Category: music

‘Film director Wim Wenders had been an inspired choice to guide that production, but contract talks broke down, partially over Wenders’ desire to produce a 3-D movie of the operas at the same time.” The new choice is Frank Castorf, longtime director of Berlin’s Volksbühne theater and a man known for stagings that are radical even by modern German standards.

“Computer technology has evolved tremendously over the past few decades, and electronic music has definitely followed suit. But are humans still at the creative core of the craft, or have we become lost in the shuffle?”

”The conclusion they reach is for a continuing program of cutting musicians’ wages and increasing job insecurity by putting musicians on part-time contracts,” Manley says. ”This is Work Choices for orchestras. The outcome of these so-called reforms will be falling artistic standards for opera and ballet performances in Melbourne and Sydney.”

“How Spano ultimately is judged will derive from his overall guidance of the fest’s many components, from its conducting academy to its chamber-music offerings to its opera program.”

“The line-up for the prize is testament to the diverse tastes of fans and of the musicians working today. It includes exponents of urban hip-hop, melodic rock, retro-country, guitar band anthems and even the power ballad. And what is even more telling than the great range represented is the fact that each performer would happily admit to having been heavily influenced by at least one of the musical traditions they are up against.”

“The musicians he [Liszt] promoted — Wagner, Schumann and Berlioz — did nothing for him, and his revolutionary late works were decried as the product of a senile old man. What’s more, two world wars changed musical tastes. Eventually Liszt was seen as too emphatic, too loud, too pious. It’s also quite possible that the heavyweight Wagner deliberately tried to overshadow Liszt.”

“Lawyers for the pension fund of the American Federation of Musicians argued in U.S. Bankruptcy Court that their side was entitled to a large-scale probe of the orchestra’s finances and operations to help determine whether the endowments might end up being used to satisfy the pension fund’s potential claim as the largest creditor in the orchestra’s Chapter 11 case.”

“The operation may have preserved the 18th-century singer’s treble voice into adulthood, making him a musical legend, but it also condemned him to a skull deformity that may have affected his mind.”

“Across the Islamic world, hip-hop has now created an alternative subculture among the young. Rap is its voice in a 4/4 beat. Muslim rap is replete with beeps, bops and beatboxes, although without the materialism, misogyny, vulgarity and “gangsta” violence of much Western hip-hop.”

“Orchestra members’ base pay in the contract that ended in June was $57,776. The new contract, which the orchestra voted to approve late Friday, raises that amount to $59,708 in the first year and $68,234 in 2015-2016, the contract’s final year.”