Category: music

“Roughly 5 million people around the world logged on to YouTube to view the half-hour sacred music concert as it was happening. By Monday night the archived performance had 32 million views. Clearly, it transcended religion, nationality, age demographic and even music preference on its way to becoming perhaps the signature cultural event of the pandemic.” – Variety

“The ‘At Home Gala’ the company is planning for Saturday, April 25, … will feature more than 40 artists, including stars like Anna Netrebko, Jonas Kaufmann and Renée Fleming, performing from their homes and streamed on the company’s website, metopera.org.” – The New York Times

Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler chose one way, conducting in Nazi Germany through World War II. Dmitry Shostakovich chose another in deep Soviet Russia. Joseph Horowitz contrasts the two in this podcast. – The American Interest

Soprano Vuvu Mpofu grew up surrounded by music in church choirs and school, but when she first heard an aria when she was 15, “the girl plunged into the library to find out where the music came from, what it was that had just penetrated her heartbeat and that would mark her life.” – El País

The opera singer says that the lyric arts are particularly at risk with the shutdown, and he addresses President Macron directly in his column. “I speak on behalf of troubadours and acrobats who go on the road, often far from their own, and whose only possibility of building their life rests on the intangibility of the next contract. There are very few wealthy people in this laborious little world, very few whose calendar goes beyond the next ten months. The life of artists is a daily struggle.” – Le Monde

Organists and cantors prepare to play for live streams instead of live services. On the other hand, sometimes that’s a bigger crowd: “Fewer than 600 people would tune in to watch the cathedral’s Sunday Mass streams before the pandemic, said Joe Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York — and that number was up to more than 100,000 on Palm Sunday.” – The New York Times

No Lincoln Center Out of Doors, no Mostly Mozart Festival, no summer programming at all. – NPR

The popular composer, who died in 2013, finished writing Krishna in 2005, but it was never published or produced and few were aware of its existence. Then the Crown Prince, a longtime friend of Tavener’s, asked director David Pountney to take a look at it — and, said Pountney, “I was astonished to discover this massive complete work.” He will direct it in the summer of 2024 at the Grange Park Opera festival. – The Guardian