year’s debilitating strike.”

“Muti will lead Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera in selections from Vivaldi and Verdi in the May 11 concert, which is being offered to the pope by Italy’s president in honor of the seventh anniversary of his election to the pontificate.”

“Pereira looks like a drummer but talks like a scholar. He is serious about his craft, which he knows doesn’t always get enough respect as serious musicianship. ‘There is a lot of creativity and exploration in sound that we have to do for percussion,’ he says. ‘It’s not just two plates of metal or drums and sticks. You have to work hard at it or you deserve all the bad jokes.'”

“Humans have an irrepressible desire to be heard and also to experience music at a sufficient dynamic that it can be felt in a visceral sense.” (And that leads to some rather odd challenges for musicians.)

Glass has a fair amount to say about Einstein on the Beach, about to be performed in the U.K. for the first time during the Olympics festival. “It was a very avant-garde tradition-breaking piece when it happened in 1976. The odd thing is that theatre’s not changed that much since then – if anything most theatre has become more conventional, probably because of the influence of television and film.”

Performers and composers now regularly spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a professional-quality master tape delivered to a record label – often one of the small, innovative outfits that have sprung up over the past few years. There’s no money to be made from the recordings, but musicians say the resulting exposure is worth the investment.

Your correspondent travels from the honeybee hives on the roof of the Palais Garnier, through the opulent auditorium and foyer, back to the 19th-century stage machinery, and over to the office of director Nicolas Joël at the glass-and-granite Opéra Bastille.

Cafe Oto, in a former warehouse (naturally) in east London, offers music ranging from the Sun Ra Arkestra to Korea’s Balloon & Needle collective to Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono to experimental opera – all to rooms full of 200 listeners, teenagers to octogenarians, listening in attentive silence.