The recent struggles and remarkable late-career concerts of these two men will always mark for me the passing from the scene of their generation of artists — a generation that has loomed over the musical landscape, and stubbornly refused to cede it for decades. - The New York Times
"Arts Council England said it would invest national lottery funding in the company until March 2024 to 'sustain a programme of work at the ENO's home, the London Coliseum, and at the same time help the ENO start planning for a new base outside London by 2026.'" - The Guardian
Dane Lam, a Chinese-Australian who currently holds positions with Opera Queensland and the Xi'an Symphony Orchestra in China, is the first music director at the HSO since it came out of Bankruptcy 11 years ago. - Yahoo! (Honolulu Star-Advertiser)
Starting in July, Kraemer, currently music director of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, will succeed Carlos Miguel Prieto, who is leaving New Orleans after 17 years to take the podium at the North Carolina Symphony in Raleigh. - AP
"The $100 million renovation kicks off this spring, with a groundbreaking on the expansion beginning in March. The 65,000-square-foot expansion will include a new education and learning center and a new lobby. There will also be a new backstage including new dressing rooms for performers." - KMOV4 (St. Louis)
"There are plenty of reasons for this, from the playlist culture spawned by streaming platforms … to the solace it provided during the pandemic. … But perhaps highest on the list is the global wave of Gen Z and young millennial classical artists." - BBC
Mozart worked from 1781 as a freelance musician. Beethoven, too, survived on publishers’ commissions and charitable sponsorship. If they had been born two centuries later, both would have been appointed to endowed professorships and never heard from again. - The Wall Street Journal
Why? It's a mystery. "The abrupt switch, at a high-profile venue in one of the biggest markets in the world, is head-spinning news in the lucrative ticketing business." - The New York Times
Natalie Murray Beale says, "We looked a lot at the physical aspects, ensuring she would not be too reverent of the conductor’s podium, because after all it’s just her workplace." - The Observer (UK)
The conductor survived brain cancer surgery and has been conducting at a furious clip - but he's also been "trying to dig out his piles of unfinished pieces he has composed over the decades and see what he can do with them." - Los Angeles Times
"The Los Angeles Conducting Co-op is a new organization founded by violinist and producer Lisa Liu, conductor Christopher Rountree and violist, curator and broadcaster Nadia Sirota. Their mission is straightforward: 'Pool resources to defray the costs of studying symphonic conducting.'" - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
Observing the company's worrisome slump in ticket sales and Peter Gelb's announced plans to focus more on contemporary works and reduce the number of performances (especially of revivals), Parterre Box contributor Dawn Fatale suggests further ways to get the FOMO factor working in the Met's favor again. - Parterre Box
A 2009 study, for instance, found that newborns react to beats — i.e. they anticipate the downbeat of rhythmic patterns, which tends to support the theory that our ability to perceive rhythms is inborn and not learned. - Ludwig Van
