Category: music

“The 1721 violin is being sold by the Nippon Music Foundation, with the entire proceeds going to their Northeastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund. The Lady Blunt set a record price every time it was sold last century.”

“A ten-year sponsorship agreement that has enabled thousands of people from regional and rural NSW to watch the Sydney Symphony Orchestra is under threat from the new state government’s program to review the spending of energy companies.”

“A normal record deal today would usually give an artist 12-20% of revenue from sales depending on how successful they are at the point of signing (only the bigger artists get anything close to 20%). But if a song is licensed to be played in, say, a TV show or a film, they receive 50% of revenue.”

Kimmel president Anne Ewers said the master plan “takes what the mission and vision of the Kimmel Center was when it opened and now allows that to really become a reality. From my perspective, they have answered every problem this building has. I think it’s extraordinary. You ask, my gosh, why wasn’t this done right the first time around?”

“The orchestra is not just making a financial comeback, it is jetting forward in its still-continuing 2010-11 season, setting sales records and attracting first-time attendees… To explain its standout success at the box office, symphony leaders point to more accessible programming, especially the introduction of its multimedia Inside the Score series, and an overhaul of its marketing.”

“At some point he needs to look beyond the uncertain economic horizon and make the buck-stops-here decisions that will make Lyric at least something of the pace-setter among major opera companies that it was during the Ardis Krainik era of the 1980s and ’90s.”

“Seventeen years after apartheid’s collapse, the reaction to the opera seems to suggest that the wounds of the liberation battle are finally healing. The work is a balanced and nuanced look at the life of a contradictory woman who played a key role in the struggle. But it also uses humour and quirky characters for entertainment value – and the audience loved it.”

“The Philharmonie has a capacity of 2,400 seats and the BPO enjoys average attendance of 98%. Audience are diverse, ranging from core subscribers aged fifty-plus to a young audience twenty to thirty years old who descend upon the Orchestra for unusual contemporary programs.”

“The two decades that saw the classical guitar thrive were decades of recession–the 1930s and the 1970s. Now, during another financial crisis, the classical guitar’s intimate strains seem again to be offering a spiritual succour in straitened times.”

“Modern opera still sounds 19th-century, although it may not look it. One of the reasons why opera appears so radically a designer’s and director’s theatre today is because somewhere, somehow, the edifice needs a complete overhaul. The core of opera – the voice – seems not to have changed in hundreds of years.”