In an editorial in Le Monde, Jean Nouvel alleges that he has been sidelined and ignored, and that key decisions about the hall, made with no input from him, have compromised the building. “The contempt these last two years for architecture, for the architect’s craft … prevents me from expressing my agreement and satisfaction with attending the opening ceremony.”
“If leaders of the Philadelphia Singers are ready to throw in the towel, the singers themselves aren’t. A core group of members, plus assistant conductor Brian Schkeeper, says it is forming its own successor organization – a new 150-voice symphonic choir.”
“Orchestra Hall is a different place nowadays. Two words never heard during the lockout, ‘optimism’ and ‘collaboration,’ are now on everyone’s lips. Audiences are back, and the orchestra is playing well.”
“Charles Dutoit, who led the OSM to glory in the 1980s and 1990s only to resign in bitter circumstances in 2002, will make a comeback as a guest conductor next year if plans unfold as expected.”
Anne Midgette: “One of the NSO’s signal achievements with this evening was to integrate other kinds of area music without pandering or watering down. … It’s one of the best efforts I’ve seen from an orchestra at this kind of thing.”
The birthday year of the founder of the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra “has been a big deal in the world of classical music, where the conductor is widely regarded as one of the most prolific, rigorous and amiable musicians of his time.” (By the way, he says audiences are “much more sophisticated nowadays.”)
“Called “Shift: A Festival of American orchestras,” and initially scheduled for a three-year run starting in the spring of 2017, the festival is a continuation, or reimagining, of the Spring for Music festival that ran in New York from 2010 to 2014, which brought orchestras large and small to Carnegie Hall with innovative, unusual programs.”
“I realized people will type weird stuff into search engines, and there’s not always songs for the stuff. If you search for ‘love’ on iTunes or Spotify, you’re going to get something like 15 million songs. If you search ‘monkey,’ you’re going to get fewer.” So Matt Farley decided to fill that gap.
“The Minnesota Orchestra will resume recording sessions this spring to complete its cycle of Jean Sibelius symphonies. The project” – released on the Swedish label Bis – “had been put on hiatus during the 16-month lockout of musicians that ended a year ago.”
“The technical problems of making a singable version of an Italian opera can be stated very simply: you have to make English sentences fit music written for Italian ones. However, this is like trying to fit a set of spanners into a velvet box made for a dinner-service. It also means you have to flip the polarity of the whole language.”
“We as musicians have a responsibility to respond to the world around us, to give the people a song to raise their spirits and fuel the fight in their hearts. So, in light of the political climate we live in — for Eric Garner, for Mike Brown, for Palestine — I pick up my pencil and write.”
“The difference between a virtuoso performer and an ordinary music fan is much smaller than the gulf between that fan and someone with no musical knowledge at all. What’s more, a lot of the most interesting and substantial elements of musicality are things that we (nearly) all share.”
“Despite the terrible moniker, and the scorn of modernists and traditionalists alike, minimalism is triumphant. You can hear the echo of its pounding beats, static harmonies and slowly shifting patterns everywhere in the wider world of music, from TV commercials to film scores to pop music.”
“The hall’s vaunting aspiration to energize its environs and redefine the concert-going experience could be for naught if the shortcuts and loss of time to fine tune prove crucial.”
“Despite the graying of the classical music audience — or perhaps because of it — American orchestras and major music institutions are chasing youth with ever more ambitious programs to reach, and teach, the next generation of players.”
“To better unify the disparate El Sistema education programs across the United States, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is embarking on a new initiative with four other organizations to create a national platform for youth orchestras.”
“The Columbia University School of the Arts has announced that John Luther Adams is the newest recipient of the William Schuman Award, a major recognition given periodically over the past three decades. Named for its first recipient, the award, in the form of a direct, unrestricted grant of $50,000, is one of the largest given to an American composer.”
“Florida Grand Opera is considering exiting from the Broward Center for the Performing Arts next season, a move that would leave Fort Lauderdale without professional opera performances for the first time in the quarter-century since the center opened.”
“The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s push to rebuild its ranks, a major issue in the stormy nine-week player lockout that delayed the 70th anniversary season, has received a boost in the form of a $1.25 million Musicians’ Endowment Fund pledge.”
“Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, scientists found that the more popular a musical style grew, the more generic it became—partly due to the glut of artists that flock to a burgeoning sound and the drop-off in innovation that tends to accompany demand.”
“We show that changes in the instrumentational complexity of a style are related to its number of sales and to the number of artists contributing to that style. As a style attracts a growing number of artists, its instrumentational variety usually increases. At the same time the instrumentational uniformity of a style decreases, i.e. a unique stylistic and increasingly complex expression pattern emerges. In contrast, album sales of a given style typically increase with decreasing instrumentational complexity.”
“Concert promoters study Spotify listens to route tours through towns with the most fans, and some artists look for patterns in Pandora streaming to figure out which songs to play at each stop on a tour. In fact, all of our searching, streaming, downloading, and sharing is being used to answer the question the music industry has been asking for a century: What do people want to hear next?”
“This rule requires that carriers must allow a passenger to carry into the cabin and stow a small musical instrument, such a violin or a guitar, in a suitable baggage compartment, such as the overhead bin or under the seats in accordance with FAA safety regulations.”
“Question the impulse to administer people, to make them compete against one another, to set up panels of judges or bureaucratic processes to make what should be individual artistic decisions. Don’t put arbitrary barriers between artists and audiences. “
“It’s an informal party setting for ages 21 and older, with the audience seated on faux leather benches set up between two stages. A half dozen well-attended bars serve exotic drinks: Mad Monk (Dolin Dry Vermouth, Benedictine, St. George Absinthe, orange peel) and dubious snacks (truffle-scented popcorn).”
“One hot-weather classical enterprise that remains impervious to change, justifiably so, is the Grant Park Music Festival.”
Sure, administrators and musicians so often say to wear whatever you’re comfortable in, we don’t mind, we’re just happy you’re here. But plenty of people who hear that just keep asking, because they don’t want to stand out or get dirty looks and they honestly don’t know what other people do. So Holly Mulcahy offers some practical help for those folks (and those of us who talk with them).
In 2014, we listed over 25,000 events cementing our position as the No.1 site for classical events. This enables us to see trends in concert halls worldwide. Who are the most performed composers? The busiest orchestras? The most popular operas?”
“In early December, Sydney Morning Herald classical music critic Harriet Cunningham was removed from OA’s list after [artistic director Lyndon] Terracini was, according to an OA publicist, ‘very offended’ by a piece she wrote in Crikey‘s arts website … And on Friday, OA took another well-respected critic off its complimentary tickets list – Stage Noise and former Bulletin arts editor, Diana Simmonds.”
“In principle, it should not be so hard to make discounted seats available. In practice, devising a fair and easy way to offer inexpensive tickets is more complicated than you might think.”