Category: music

“It’s very hard to take classical Persian poetry and make it sound like Al Green or Billie Holiday,” says Iranian-American singer Rana Farhan. But that’s just what she’s been doing since an odd sequence of serendipitous events six years ago. The combination has made her a star in Iran, and now the international jazz world is catching on.

“The AWO, apart from its exciting music-making, has been a timely reality check, an assessment of Australian orchestral music and where we’re going.”

Fearful of the spread of Middle East-style protests against authoritarian rule, and of any destabilizing influences ahead of a change of leadership next year, Beijing has been laying down the law online.

‘Last fall his supporters on the Virginia Opera board went public about what they characterized as a plot to force Peter Mark out of his job by mid-2012. Following a series of actions by his supporters, including a passionate curtain speech after a performance, Virginia Opera fired Mark on Nov. 18. Less than two months later, Mark announced his new company at a reception in Sandler Center.”

iTunes and streaming music services have never known how to deal with classical music, says Steve Smith. But Spotify, which thrilled pop music lovers when it debuted in July, offers slightly better service – and a trove of European recordings otherwise unavailable in the U.S.

“The question is, how many commemorations do we need before we’re ready to move on, how many performances of Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony, which appears to be the classical answer to ‘God Bless America,’ an unofficial anthem of memorial?”

After an expensive building renovation, the Missouri Symphony Society just about collapsed. Instead, the University of Missouri will lease and manage the Missouri Theatre, solving a host of problems for the school and the symphony.

“A classical concert provides an opportunity to untie the digital umbilical cord and replace it with chords that really do resonate.”

“Matthew Halls, 35, a bright British conductor who comes out of the early music movement, will replace founder Helmuth Rilling as artistic director at the Oregon Bach Festival at the end of the 2013 season. Rilling, who led the 17-day festival since its founding in 1970, will remain with the University of Oregon event as director emeritus.”

“Hold those obituaries for the classical CD. Nielsen SoundScan’s report for the first half of 2011 indicates that classical music had the biggest gain in sales of all genres, 13%, over the first half of 2010, for a total of 3.8 million albums.”