Category: music

“The next couple of months are very unknown. But times of this kind of catastrophe are times for really reimagining what you can do and bringing people along to dare to make those choices.” – Los Angeles Times

Friday’s concert will strictly adhere to current social distancing guidelines in Germany, with players forming a chamber orchestra, spaced apart from one another on stage. The programme includes Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, music by Ligeti, Barber’s Adagio for Strings anda chamber version of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 with soprano Christiane Karg. – ClassicFM

His name was Vicente Lusitano, he was son of a Portuguese father and African mother, he worked in Italy and (later) Germany, and his first book of motets contains daring chromaticism and dissonances that precede Gesualdo by decades. His place in European music history was obscured not (or not only) by racism: it was a case of sharp aesthetic disagreement with, and professional enmity from, an influential colleague. – Van

Katharina Wagner, the composer Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter, became co-director of the festival (alongside cousin Eva) in 2008 and sole director in 2015. Now, just short of age 42, Katharina has stepped away from the job indefinitely due to a long-term illness (not COVID-19, according to festival management). – OperaWire

What timing: “It was an exuberant, whirlwind stretch for Jader Bignamini in late January, when the young conductor was unveiled as new music director for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.” Now, he’s hosting watch parties from Toronto and says, “Music and concerts generally are so important but now even more. Because it can give people happiness, joy and good thoughts. We have to think good things, and it’s so difficult now. I think with music — with culture, with books, with art — we can imagine a better world than now.” – Detroit Free Press

“We have all sometimes taken opera, and opera houses, and opera singers, for granted. No longer.” – The New York Times

The Handel and Haydn Society has been around, performing Baroque concerts on period instruments, since 1815. And now it’s time to diversify their programming – and acknowledge the diversity they’ve already had, says Reginald Mobley, their new programming consultant. “‘There are so many composers that are female or black or queer that have existed long before we really thought of race or sexuality as a social construct,’ says Mobley. … ‘What it does is gives a sense of belonging … to all of these various communities that have always felt unwelcome or left out of classical music or ‘high art.’'” – The Bay State Banner

Karissa Krenz: “Perhaps the coronavirus is forcing us to have an extended performance of John Cage’s … groundbreaking 1952 work that epitomized his every-sound-can-be-music philosophy. … I’ve been taking some of this time to listen anew, experiencing the sonic composition of a paused city. … Hearing it now, slowed to a relative calm, it speaks volumes about what comprises the whole.” – WQXR (New York City)

Saturday afternoon’s At-Home Gala, the brainchild of Met general manager Peter Gelb, will have opera stars performing live on the Web from wherever they’re waiting out the COVID lockdown. What’s the controversy? Detractors say that a company that furloughed all its staff performers and declared force majeure to break soloists’ contracts has no business asking those people to perform for free. “But with one or two exceptions,” Gelb tells David Patrick Stearns here, “everybody leapt at the idea of doing this.” – WQXR (New York City)