Category: music

Though it’s tentative – and though both sides say it will change during the working out of details – the orchestra association and the performing arts hall basically have a new agreement.

“The audience demands higher standards now . . . People are paying a lot of money to come to the opera or to go and see any show, and they expect to see work of a high quality, and that’s not only limited to singers.”

“Politicians in Berlin have launched a campaign to rescue the city’s legendary nightclub scene from the spectre of property investors in the hope of salvaging the capital’s reputation as one of Europe’s party hotspots. A ‘Music Board’ fund of around €1m (£835,000) has been set up to help protect the city’s shrinking club scene.”

“‘Sometimes when I think of all that I do for my voice, I think I don’t want to go on’ … She says that after 10 years on stage, most singers develop common cold-like symptoms year-round, ‘because we breathe in dirt, dust and odors’ while performing.”

“What happened to Debussy? There’s a clanging great anniversaire that classical music has so far neglected this year, since it’s the sesquicentenary of his birth in 1862. So where, oh where, is Claude-Achille, that father of musical modernism, ever since that languorous flute solo was first heard to create the reverie of a priapic deer in his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune in 1894; the composer without whose investigations of texture, colour, form, and feeling, the vast majority of 20th century music could not have been written?”

“Haye Hinrichsen at the University of urzburg in Germany proposes a solution to this problem that may make it possible for electronic tuners to match the performance of the best human tuners. His idea is that tuning can be considered a problem of entropy minimisation.”

“It is instead an alternative-universe high school band: a new-music factory that focuses on works written in the last 50 years, with an emphasis on the new alt-classical style. Its musicians, who began studying new music before anyone had told them that it was incomprehensible or unlikable, are thrilled to play it, and their spirit has impressed composers whose music they perform.”

“‘It’s going to be very similar to the last offer. We’re just going to make it very, very clear – to clarify exactly what it is going to take,’ [board president Chuck] Maisch said, referring to the terms under which management believes it can employ the musicians and not exceed its budget projections.”

“Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini wants to break 23-year-old restrictions on the number of foreign singers his company can employ, declaring: ‘You can’t have unions running art’.”

“There is also a more bracing Brooklyn, and one to which L.A. feels both close to and competitive with. We on the West Coast jealously watch many of our promising composers flock there. We also do our best to be Brooklyn on the Pacific. We’ve got the Dodgers and good Brooklyn bagels. And we play Brooklyn music, as wild Up and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra proved over the weekend.”