The Brit Awards announced they "would do away with gendered awards categories entirely, following in the footsteps of the Grammy Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards and the Juno Awards." A big concern: Women performers may get shut out once again. - CBC
"It seemed important to hold a space for folks to feel whatever they needed to, to sing and cry and laugh and be with people who understood what a loss this was to those who love theater." - The New York Times
Film music may be a genre, but all that means is music used in a film. Other than that, anything the director will let a composer get away with goes. - Los Angeles Times
Felix Klieser, 30, was born without arms. Even so, he graduated from a German conservatory and made a recording at age 22 that won him an ECHO Klassik prize. His fifth CD came out in March, and he's currently the Bournemouth Symphony's artist in residence. - BBC Music Magazine
Louise Toppin is on a mission to recalibrate who, what, and how we program our concert seasons to enable a more equitable representation of music from composers of African descent. She is seeking a sustained and systemic cultural shift. - Classical Voice North America
"The 87-year-old's farewell took place in Sage Gateshead, directing the Royal Northern Sinfonia in an all-Haydn concert that effortlessly rolled back the years. It reminded us that this is a man who has changed classical music emphatically for the better." - The Guardian
Bowes Center signals a major expansion of the Conservatory of Music, which has most of its academic and performance spaces a few blocks away on Oak Street. - MSN (San Francisco Chronicle)
Matthew Aucoin finds impossibility to be a constant in the history of opera. “The art form’s first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Italy strove to re-create the effect of ancient Greek drama, which of course they had never heard.” - The New Yorker
Hough played the first live, streamed concert after shutdown to an empty hall in London. "It was a reminder of how important a cog music is in life. Don’t take it for granted. Tell our political leaders it’s not just entertainment." - The Observer (UK)
Mary Ellen Goree, principal second violin: "I cannot sit on stage in my chair knowing that 26 of my colleagues lost their jobs just so I could hold onto two-thirds of mine. ... It’s a moral issue." - Spectrum News (San Antonio)
According to the Canadian pianist Liu, the answer after an extra COVID year was spontaneity. "That was the challenge, actually: to not get bored of yourself after playing these pieces and practising them for thousands of hours." - CBC
"'Often there's that idea that you're just going to dig your garden and go to Zumba or visit a National Trust property,' songwriter and guitarist Ruth Miller said. 'We want to be in a punk band. We don't want to just watch daytime TV.'" - BBC
She told Spotify to quit with the shuffle on albums - and "on Saturday, the streaming giant confirmed that it had agreed to the British superstar’s request to automatically play the music in the order an artist has curated." - Washington Post
Of course the past two years have meant near-constant revisions of goals, budgets, and the definition of success - but in Portland, the Friends of Chamber Music's Pat Zagelow had decades of flexible crisis response to call on. - Oregon ArtsWatch
