I'm withdrawing my "Indie pop footnotes" post. It had some mistakes, some due to my carelessness, some from misinformation. What follows is (I hope) more accurate. It follows up on my earlier post about Sufjan Stevens making history -- maybe -- at BAM. Other indie rock people have done work with orchestras. I've heard, for instance, about this happening in Australia. Ben Folds has appeared with many Australian orchestras, with whom he sometimes improvises, even in songs where they might simply be backing him. The DVD of him playing … [Read more...]

I've never seen such a crush of classical music personalities, as at the two concerts in New York this week by Dudamel and the Venezuelan youth orchestra. And then came three concerts by the Berlin Philharmonic, which of course has close ties with the Venezuelans. These five concerts together were the hottest classical music ticket in New York, and also meant a lot for the future of the field. I'm reviewing it all for the Wall Street Journal, so here I'll skip any comments on the musical performances. But as for the future of classical … [Read more...]

Well, maybe not the future, but one possibility. This was Sufjan Stevens's piece BQE at BAM last weekend, part of their Next Wave festival. Here was a top indie rock guy creating a multimedia piece, 30 minutes long, with the music written for orchestra (30 pieces or so, counting his band). And he most certainly can write for orchestra. This wasn't the embarrassment we all too often get, when pop people venture into classical music. Jon Pareles wrote a rave review in the New York Times, both of BQE and the show of Stevens's songs that … [Read more...]

If you've read my complaint about the New Yorker piece on Peter Gelb on the Met -- it was 11 pages of syrup, I thought, without any important issues raised -- try a San Francisco magazine piece on David Gockley, who runs the San Francisco Opera. Maybe it's a bit pedestrian as prose (the New Yorker might turn up its pedigreed nose), but it's far more substantial. (Many thanks to the San Francisco arts professional who agreed with my post, and sent me the Gockley link.) … [Read more...]

I'd been critical of James Levine's conducting in the Met's opening night Lucia. So it's only fair to say that in the new Macbeth production, he's much, much better. Right from the start, the orchestra was crisp, and dotted rhythms (very vague in Lucia) were strong and clear, with each note distinct. Sudden loud chords were really loud and sudden. Some scenes were terrific, or even spectacularly terrific -- the apparitions, the Sleepwalking Scene, the Scottish exiles. Conducting like this -- sharp, pristine, focused, energetic, … [Read more...]

A while ago I wrote about interpreting ticket-sale statistics, as what I hoped would be a helpful guide for journalists trying to make sense of those numbers. I had a lot to say about subscription sales, since these are especially tricky. When someone says "our subscriptions are up," do they mean the number of subscribers, the number of tickets sold to subscribers, the amount of money made from subscription sales, or the percentage of total sales that subscriptions make up? So here's something else to think about, most … [Read more...]

I can't say I liked the piece on Peter Gelb and the Metropolitan Opera in the October 22 issue of the New Yorker. It's far too positive. In fact, it's 11 pages of syrup. I hope I've made it clear that I admire Peter, and what he's doing. He's my poster boy for the future of big classical music institutions; when I was asked to nominate people for a classical music award, I named him (though he didn't get it). And certainly I liked the things in this piece that showed his personality, and what seems to be his admirable working style. … [Read more...]

At a concert by the Theatre of Voices Friday night, I loved a Berio piece, A-Ronne. Twitters, muttering, all kinds of entertaining vocal sounds, and also some compelling singing, all structured in a way that captivated me. But when I said I liked the piece, at intermission, two composers (one quite well known) objected. To them the piece felt suffocating. I knew why, of course. They'd studied composition in the 1970s, when modernism ruled in academia, and when -- as I know from my own composition studies then -- you had to like and … [Read more...]

We Americans can theorize all we like, but there's something most of us don't have -- the ghastly experience of living under a totalitarian regime. James Zhu, who had that experience, posted the following as a comment to my North Korea posts. He fully supports the Philharmonic's visit, and wrote what follows as a response to my fellow blogger Terry Teachout's piece in the Wall Street Journal. Terry opposed the Philharmonic's visit, which of course he has every right to do. I thought I'd promote James Zhu's thoughts from a comment to a … [Read more...]

There's been a small explosion over Richard Taruskin's long piece in the New Republic, about, yes, the future of classical music. Or, more precisely, about three books that try to make classical music's case. Taruskin, as anyone who's read him might expect, goes after these books with savage virtuosity, or maybe it's virtuoso savagery. I loved every word, and agreed. This is a very long piece, but ought to be required reading. (If you follow the link, don't try to read the piece on the page you'll go to. You'll find it broken into … [Read more...]