Category: music

“The original version was produced in Toronto in 2007 as a low-budget ‘digital opera,’ with Canadian students trying to sing in the Xhosa language. It was an embarrassing flop. But the creators followed that reviewer’s advice. They went back to the drawing board, rewrote the entire work, and rediscovered their South African roots. The new version is a wholly South African production.”

“It seems that as long as there has been a music called jazz, someone has been trying to call it an American art form and someone else has poo-poohed the attempt. It seems that as improvisation became more important to jazz performance, the musical result became more questionable in terms of authenticity.”

“The Machine Orchestra carries an undeniable cool factor, but it could also seem an unnecessarily complicated way of making music. And might performing robots dilute a core reason we play musical instruments in the first place — for the human expression of emotion through sound? Kapur and Darling maintain the opposite: that playing traditional instruments, even in the world of DJs and experimental electronica, can be limiting. “

“The Colorado Symphony and its musicians have ratified a three-year contract that will restore four weeks of pay lost to furloughs and offer a 4.5 percent salary increase for the 2012-13 season. While the contract does not fully restore pay levels prior to substantial cutbacks in 2009-10, it moves significantly in that direction.”

Fabio Luisi is “clearly the heir apparent, and many signs point to a Metropolitan Opera someday under his baton. That would be an epochal changing of the guard.”

“Anthony Freud, general director of Houston Grand Opera, will succeed William Mason as general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago starting in October.”

“In the business world, you wouldn’t condemn the whole field because a few businesses folded. But you would laugh at a field that clung to traditional business models even when they were proving not to work very well in a changing economic climate.”

“So there it rests, for the moment; four years of planning, and then, for whatever overt or covert reasons, an embarrassing debacle. If nothing else, it will cause arts organisations across the world to ask themselves whether the promise of a big donation from a rich patron is worth the paper on which it isn’t written.”

“We are going through a very significant growth strategy over the next three to five years, but it’s going to need much more flexibility on the part of all our employees: technicians, orchestra, artists.”

The orchestra has been in difficulty for some time and has missed seven payrolls.