Thomas, named artist in residence at the Los Angeles Opera and about to star in the new LAO COVID-safe performance of Oedipus Rex, says about his also new Russell Thomas Young Artists in Training program, "The most exciting project is the academy for young singers, because being a singer is so expensive and I was lucky when I was...
It's not because they'll live forever; think of the precipitous decline of Elvis' music and memorabilia. It's because they're hot right now and for the next few years. And if you're a young singer? Well. "The future of the music business is in fashion, make-up, booze, shoes—almost anything except the music itself. If you’re looking for the next Dylan,...
The 38-year-old conductor and cellist is also music director of the Orlando Philharmonic and the Greater Bridgeport (Ct.) Symphony, but he's best known in the wider world for two dynamic contemporary music ensembles: chamber orchestra The Knights, which he founded with his violinist brother Colin, and the string quartet Brooklyn Rider. - The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.)
"A team of researchers studying brain activity of singing male and female plain-tailed wrens has discovered that the species synchronizes their frenetically paced duets, surprisingly, by inhibiting the song-making regions of their partner's brain as they exchange phrases." - Phys.org
As vaccines spread and COVID-19 numbers drop, "concert and theater venues are scrambling to keep up and figure out when and how to welcome back the crowds they depend on. For the Hollywood Bowl — perhaps the most celebrated outdoor venue in the nation — that has meant making plans, and ripping them up again, as it rides rapidly...
William Grant Still's one-act Highway 1, U.S.A. has barely been seen since its 1963 premiere, but it's being brought back to life this summer by Opera Theater of St. Louis with a cast headed by Nicole Cabell and Will Liverman and no less than Leonard Slatkin conducting. Yet it wouldn't have happened at all if not for COVID. -...
Angelico specializes in trousers (or pants, in the US) roles. He says that one day, he finished a rehearsal at covent Garden and realized that he couldn't play the role of a woman offstage anymore. "The art of opera has always had an appreciation of gender fluidity – and it allowed Adrian to perform as a man onstage before...
How'd the dry run for the YOLA concert hall go? "It would be hard to imagine a less proper acoustic assessment, or a better real world one. The ensemble of student string players spent the pandemic practicing at home and taking instruction via Zoom. Yet their assignment, on only their third time back together, was the tricky first movement...
To be fair, the Skagit Valley Chorale (the one where 52 of 61 singers eventually got COVID from a single rehearsal in March 2020) is singing together now - over Zoom. But a planned return in the fall looks bumpy, thanks to politics around vaccine requirements. - NPR
Justin Davidson, on the NY Phil's Green-Wood Cemetery "Death of Classical" concert: "That might not seem like the obvious location to stage the revival of performance culture, but when Green-Wood opened in 1838, it was intended to be one of New York’s grandest, most verdant, and most romantic public parks. (Today, its permanent residents include the orchestra’s late music...
Sara Glojnarić, who won Berlin’s “Neue Szenen” competition last year, explains that being a woman, being queer, and working against racism all intersect in her work, and she believes others' identities are reflected in their work as well. When she was in school at Stuttgart, she says, "our professor, Martin Schüttler, encouraged us to engage with that, to work...
The amount of money people are spending on music hasn't changed from when we bought albums at the record store or CDs by Sony subscription service - but the way musicians get the money, and how much money they get, is radically different. "When we talk about per stream rates, what we’re doing is sort of smushing all of...
A Facebook post in late April from an alumna of Venezuela's famous system of free musical education "has since sparked a collective portrait of teenage girls in El Sistema being systematically groomed by older male teachers, with coercive innuendos and propositions as everyday occurrences." Said one former student of her oboe teacher, "His methods rested on an uplifting discourse...
"On May 25, 1991 — 30 years ago Tuesday — Billboard … started counting album sales with scanners and computers and whatnot, and not just calling up record stores one at a time and asking them for their individual counts, often a manual and semi-accurate and flagrantly corrupt process. … Virtually overnight, SoundScan changed the rules on who got...
"While a normal season features about 90 concerts over eight weeks, last year just 14 concerts played to an empty Royal Albert Hall. The BBC said the plan this summer was for 52 concerts over six weeks, with audiences. 'And we pray it will be a full audience,' said the Proms director, David Pickard." - The Guardian
