Category: music

London’s Royal Opera And Royal Ballet Return To Live Performance

It’ll be to an empty house, though; social distancing isn’t over yet. The Live from Covent Garden series, streamed over the Royal Opera House’s YouTube and Facebook pages, begins on June 13 with a program including a brand-new dance by Royal Ballet resident choreographer Wayne McGregor and music by Handel, Britten, Butterworth and Turnage sung by Royal Opera soloists Louise Alder, Toby Spence, and Gerald Finley. – London Evening Standard

A “Window Concert” In A Hotel Courtyard Was Vienna’s First Taste Of Opera Since Lockdown

“Deserted by tourists, a hotel in Vienna gave itself a temporary one-night-only makeover, turning itself into an outdoor concert hall. The guest bedrooms, which have stood empty during the coronavirus lockdown, were transformed into opera boxes for an evening, and the hotel courtyard into a stage to create a rare moment of joy in the city of music on Saturday.” – Yahoo! (AFP)

Music, Social Media, Go Dark On Blackout Tuesday

Instagram and Twitter accounts, from top record label to everyday people, were full of black squares posted in response to the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. Most of the captions were blank, though some posted #TheShowMustBePaused, black heart emojis or encouraged people to vote Tuesday with seven states and the District of Columbia are hosting the largest slate of presidential primary elections in almost three months. – Washington Post

Crowd-Based Opera Postpones Reopening

Crowds are essential to this moment — and, really, to opera as an art form. Choruses fill the stage; musicians cram into the orchestra pit; thousands of people sit shoulder to shoulder in the theater. The Metropolitan Opera, one of the world’s largest houses, seats an audience of nearly 4,000. And it would probably have been packed for the season’s opening night on Sept. 21, the premiere of a new “Aida” production. – The New York Times

Can My Online Choir Give Me What My Regular Choir Does?

I’m not yet sure how much my life will change without choir: without the paper cuts and warmups, the imagistic instructions from conductors (bite the apple, smell the rose, blow the birthday candle), the nonsense vowels (for learning) followed by foreign words (German, Italian, French) twisting in my mouth. The pauses, the frustrations. A dynamic raised and lowered. A tempo sped and slowed. That radical yet practical ethics of ensemble. The chorus says to the individual, you are not important. Blend, modify your vowel, sing a little softer, tune. At the same time, you matter. You must know your part, you must place the “t” correctly, you must practice, and listen. – Commonweal

Recreating The Acoustic J.S. Bach Worked In

“As a composer, Bach would have been highly attuned to the effects of a church’s acoustics on the performance of music. He was known, for example, to have preferred composing for the Thomaskirche over Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche because he deemed it superior for choral music. Supported by an NEH grant and state-of-the-art computational methods, an interdisciplinary team led by Boren is digitally reconstructing the soundscape of the eighteenth-century Thomaskirche to determine just how Bach’s music would have sounded to the composer when it was first performed.” – Humanities Magazine

Metropolitan Opera Cancels All Performances Until End Of 2020

“The company, which last performed live on March 11, now hopes to return with a gala on New Year’s Eve after its longest interruption in more than a century. It is a gap that is projected to cost the company close to $100 million in lost revenues, a figure that will be partly offset by lower costs and emergency fund-raising efforts.” – The New York Times