Category: music

“I think the greatest need is to internationalize the National Symphony. I want them to tour regularly. I also want them to record. We just made our first recording–from concert performances of Gershwin and Bernstein. And we’re planning a big tour to South America. Then we will work on a tour to Europe. I want to get the orchestra to the point that I can show them off with pleasure.”

“The company has hired Ramon Tebar as its new music director, filling a position that has been left vacant since Stewart Robertson departed in 2009. The Spanish conductor, 32, received critical accolades for his work in last season’s Lucia di Lammermoor and the Turandot that opened this season.”

“Who knows what the full artistic implications of the Met’s partnership with Juilliard will be over the coming decades, but it’s an institutional streamlining of a kind that happens only rarely at this level.”

“Recurring health setbacks drew sympathy for his plight but also real frustration from players, concertgoers, and the board. It took a toll on the orchestra to see, time and again, its capstone artistic projects outsourced to last-minute substitute conductors.”

A Cambridge Mass, written when the composer was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, had been filed away in the University Library. … The choral manuscript was submitted for his Doctor of Music examination in October 1899.”

Yes, there was punk rock in France in the ’80s, and a new BBC Radio 4 documentary “argues that far from riding the coat-tails of their English and American peers, early French punk groups were applying futuristic, electronic invention to the form back when much of the fluidity and freedom of UK punk was stiffening into cliché.”

The robber “had used two teenage accomplices to act as decoys so that he could snatch the instrument from under the nose of acclaimed musician Min-Jin Kym as she ate in a Pret a Manger at Euston station.” The next day, they tried to sell the £1.2 million violin to a stranger at an Internet cafe for £100.

“It puts you close to the singers, as well. But now you feel you are on the stage because there is a depth of field behind them. That’s something that most directors strive for with sets anyway, manipulating scale and viewpoints.”

“Most reviews of productions I’ve attended concern themselves nearly exclusively with a detailed analysis of the director’s conception of the drama. The fact that the writer is generally a music rather than theatre expert is even more bemusing.”

“Under the proposal, the musicians and management each would select an arbiter, who together would select a third member of the panel. The unresolved issues in the strike, including pay and work rules, would be argued in front of the panel. The two sides would be bound by the majority and the arbiters could agree with one side or the other or propose compromise measures.”