The Met win was for "Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, a work based on the memoir of the same name by the journalist and columnist Charles M. Blow." Philadelphia, Chicago, and the Broadway cast recording of Into the Woods also won. - Limelight
Few viral stars, and ... whew, what, is this 2023? "This year’s best artist category – which replaced the gendered best male/female categories – has been criticised for its all-male nominees." - The Guardian (UK)
Freeze Corleone was big on Spotify, and the label wanted him. "The memo, sent in September 2021 by two executives in the company’s French office, weighed the risks of hate speech against the financial upside of working with him." - The New York Times
And also, make it so that the contestants don't know they're on a reality TV show - "This isn’t a documentary – it’s a competition. They are secretly being judged by two globally renowned maestros: classical virtuoso Lang Lang and pop star Mika." - The Guardian (UK)
First of all, Beyoncé "needs three wins to tie, and four to beat the conductor Georg Solti, who holds the record for most overall wins." - The New York Times
Like his hero Duke Ellington, he had a gift for reconciling musical experiment with the immediacy of pop, finding freedom in the constraints of a verse-chorus-bridge grammar that might otherwise default to clichés. - The Baffler
Tim Jackson co-presented the ’92 season with Jimmy Lyons, who launched the festival with San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason in 1958. By 1993, Jackson took over and quickly re-established the reputation of the longest continuously running jazz festival as one of the genre’s pre-eminent events. - San Francisco Chronicle
Composer Emma O'Halloran had had her Uncle Mark adapt two of his scripts, Mary Motorhead and Trade, into librettos to which she's written one-act operas --- and she plans to make it a trilogy. She talks to David Patrick Stearns about the collaboration and about the ways she works. - Musical America
The Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative report reveals that while the amount of women represented in Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 chart jumped 28.7% last year, to a total of 30%, only 14% of songwriters represented on the chart were women, a slight decrease from the 2021 statistic of 14.3%. - The Guardian
For the orchestra's February program, at least, the venue will be the Met Philadelphia, a former opera house on Broad Street north of Center City and a familiar hall for the Pops. There's no word yet on whether they'll return there for the season's four remaining programs. - The Philadelphia Inquirer
For artists who are thinking about retirement, it’s a way to enjoy the fruits of their labour and create a pension for themselves. It could be that, because of the pandemic, artists have sold their catalogue to compensate for loss of revenue while venues and other income streams were lost. - The Conversation
“We, the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony, have been playing without a contract for months and are the only major American orchestra who have not had their salaries restored to the contractually agreed rates, prior to the contract expiring." - San Francisco Classical Voice
Even the most curmudgeonly of musicians and symphony-goers are coming to accept the value of these sorts of shows. And, most importantly, the music is often excellent. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
