“Roland Valliere, MSO’s president and CEO, said it was no surprise. … Her decision comes at a time when the orchestra has been struggling financially. The MSO announced in January of last year that it was deep fiscal trouble, and it cut staff and expenses to survive the 2013-14 season. It drastically reduced offerings for this season, and musicians took a 38 percent pay cut.”
Ye-jin (Regina) Han, a 44-year-old soprano, faced opposition from the day she was appointed general director of the Korean National Opera: local organizations argued that she lacked the experience and qualifications to lead the country’s flagship company. Han’s departure comes two months after the CEO of the Seoul Philharmonic was forced to resign following the open rebellion of her staff.
“For all its past glories, the hall has a shopworn feel, with those odd reclining seats and scuffed brass railings. The goal of the expensive facelift, paid for largely by corporate and government cash, is to do some sprucing up without sanding away the antique beauty of the place.”
BBC Radio 3 presenter Clemency Burton-Hill reviews the liberties writer Peter Shaffer and director Milos Forman took with the historical record (and the device they used to get away with it) – and nevertheless finds that Amadeus is “arguably the finest movie ever made about the process of artistic creation and the unbridgeable gap between human genius and mediocrity.” (text-only)
“The spirit of Beethoven has come back to life in first-person shooter games. Over-the-top Romanticism, in all its most extravagant manifestations, is now the preferred musical accompaniment to virtual killing.”
“Today a growing number of geologists believe we have left the Holocene and entered a new period—the Anthropocene—in which the dominant geologic force is humanity itself. What does this mean for music? What does it mean for my work as a composer, or for any artist working in any medium today?”
“Is this more than a vanity project? Is Simon Rattle’s musicianship really worth it? Would such a “world-class hall” be sustainable after his departure? At 63 he would be, even by the gerontocratic standards of classical music, not a young man when his Berlin contract runs out in 2018.”
“The proposed upgrades include a permanent function centre at the Opera House overlooking the harbour and a new waterfront public square at Walsh Bay. About $202 million would be spent on the opera house, which was completed in 1973 and attracts 8 million tourists a year.”
The founder and director of the New London Consort and Musicians of the Globe (the resident ensemble at Shakespeare’s Globe), with a discography of 48 titles, Pickett was convicted of assaulting several of his students at the Guildhall School.
Gabrielle Herbst: “People go to the opera to step out of their ordinary lives, and I was interested in the symbols and archetypes that opera’s stories have, and how people come to terms with their own lives in terms of these very intense emotions and gestures.”
“To repair its relationships in the music world, Pandora has created a division to work with labels and artist managers, opened its vast databanks, and begun experimenting with artist promotions.”
“The program, which is being financed through a bequest from the Rudel estate, will give some Mannes conducting students residencies with the Buffalo Philharmonic, which Mr. Rudel once led.”
“Zimmermann doesn’t own the violin. He rents it through an arrangement, struck with a now-defunct German bank, WestLB AG. That contract is set to expire Sunday night.”
“We’d been very meticulous in the look and the detail of the film in its period accuracy, but the music, the score, should somehow be a voice that comes from a different place. It should somehow be an expression of the essence of Turner’s painting in some way.”
London’s mayor: “We have heard the clarion call from Sir Simon Rattle and many others who wish to see a brand-new and world-class centre for music in London.”
Ronald O. Perelman, billionaire business titan and a self-described ‘frustrated musician,’ … [has] succeeded Sanford I. Weill, who has served as chairman for nearly a quarter-century. … Mr. Perelman, 72, said that he was not much of a classical music enthusiast and would push for the hall to stage more of the pop performances it was known for decades ago.
Violinist Daniel Hope looks at the composers who fled the Nazis and settled in Los Angeles – and supported themselves by creating a style of music that defined an industry.
“It overruns the boundaries separating art from pop, mainstream from underground, primeval past from hi-tech present. … It is as though, in a reversal of tectonic drift, isolated land masses of taste were re-forming as a supercontinent.”
The two companies, which developed and premiered Muhly’s recent Two Boys, will work with the composer on an adaptation of Marnie, Winston Graham’s 1961 novel (made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock) about a woman blackmailed into marrying one of her bosses after she gets caught embezzling.
“‘Our audience is segmenting. There isn’t such a thing as a classical music audience. There are dozens of classical music audiences,’ said Chad Smith, the Phil’s vice president of artistic planning. ‘We want to be seen as relevant to what’s happening in our world. L.A. is the most contemporary city. You miss a beat and you are forgotten.'”
“The National Symphony Orchestra announced this morning that Christoph Eschenbach will become Conductor Laureate of the orchestra in the 2017-18 season. In other words, his contract, after what will have been seven seasons as music director of the orchestra and of the Kennedy Center, is not being renewed.”
When Darío Lopérfido took over last week at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the very first change he made in the house’s program was to cancel the contract of Katharina Wagner – great-granddaughter of the composer and director of the Bayreuth Festival – to direct Parsifal in December. His stated reason: “I wanted something artistically stronger.” (in Spanish)
Enormously, breathtakingly bad. The Teatro Colón, once the peer of almost any opera company in the world, has gone through years of badly-targeted staff cuts, unfinished renovation and construction, labor unrest (justified and not), and disastrous political interference. Now a new general director faces the fearsome challenges of cleaning up. (in English)
“It’s curious that the Royal Opera’s new venture into smaller spaces has coincided with an unprecedented new approach to translation. No attention has been drawn to this shift in policy, which has slipped through as part of a wider attempt at accessibility, at reinventing opera for the youthful audience of the Camden Roundhouse (with the recent Orfeo, also in English) and the more theatrically-inclined audience at the Globe.”
“Of course, I miss a lot of the musicians in Montreal. What happened there, you know, I made one mistake: I never answered the attacks from the union. One has to understand the context. When they signed the contract, I was completely on the side of these people. I even was wearing a shirt to help them to get more money, and I was quite close to the premier ministre, and so on.”
“Whatever you think of the radical relativism of postmodern cultural theory—and I detest it—the fact is that the coming of postmodernism has proved to be both liberating and stimulating to musicians of all kinds.”
Now the station features 22 hours of locally hosted or produced programs on weekdays. And while it kept popular national shows such as “From the Top,” “Concierto” and the live Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, KMFA has dropped Classical 24 entirely, even from the convenient overnight slot.
John and Helen Meyer can fix just about any acoustical problem in a space – from a dead auditorium to a restaurant full of deafening chatter. Their Constellation system “undertakes a process akin to the Photoshopping of an image, with undesirable elements removed.”
When his current contract expires in 2017, the Dutch maestro will be 76. He will continue to take guest-conducting work.
“Following these guidelines is how you will avoid glimpsing voodoo dolls of yourself with pins in them on the musicians’ stands.”