Paul Meecham comes to the job after leading the Utah Symphony & Opera for three years and a 10-year run as CEO of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. His résumé also includes two years at the Seattle Symphony. - Tucson.com
"Only the males can vibrate a section of their abdomen called the tymbals to make either phaaaaaroah drone sounds or chchchchhwhhhs noise waves, depending on the species. For any mating to happen, though, the females must respond with a quiet but audible flick of their wings, leading the males on to successive sounds only if this flick happens at...
The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, located on the downtown waterfront, seats up to 10,000 people and (because it's San Diego and they can) will be used year-round. It hosts a livestream with selected orchestra members on May 21 and will have its first full orchestra concert, under music director Rafael Payaré, later this summer. - The San Diego...
At the beginning of this week it was announced that the conductor (who was, when he was younger, hailed as a new Herbert von Karajan) was not offered a contract renewal at the orchestra and opera house in Dresden. It turns out that his term as music director at Wagner's own opera house in Bayreuth expired on Jan. 1,...
The book’s subtitle, New Adventures in the Western Classical Tradition, makes its soft boundaries clear. As managing director of London’s Barbican Centre, and former director of the Proms, controller of Radio 3 and music critic of the Observer – and therefore a colleague and friend to those of us in the business of classical – Kenyon has heard and...
"Let's set the scene. It's February 28, 1903, and 12 musicians from the Imperial Household Orchestra are seated in front of a gramophone horn in a Tokyo hotel room. The needle slowly lowers onto a spinning blank disc and the session begins. What follows is a recording of the sound of gagaku, the oldest continuously performed orchestral music in...
“2020 had all been about crypto art. We believe that Betty’s Notebook is the birth of crypto music. It makes music truly ‘crypto native’,” meaning the piece is designed and meant for consumption on the blockchain, instead of simply being added to it as a NFT. “You can’t have Betty’s Notebook without the blockchain.” - Dallas Morning News
"Members of the company's orchestra and chorus, joined by prominent soloists and led by its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, will give two concerts at the Knockdown Center in Queens on Sunday. … The concerts will go on despite continuing labor tensions at the Met, which have threatened the intended reopening of its Lincoln Center home in September." - The...
"The union, the American Guild of Musical Artists — which also represents soloists, dancers, actors and stage managers — is the first of the three largest Met unions to reach such a deal after months of sometimes-bitter division between labor and management over how deep and lasting the pandemic pay cuts should be." - The New York Times
The culture ministry of the German state of Saxony has announced that Thielemann's contract as music director of the Staatskapelle Dresden, one of Europe's oldest and most admired orchestras, and the Saxon State Opera (aka the Semperoper) will not be renewed when it expires in the summer of 2024. The contract of Semperoper superintendent Peter Theiler, which expires at...
Andres Orozco-Estrada hasn't been back to Texas to conduct his orchestra for a year, but he had been planning to return for concerts May 7-9 and May 14-16 to close his next-to-last season in Houston. (He'll step down in the summer of 2022.) But the U.S. government's National Interest Exemption on pandemic travel restrictions for certain artists expired in...
Last month, Midia Research, which specializes in music and digital media, released a study, “Rebalancing the Song Economy,” that was commissioned by Abba's Bjorn Ulvaeus. It includes some surprising findings — in a survey, twice as many streaming users said a song mattered more to them than the artist who performed it, rather than the opposite — and sounds...
Riccardo Muti called the experience of the past year “an unnatural global experiment” that had “stunned” the world. “If we truly took into account how we are living, we would all go crazy. We try to maintain the illusion that we are living a normal life. It is the only way to reach the end of this absurd path,’’...
That new album by your fave, the one you haven't heard hyped on social media or in music magazines? It's probably by a deliberate Doppelgänger. "Inside Spotify’s borderless musical landscape, you’re never more than a playlist transition away from a fake-out. ... There’s always someone trying to game the system." - Slate
With a 500-person limit, a record high in private funding, new digital streaming infrastructure, and a mandate to be more ecologically conscious, the Milan opera house and its new artistic director, Dominique Meyer, are ready to put the horrible experience of 2020 behind them. - The New York Times
