Category: music

What we need are larger communities of musicians who take on a variety of musical tasks throughout their towns, playing early music, new music, movie music, chamber music, whatever is wanted. – Los Angeles Times

“Yuval Sharon will serve as Long Beach Opera’s interim artistic director and dream up the 2021 season.” He would seem to be a good fit for a small company known for unusual work. “Any other opera company in America would be completely blindsided by the projects that I’m proposing,” he says, “Every other opera company would turn ghost white at the thought of this kind of season. I think it’ll be great.” – Los Angeles Times

“The Metropolitan Opera has run small deficits for the past two years and faces rising capital expenses — including for the repair of its white travertine exterior — prompting S & P Global Ratings to announce on Wednesday that it was keeping the company’s ‘A’ credit rating but revising its outlook to negative, from stable.” – The New York Times

Andrew Norman’s “Sustain” earned Grammy nominations in two key categories: contemporary classical composition, where composer Norman will square off against Julia Wolfe, Caroline Shaw and Wynton Marsalis, among others; and orchestral performance, where the nomination went to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who performed “Sustain” as part of the orchestra’s landmark centennial season. – Los Angeles Times

The country’s first post-Soviet president, the autocratic and eccentric Sapurmurat Niyazov, banned opera in 2001 as “incompatible with Turkmen mentality.” His successor (and former dentist), Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, maintained the ban until this week, when Pagliacci was presented as part of a joint Italian-Turkmen cultural festival. – Yahoo! (AFP)

Whether the Chicago brass would be recognizable in a blind test is open to debate — many of the regional styles that once differentiated orchestras have been sanded over in this age of jet-setting maestros and more peripatetic players — but it is still considered one of the jewels of the orchestral world. – The New York Times

“E. Loren Meeker was announced Friday as the company’s general and artistic director, and Francesco Milioto will become music director. Meeker replaces both Adam Diegel, who departed as artistic director in 2018, and executive director Liz Tullis, who also relinquished her role in 2018. Milioto will be the company’s first music director.” – The Rivard Report (San Antonio)

For all that composers like Jerome Kern hated jazz and pop interpretations of their work — work generally created, after all, for specific scenes and characters in specific musical plays — Rob Kapilow notes that “it is precisely the freedom to take these canonical works — these ‘standards’ — and continually reinterpret them in the multiplicity of musical languages that have evolved over time that has kept the repertoire alive.” – The New York Times