Category: music

This is a rather unbelievable story. “When [the two researchers] met, Pentcheva started telling Abel about the Hagia Sophia – how we couldn’t really understand the experience of worshipers there unless we could hear the music the way they did. And as she talked, Abel started to feel a prickling of excitement. They could recreate what that music would sound like. If only they could get in the Hagia Sophia and pop a balloon.” (Note: They did.) – NPR

“Levit’s career is a stark demonstration of the dissolving boundaries between art and commerce, journalism and public relations, particularly in Germany. … He is a friend to media personalities and politicians. Journalists ask his opinion on climate change, the rise of the far right, books, the ideal body weight. He works with artists and comedians, performs at the Bundestag in Berlin and for the Greens. In England, he’s enraged Brexiteers; in the U.S., he’s ‘The Pianist of the Resistance.'” His media presence has reached the critical mass at which coverage leads inexorably to more coverage.” – Van

The project, called “50 Fanfares”, will encompass chamber works as well as short fanfares and full orchestral scores commissioned from 50 Australian composers and premiered through the 2020, ’21 and ’22 seasons. – Limelight (Australia)

The result, at least in what producers were careful to call a dress rehearsal, is intermittently convincing. The hologram gets some of Houston’s physical tics right, and the lip-syncing — if that’s the right word for it — looks pretty real; detailed visual touches like that rippling fringe aid in the suspension of your disbelief. It certainly helps too that the live band cooks. But… – Los Angeles Times

‘Technology is playing a huge role in shaping the future of how people engage with orchestral music,’ says James Williams, managing director at the RPO. ‘At the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, we see it as an essential role to respond to this change, and to evolve and develop – be it through online content or programme notes that appear live on your phone. Indeed, last year we reached around 17m people worldwide through Spotify alone, and these numbers continue to grow each year.’ – Rhinegold

In the 1970s and ’80s, Abu Obaida Hassan’s singing and skill on the Nubian tambour thrilled Sudanese listeners and even gained attention overseas. Then the imposition of a stern version of Sharia law and the 30-year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir squashed the country’s music scene, and Abu Obaida withdrew from public view. In 2016, a Western record producer went looking for him and found him by sheer dumb luck, and with Bashir now ousted, fans are rediscovering Abu Obaida’s sound. – The Guardian

Victory Hall Opera in Charlottesville is working on a production of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites with Deaf performers acting the roles in American Sign Language alongside singers. The first workshops are happening at the end of this month. Reporter Thomas Floyd talks with the leader of Victory Hall Opera and stage director Alek Lev. – The Washington Post

Yuval Sharon: “If there was a straightforward message, there would certainly be simpler and more direct ways to communicate it than by creating this enormous operatic experience. Opera’s power lies in its complexity and its ability to create complication, to help us experience complex visions of the world. It’s something we need more and more desperately and why I think opera has an underestimated political power. Reducibility, along with didacticism, has been something all of us have actively resisted in this process.” – San Francisco Classical Voice

“It seems to me that the only solution commensurate with the scale of the problem is fundamentally changing the way musicians work. We have to stop seeing it as reasonable that we’d play in Barcelona one day, London the next, and New York two days later. And stop seeing it as reasonable that, at a big festival in Barcelona, fifty thousand out of the hundred thousand people there have flown from the U.K. to attend.” – The New Yorker

“What you get in a period orchestra are three things: greater individuality of timbre, more transparency of texture and an increased dynamism once all the instruments are stretched to their absolute maximum capacity of volume and expressivity. If you attempt that with a modern symphony orchestra, there will always be a certain comfort factor, a plushness, which, I feel, doesn’t help the listener to savor all that is most original in the score. It can sound a tad too comfortable.” – The New York Times