It is the first major jazz club in the city to close permanently due to the coronavirus pandemic. – NPR
Category: music
Spotify’s Most Streamed Tracks Of 2020
Bad Bunny was the biggest artist globally, amassing 8.3bn streams. The Puerto Rican star’s second album YHLQMDLG notched up 3.3 billion streams, followed by The Weeknd’s After Hours and Post Malone’s Hollywood’s Bleeding. – BBC
The Rediscovery (At Last) Of Ethel Smyth
“In 1934, all of musical England gathered to celebrate the 75th birthday of one the country’s most famous composers – Dame Ethel Smyth. During a festival spanning several months, audiences crowded into the Queen’s Hall, London, to hear her symphonic cantata The Prison, or settled in at home to listen to the BBC broadcasts of her work. At the festival’s final concert in the Royal Albert Hall, the composer sat beside Queen Mary to watch Sir Thomas Beecham conduct her Mass.” Yet within a couple of decades she was all but forgotten — until just the past few years. – The Guardian
Canadian Opera Company Hires A New Leader
Over the course of his 36-year career, Perryn Leech has worked with the English National Opera, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Glyndebourne Festival, and most recently as Managing Director of Houston Grand Opera (HGO). He first joined the HGO in 2007 and was later appointed Managing Director in 2011. – Ludwig Van
An Operatic Countertenor Is Now A Top Contender On ‘The Voice’
John Holiday, 35 and from metro Houston, “has long sung jazz as well as opera, and crossover success was in his sights even before the pandemic hit. He’s sung at the Apollo Theater, opened for Jason Mraz and told The New Yorker that gospel music and Cardi B influence his classical singing. His dream: perform to a sold-out Metropolitan Opera house one week and a sold-out Madison Square Garden the next.” – Los Angeles Times
Here’s A Very Rare Thing: A Black Male Harpist Skilled In Both Classical And Jazz
A 26-year-old Bostonian, originally from Virginia, Charles Overton “wants to be both the Yo-Yo Ma and Herbie Hancock of the harp.” (Might one say he is pushing the Overton Window?) – Ozy
“Reimagining” Your Orchestra Season? Really?
“When, over the summer, orchestras began making known their fall plans, the operative word was “reimagined.” At least twenty orchestras, from Albany to St. Louis, announced reimagined seasons. Yet, because so many institutions were using identical language, it didn’t seem that anything particularly imaginative was going on. A certain herd mentality also surfaced in the programming.” – The New Yorker
John Luther Adams – Composer Of Places
“What sets Mr. Adams’s seething, shimmering, preternaturally patient sound forces apart is their absence of a definable human anchor. The pieces that make up the “Become” trilogy are neither stories about nature nor pictures of it. Rather, as Mr. Adams writes in an essay accompanying the excellent recordings, ‘this is music that aspires to the condition of place’.” – The New York Times
A Better Way To Give Concerts?
Stephen Hough: “One issue I wrote about that seems to have struck a chord with readers was the idea of removing the interval and having shorter concerts, lasting around 60-80 minutes, perhaps at different starting times, and even repeating them on the same night. Since the pandemic struck this shrunken format has quickly become the norm, a neat solution to comply with new health and safety requirements … and I’ve loved it.” – The Guardian
The Carols From Kings Will Go On, To An Audience Of No One
No one except the BBC, of course. “For many of us, it is the moment when Christmas really starts: the soaring voice of a boy soloist at King’s College, Cambridge opening its iconic Christmas Eve service with Once in Royal David’s City.” No one will be in the pews this year. – The Observer (UK)