Category: music

Recently journalist and editor Sameer Rahim asked a priest acquaintance about Bach’s oratorio, and was told that “I should listen to it once a year on Good Friday as part of a church service. Any other time or setting would not be true to the composer’s Christian vision.” So he tried it that way …

Very few operas have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize since the prize was established in 1943.

“Puts’ opera is adapted from the 2005 movie Joyeux Noël, which was nominated for an Academy Award for foreign-language film. Like the movie, the opera depicts an unexpected truce negotiated by Scottish, French and German officers on Christmas Eve [in 1914].” The work’s premiere was at Minnesota Opera in November.

“From next season, this group of a dozen of the best of our younger singers – all British or British-trained – will become a sort of core resource for ENO, each of them assigned a bespokely tailored [sic] programme of roles over two or three seasons.”

“There are, on the surface, few similarities between Ka and Wagner’s Ring, besides the brandishing of a large nugget of what appeared to be gold at the start of the Cirque show and a shared fixation on twins. … [Yet] it is nevertheless possible to see how Peter Gelb and others at the Met could have watched Ka and wanted Mr. Lepage to direct the Ring.”

“When the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for Chapter 11 last spring, its leaders said the reorganization would cost $2.9 million in legal and administrative fees, and they predicted the orchestra would be out of bankruptcy in the latter part of 2011. The legal tab now looks likely to be triple that initial estimate, and the case is entering its second year.”

“Writers are expected to reinforce goodwill for opera in Beijing. When an iconoclastic visitor (this iconoclastic visitor) asks if a local critic could write a negative notice of an event at the NCPA, the answer is simple: “No.”

“By now Mr. Hütter is used to Kraftwerk being acknowledged as a prototype. Its riffs are foundations of songs by performers from the rapper Afrika Bambaataa to Coldplay. ‘We’re not so interested in possession. We are more interested in participating,’ Mr. Hütter said. ‘We’re sending out. Certain of these ideas are radio waves. We’re the antenna catching information, the transmitter giving information, back and forth.'”

New music shares a few broad characteristics – and it’s possible to look at the music now, rather than waiting, to see what’s worthwhile.