Category: music

“As live music begins to make a cautious comeback, Matthew Bain, a freelance violinist with the London Philharmonic and Philharmonia amongst other ensembles, shares his experience of returning to orchestral playing.” – The Strad

“The Boston Symphony Orchestra and music director Andris Nelsons have agreed to a three-year contract extension, … ensuring he will lead the symphony through the 2024-25 season and possibly beyond: An evergreen clause allows his commitment to stretch well beyond the new term. … Nelsons has signed a similar contract extension with the BSO’s sister orchestra, the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig.” – The Boston Globe

The Supreme Court “denied a petition aimed at reviving the case, ending six years of litigation that the song’s writers, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, plagiarized the song’s iconic intro from the 1968 song “Taurus” by the group Spirit.” – Variety

The painting, which was commissioned for the Covent Garden building in the 1970s, is to go up for auction later this month in an unprecedented attempt to protect the venue’s future as a home for the Royal Ballet and for international opera. – The Guardian

“While listeners gravitating to loud, aggressive, and fast-paced music during the pandemic was a common response to my inquiry, answers from people who instead went to ambient, jazz, and soothing instrumental music were just as popular.” – Vice

“There’s a real sense of people trying to save face. It has to be met with some skepticism. It’s always this concern that I’m being programmed just to fit a mold, like I’m being tokenized.” – The New York Times

“Ever since the 1980s, and the 1985 release of Joseph Kerman’s hallmark Contemplating Music, the traditionally separate fields of musicology and ethnomusicology have been undergoing a reinvention. Today, music scholars (note the conspicuous absence of terminology) are grappling with the field’s complex, colonial history, its purpose and articulation, and even its name in novel ways. Their work is a reflection of the field’s proverbial coming of age.” – WQXR (New York City)

“These tapes” — of Fitzgerald’s return to Berlin two years after her 1960 debut there, a concert which became a Grammy-winning bestseller — “come from impresario and Verve Records founder Norman Granz’s private collection. As Ella’s manager, he had a habit of recording Ella live – sometimes for radio broadcast, sometimes for later release, sometimes just to have. He also had another habit of focusing on his next project rather than harnessing what he had just recorded, thus the tapes being lost.” – Glide Magazine

“A sharp little scene [in Mrs. America] points out how two political opponents could both relate to [Woody] Guthrie’s generous vision of the US, but it also raises a crucial question about the significance of a song so famous that it has been described as an ‘alternative national anthem’. Not knowing about the story behind the song may make it universal, but is that at the cost of diluting it?” – BBC

For more than 20 years he sang the lyric baritone repertory at the world’s top opera companies, with Mozart’s Don Giovanni a specialty. But, before the lockdown, he had been canceling appearances frequently, and he continued to do so as opera production restarted in Europe this summer and fall. Now he has revealed that, due to persistent back problems, he has ended his performing career and been named artistic director at the opera house in Wrocław, Poland. – OperaWire