Category: music

“The board of the Napa Valley Symphony Association voted Thursday night to ‘suspend all operations and to explore the wisdom of dissolving,’ according to chairman Michael Enfield.” He said that saving the orchestra “would require an immediate source of funding that is not in evidence.”

“Just as the second movement [of Brahms’s Symphony no. 2] was drawing to a gentle close – with Music Director Riccardo Muti at the podium – a man in his 30s, according to police, started punching a 67-year-old man inside one of the boxes.”

“Most classic operas have no real legal protection. There was nothing to stop Mr. Brook from tampering with Mozart’s score. Still, if music and words are respected in most productions today, the reason is not just a principled devotion to the masters but also something more pragmatic.”

“The thing with writing music is you have some sort of an inspiration that makes you write a piece. But when you succeed writing music, it transcends things, so it can mean lots of different things at different times. If you think about the music you like to listen to, it probably doesn’t have just one meaning to you.”

“I remember doing this pop competition; I showed up, and there were, like, 5,000 singers. And they were all dressed up — I don’t even know how to describe it. They were not there because they cared about music, they were there because they wanted to be famous and get noticed. It just wasn’t me.”

Stephen Sondheim has a few words for would-be revisers – and some of those words aren’t so nice.

“Warner Music has tried to buy EMI more than once in the past decade, but was prevented from doing so by regulators. So why would they approve a merger between EMI and the much bigger label Universal? Because of piracy, apparently. Universal claims that due to the decline in recorded music revenue EMI needs investment – and the merger will provide it. But will it?”

“Classical music has a reputation of being something smart – indeed, its fans are often stereotyped as nerds and eggheads – but the way that people engage with it often seems to me anything but, as if it renders otherwise smart thinkers uncritical.”

“The 76-year-old maestro, who underwent surgery for esophageal cancer in 2010 and was treated for a hernia last year, had planned to conduct four concerts in Japan from March 17 but had decided to cancel the performances.”