Music

“Firefighters worked for seven hours to put out the fire on Thursday afternoon and were still there on Friday morning. According to the Emergency Situations Inspectorate, the flames burned an area of about 3,500 square metres, reducing much of the interior to ashes.” – Balkan Insight

Only a year ago, musicians and management were just ending a very bitter lockdown-turned-strike, and unflattering details of the orchestra’s severe money troubles had been splashed across the media. Now, despite the pandemic, there’s a new five-year contract in place and a spirit of cooperation. “It’s an astonishing reversal of fortune,” says the co-chairman of the players’ committee; “We’re working together in ways we haven’t in many, many years,” says the CEO. – Baltimore Magazine

Kyle Devine writes, “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music’s previous eras.” He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions—some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000.” – The New Yorker

Afton Battle, a native Texan with degrees in voice from the University of Houston and Westminster Choir College, “previously worked in development and consulting for the Joffrey Ballet, New York Theatre Workshop, Red Clay Dance Company, the National Black Theatre, and the African American Policy Forum. [She] is also one of the founders of the recently announced Black Theatre Coalition, [which] has a mission to increase employment opportunities for black theater professionals and eliminate systemic racism in American theater. Battle’s commitment to diversity informs her plans for FWO.” – Fort Worth Star-Telegram

The decision is likely to send ripples of concern through New York and the rest of the country, as Broadway theaters, symphony halls, rock venues, comedy clubs, dance spaces and other live arts institutions grapple with the question of when it will be safe again to perform indoors. Far from being a gilded outlier, the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, may well prove to be a bellwether. – The New York Times

A musicologist and a songwriter, stars of Vox’s ‘Switched on Pop’ podcast produced with the New York Philharmonic, have been criticised for their new reading of Beethoven’s Fifth, which argues that white men embraced the work and turned it into a “symbol of their superiority and importance.” – ClassicFM

The platform, with its artist-first business model, has since its birth in 2008 become a player in the music streaming wars by celebrating niche communities while promising a radically transparent approach to royalties. – Los Angeles Times

“Harnessing the pure sound of Tibetan singing bowls, this new composition was programmed to run for 1,000 years without ever repeating itself. Two decades on, Jem Finer chuckles at his own presumption. When he was devising the project in the late 90s, he says, he hadn’t understood the real challenge, which was that such a long-term project is only as good as the structures devised to look after it, keeping it relevant to a fast-changing world and up to date with a technological revolution that has swept us from the infancy of the internet to the hyper-connected world in which we now live.” – The Guardian

“A months-long investigation by the law firm Cozen O’Connor into ‘horrifying accounts of rape and repeated sexual abuse’ from violinist Lara St. John while she was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music has found her claims to be credible. A report by the firm detailing her experience, as well as separate claims of abuse by about two dozen other students over a period of decades, was unanimously accepted Tuesday by the Curtis board,” which unreservedly apologized to St. John and thanked both her and the newspaper reporters who published her account. – The Philadelphia Inquirer

The decision by the organizers of the quadrennial event makes the Cliburn the first major music competition of 2021 to be called off because of COVID. As a result, in 2022 Fort Worth will host both the main competition (in June) and the Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition (sometime in the fall). – KERA

“We voted to accept devastating changes to our existing contract,” stated a press release issued by the musicians. “Had we rejected these cuts — including 50% of our weekly salary for the fall season and deep but graduated cuts for the ensuing two years — we would immediately have been without any income or the guarantee of health coverage.” – San Francisco Examiner

Heather O’Donovan: “Unlike six months ago, however, they’re prepared to face the challenges. I spoke with leadership at conservatories across the country to get a sense of how they’ve adapted to these unprecedented times. What they shared with me was a deeply heartening show of ingenuity, creativity, and resilience.” – WQXR (New York City)

Thomas Wolf: “To the extent it was described to us in the younger generation, their travails were recounted as humorous stories with the suffering left out. It was only much later as I began my research about the family that I learned just how treacherous their journey had been.” – Nightingale Sonata

“A survey of 2,000 members of the Musicians’ Union found that 34% ‘are considering abandoning the industry completely’, because of the financial difficulties they face during the pandemic, as performance opportunities are severely curtailed. Almost half have already found work outside their industry, and 70% are unable to do more than a quarter of their usual work.” – The Guardian

A performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” at the Teatro Real was canceled after spectators spent more than an hour shouting and clapping to protest against what they said were insufficient social distancing measures in the opera house’s mezzanine levels. Photos and videos shared on social media showed filled rows in the upper sections of the house, in contrast to the orchestra level of the auditorium, where spectators were separated by vacant seats. – The New York Times

“To woke critics, Beethoven’s music has taken on a new, darker meaning. To musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding, stars of the “Switched on Pop” podcast produced in association with the New York Philharmonic, the Fifth Symphony is a stand-in for everything they don’t like about classical music and Western culture. As far as they’re concerned, it’s time to cancel Ludwig.” – New York Post

Mehta doesn’t mind that both Domingo and Levine are facing allegations of sexual harassment in the United States. “We leave the blacklists to American puritanism. Levine has been ruined by the US media. Domingo has had to leave the Los Angeles Opera, which was worth nothing before him. And all because of complaints that have come from failed artists after 30 years . That sounds like revenge,” commented Mehta. – Weiner Zeitung

The cars get, let’s say, preferential treatment at the new La Bohème. “The unintended genius of English National Opera’s modern-day, 90-minute staging of Puccini’s opera is to spread the class politics from stage to audience.” – The Guardian (UK)

The size of the previously undisclosed settlement “casts doubt on the strength of the company’s case had it gone to trial. Mr. Levine’s contract, which had been amended over the years but was essentially based on agreements struck decades ago, lacked a morals clause.” – The New York Times

Melinda Bargreen talks about the journey: “Music presenters often overuse the phrase ‘a concert like no other, but for once, that was exactly what we got: a Symphony concert recorded earlier in the week in Benaroya Hall, watched on the park’s big drive-in screens, and streamed through a dedicated FM channel into the car radios. There’s never been an opening night like this one.” – Seattle Times

When Justice Ginsburg’s death was reported Friday night, tributes poured in from everyone associated with the art form. “She saw her first opera — a condensed version of La Gioconda — in 1944, when she was 11, and was immediately hooked, becoming the kind of aficionado who goes to dress rehearsals, and then opening nights, and then closing nights, too, for good measure.” – The New York Times

In Darwin, people are leaving them on the curb as they clean out their houses before “cyclone season,” but in Hobart, the older ones are more common, and perhaps slightly more tunable. A piano tuner says, “Unless it’s a Steinway it’s not worth fixing.” – ABC (Australia)

The siblings, including the cellist who played at the wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle, just recorded an album “aimed squarely at children. It is all part of their mission to demystify classical music, especially for young people.” – BBC

Back when we bought vinyl albums or CDs, writes Lukas Krohn-Grimberghe, we gave particular music and musicians both money and shelf space in our homes, incorporating them (at least a bit) into our identities. (“Remember browsing through someone’s record collection? That’s what I am talking about.”) Online streaming may give us almost unimaginable choice for little money, but, argues Krohn-Grimberghe, it changes both the listening experience and how we relate to the pieces we hear (as well as severely reducing the amount of money going to the musicians), and music becomes something like a utility. But there are ways that problem can be addressed. – WQXR (New York City)

“Among the smartest recording labels, one-composer programs — the norm since the arrival of the LP record in the early 1950s — are giving way to conceptual collections of music that juxtapose the ancient and modern, progressive and retrogressive, as well as the familiar and the obscure. … Is this fusion cuisine, classical music style? I prefer the term ‘conceptual virtuosity,’ since these programs often have an intellectual depth that goes beyond any Spotify algorithm.” David Patrick Stearns examines some recent examples. – WQXR (New York City)

“Music venues, theaters, and movie houses help make cities desirable, interesting, and economically humming—but they simply cannot operate in a pandemic. Following one of them through the past six months reveals a lot about how America’s economic relief left many kinds of businesses behind—and how much worse off these places will be unless a presently gridlocked Congress does something.” – Slate

For 116 years, the ensemble (a term loosely applied, at least musically) has been both beloved and disdained for its un-march-like on-field scrambles; its sometimes witty, sometimes tasteless, always irreverent satirical routines; and its on-campus pranks. This week, more than 20 members voted “unanimously and enthusiastically” to shut the group down for its history of “sexual misconduct, assault, theft, racism and injury to individuals and the Columbia community as a whole.” (Some observers are hoping that this, too, is a prank.) – The New York Times

The centuries-old three-stringed lute, a mainstay of traditional Japanese art music, remained popular up at least to the turn of the millennium, but most of the remaining players today are well over 60. With the pandemic paralyzing an already shrinking market, the country’s largest shamisen maker was about to close when it was rescued (for now) by an online fundraising campaign. There’s some hope that a newer style called tsugaru shamisen, livelier and less austere than the genteel music of Kyoto geishas, can keep interest in the instrument alive. – The Observer (UK)

The event, operated by the Philharmonie de Paris concert hall and the Paris Mozart Orchestra, is taking place this week in the French capital. Conductor Marin Alsop, who is on the jury, talks with host Olivia Salazar-Winspear about why the competition is (still) necessary and the obstacles that women conductors still face, even as their prospects are finally starting to improve. (video) – France 24

Mr. McGill was the Philharmonic’s first Black principal musician when he joined in 2014; he is currently its only Black player. He appears at David Geffen Hall and elsewhere as a concerto soloist, and is in a trio with his brother, Demarre McGill — the principal flute of the Seattle Symphony — and the pianist Michael McHale. In 2009, he performed at Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration. – The New York Times