Music

In fact, David Lang is, with a re-imagining of Beethoven’s Fidelio. Anne Midgette explores the idea of revisiting classics in new form. – Washington Post

When Palm Beach Opera promoted him to general director in February 2009, the company was struggling. It was posting unsupportable deficits and the chief administrator job was a revolving door. Under Biaggi’s leadership, the company stabilized and grew. It slashed the budget, reducing the number of operas it produced at the Kravis Center from four to three and eliminating Monday matinees, and re-directed resources to programming designed to broaden its audience. – Palm Beach Post

“We put $8 million into the BSO,” Governor Larry Hogan said. “They received the most money of any arts group in the state, 74 percent higher than any other arts group. . . . We continue to pour millions and millions of dollars into the BSO, but they’ve got real serious issues and problems with the management, with losing the support of their donor base.” – Washington Post

“We found that a certain region of our brains has a stronger preference for sounds with pitch than macaque monkey brains. The results raise the possibility that these sounds, which are embedded in speech and music, may have shaped the basic organization of the human brain.” – EurekArt

The 90-year-old conductor gives his farewell to his birthplace, Amsterdam, this weekend; following one August concert with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in Lucerne, he will close out his 65-year career late this summer with the Vienna Philharmonic at the BBC Proms and the Salzburg and Lucerne Festivals. And what will he do after? “Just live.” (in Dutch; Google Translate version here) – De Volkskrant (Netherlands)

UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost. – The New York Times

The group announced on its social media platforms today that the archive—consisting mostly of unfinished music and clips from the mid-90s—had been stolen last week. The hacker, or hackers, demanded $150,000 to keep it from being released to the public, Radiohead said. In response, the band decided not only to ignore the ransom demand but release the entire trove of music to Bandcamp in aid of Extinction Rebellion, the new climate change movement. – Newsweek

“Less than an hour after Watkins Glen International speedway announced it was no longer hosting Woodstock 50 on Monday (June 10), in separate announcements the event’s producer CID Entertainment issued a statement saying it was ending its involvement with the anniversary festival and the New York State Department of Health gave word its permit application was being rescinded.” – Billboard

“‘We had several options, and this was the one that was viable … because he had that incredible imagination and powerful talent that a lot of people don’t have,’ said Carol Karotkin, chairwoman of the board. Richter, who launched the company in 2012 under the name Opera Piccola, died April 28 at the age of 51.” – San Antonio Express-News

Alsop, who is currently music director of the Baltimore Symphony and begins as chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony this fall, steps down from Brazil’s leading orchestra at the end of this year. Fischer, who will remain the Utah Symphony’s music director through the 2021-22 season, begins in São Paulo next March, after the summer break there. – Gramophone

Music played an outsize role in the evolution of the internet. As Larry Lessig put in Free Culture: “Filesharing music was the crack cocaine of the internet’s growth. It drove demand for access to the internet more powerfully than any other single application.” Jobs became the first licensed dealer in that drug and iTunes provided the saddle that enabled Apple to ride the tiger. – The Guardian

In 2001, the music industry “faced an existential threat” because its “vanquishing of Napster turned out to be a pyrrhic victory: the genie had escaped from the bottle. Dozens of filesharing systems had come into being.” iTunes (even though it’s now bloated and terrible and leaving) “was a revelation,” and made paying for music online a norm. – The Guardian (UK)

The opera will go back to concert productions of Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust next year, because, well, the production that was scheduled was way too demanding. The Met “decided not to revive the production after officials realized that they would need to revamp some elements of it to meet newer industry safety standards, refurbish some of its automated mechanical systems, and update video projections that are more than a decade old.” – The New York Times

The concert business, according to Pollstar, set records in 2018 with more than 152 million tickets moved and $10.4 billion in sales nationally. The live industry’s growth was necessary to offset lost record sales. Those peaked in 1999 at $40 billion and were less than half that last year at $19.1 billion, with just under $9 billion coming through streaming. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“By September 2020, I will have been at the League for twenty-two years and CEO for twelve,” Rosen said in his remarks to delegates during the League’s 74th National Conference in Nashville. “I’ve had an enormously fulfilling experience, but it’s time to begin thinking about the next chapter. ” – Broadway World

“The donation, by a couple wishing to remain anonymous, places $50 million into the orchestra’s endowment plus $5 million for general operating costs.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

“The string players sat in concentric semicircles, with odd-looking tangles of wires running between the players’ feet. … As the lights dimmed, long drifting skeins of sound emerged, which coalesced into warm major chords and then drifted apart again, but what really seized my attention were the fluctuating patterns of light winking in the gloom.” Ivan Hewitt checks out the Aurora Orchestra. – The Telegraph (UK)

Before Thomas W. Morris became artistic director in 2004, the Southern California contemporary music event was respected but somewhat, as Zachary Woolfe puts it, “insular and Eurocentric … If high modernism could be cozy, this was it.” Morris opened Ojai up to the ever-more-lively American new music scene and brought in as visiting music directors (a new one each year) a range of starry, even hip artists such as Mark Morris, Eighth Blackbird, Vijay Iyer, and (this year) Barbara Hannigan. – The New York Times

“We’re trying to create a balance between things we know are really good and things that we maybe aren’t sure about but don’t ‘fit in’ to the typical new music ideal. It’s tricky — there are just certain kinds of music that neither of us has any experience evaluating. We’ve had to draw some boundaries based on logistics and our own level of knowledge.” – San Francisco Classical Voice

In late May, the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s management dismissed Lam Fung, a local composer who took the position in 2017 and had received a good performance review as recently as March. “[The administration] did not offer reasons for Lam’s sudden dismissal, only saying in a statement that the orchestra ‘remains committed to the support and development of local talent.'” – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

Festivals are expensive. Toronto’s an expensive city. Lots of entertainment choices. And what if people don’t buy what you’re offering? – Toronto Star