Music

Britain’s Proms: music for everyone in Olympic UK

April 21, 2012
By

Reuters) – In London’s Olympic year, the BBC Proms is mounting an olympian effort to attract audiences to its 92-concert summer season, and to be sure they can get there amid the crush of athletes and hundreds of thousands of fans flooding the city.

“It’s an international musical festival which happens to take place in the UK,” Proms director and BBC Radio 3 controller Roger Wright said at a news conference on Thursday launching the 118th Proms season.

The Proms open on July 13 and run until early September, providing a rich feast of concerts, chamber music, opera, musicals, world music and, most famously, the flag-waving, singalong pageantry of the Last Night of the Proms…..

Reuters


Forgotten Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette

February 15, 2012
By

A homage to love, Shakespeare and the symphonic form, Berlioz’s symphony should be recognised as a triumph of drama, formal coherence and lyric beauty.

At a time when Hector Berlioz’s music is played more often than ever before, when performances of the Symphonie Fantastique, Les Nuits d’été, The Damnation of Faust and even the Requiem have become almost commonplace events, and his magnum opus The Trojans has at last been recognised as what Donald Tovey called “one of the most gigantic and convincing masterpieces of music-drama”, it’s odd that a work as beautiful and eventful as the dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette should still be in need of special advocacy…..

The Guardian

Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas album

February 2, 2012
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Leonard Cohen’s new album Old Ideas is unexpected delight, says Bernadette McNulty.

Being invited to an exclusive first listen of an album at a record company playback is usually a poisoned chalice, especially if the musician themself will be present. While you sit in a windowless room, being bombarded by unfamiliar songs blaring at you at cinematic volumes, innate human politeness dictates that under the watch of the star and their publicists, you betray no opinion on your face but delight…..

 

There was no need for such artifice though yesterday when Leonard Cohen arrived in London to unveil his latest album Old Ideas. Entering the Mayfair hotel like a genteel gangster in his trademark double-breasted dark charcoal suit, he politely doffed his fedora to the audience. “Don’t worry,” he said with a mischievous smirk before the music began, “I’m not going to sit facing you.”


The Telegraph

Jeremy Nicholas ponders what to do with his collection of 78s

January 24, 2012
By

Shelving the shellac

Tue 10th January 2012

Jeremy Nicholas: 78s span seven decades of recorded history…and a lot of storage space.

In the early 1960s when I was about 13, an optician friend of my parents named Peter Leach gave me his entire collection of 78rpm discs. It was a whole library of great and not-so-great classical works in recordings that reflected the listening tastes of a connoisseur. He must, I am sure, have subscribed to The Gramophone. I still have the list I made of his generous gift – a lot of HMV red label artists (Toscanini, Koussevitzky, Boult, Kreisler, Heifetz, Rachmaninov, Cortot) as well as Moiseiwitsch, the Busch Brandenburgs, Gabrilowitsch in the Schumann Piano Quintet and a host of oddities like the single-sided G&T of McCormack singing The Snowy Breasted Pearl, and John Barbirolli conducting Yvonne Arnaud in Raff’s La fileuse. It moved my musical education up a few gears – and kick-started my record-buying habit…..

Youth orchestras in Venezuela

January 23, 2012
By

The music man
The power of art

IN THE debate on the value of arts lessons in schools, one killer argument comes from a place that few know much about. Some are familiar with Venezuela’s oil, natural beauty, high crime rates and comic-opera rulers. But the country is also home to el sistema, a network of youth orchestras founded in 1975, which has lifted innumerable children from overcrowded barrios and turned them into successful professional musicians. Its star graduate is Gustavo Dudamel (pictured left), who, among other things, is the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. This month he begins an ambitious programme to honour the centenary of Gustav Mahler’s death, conducting all of the composer’s symphonies with both the LA Philharmonic and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, his alma mater…..

The Economist

Trouble at the mall? Classical music dudes in fight

January 23, 2012
By

The news of Monday night’s riot at the Mall of America shocked many, who insisted it be called a fracas. Other citizens, grasping for reasons why the outbreak of violence came at a time of holiday cheer, said it was a melee. But one thing is clear: Mall officials were stunned by what some are calling the worst outbreak of music among middle-aged, classical-music fans in the city’s history.

As far as we’ve been able to reconstruct the event, it began with the rumor that popular conductor Claudio Abbado was in town and might visit one of the mall’s 16 cummerbund stores. Ironically, Abbado was in Paris, where a performance of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantasitique” — already controversial for its themes of recreational drug use and violence — resulted in a free-for-all that put 127 people in the hospital. Nevertheless, hundreds of the conductor’s fans, many wearing shirts that read ABBADO TO THE BONE, were gathered in the food court, when they encountered a group of music lovers allied with a rival conductor, Daniel Barenboim. Said a witness:

“These two dudes, they’re dressed for trouble, the tails, the white scarf, everything, they start sneering at each other, and then the other stands up and sniffs dismissively, and then one dude gets out some opera glasses and looks down his nose at the other, and the other dude says ‘So’s Yo Yo Ma,” and it was on.” The video, available on YouTube, shows the rioters throwing wadded-up napkins at each other, screaming insults in Italian, and picking up chairs and putting them down forcefully a few inches away…..

 Star Tribune

Arts review of 2011. BBC

January 23, 2012
By

Will Gompertz

A devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, riots in London and Manchester, and the imminent threat of financial Armageddon in Europe. That was the big news of 2011.

Oh, and there were some good art exhibitions too.

Tracey Emin at the Hayward Gallery, Mike Kelley at the Baltic, Gateshead, and Leonardo da Vinci at the National Gallery, to name just a few.

But then, enjoyable as they were, they hardly compare in news terms to the matters of life and death that were (and continue to be) played out during some of those major world events…..

BBC

The Leonard Cohen Interview

January 23, 2012
By

Leonard Cohen: ‘All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience’

Sombre prophet, mordant wisecracker, repentant cad: Leonard Cohen is back with a great new album, Old Ideas – and more wit and wisdom

On Leonard Cohen‘s gruelling 1972 world tour, captured in Tony Palmer’s documentary Bird on a Wire, an interviewer asked the singer to define success. Cohen, who at 37 knew a bit about failure and the kind of acclaim that doesn’t pay the bills, frowned at the question and replied: “Success is survival.”

By that reckoning, Cohen has been far more of a success than he could have predicted. There have been reversals of fortune along the way but 40 years later he enters an ornate room in Paris’s fabled Crillon Hotel to a warm breeze of applause. Looking like a grandfatherly mobster, he doffs his hat and smiles graciously, just as he did every night of the 2008-10 world tour that represented a miraculous creative revival…..

The Guardian

Alex Ross

January 18, 2012
By

OUTSIDE THE MACHINE: THE BEST CLASSICAL PERFORMANCES OF 2011

By Alex Ross

If popular stereotypes about classical music held true, the genre should have had no social or political relevance in 2011, one of the darkest and angriest years in recent American history. Classical music is, we are given to understand, the playground of the one per cent, the province of the super-rich. When concerts are depicted in the movies, you see élites in evening wear gazing snootily through archaic eyewear at misbehaving interlopers. Anyone who has actually attended a classical performance in the past half-century knows that such images are largely make-believe. Yes, the most expensive seats at the Metropolitan Opera cost hundreds of dollars, but the highest-priced tickets for big-league pop-music and sports events generally cost far more, and the money in play behind the scenes of such mass-market spectacles makes the classical economy look puny……

The New Yorker

Delius

January 13, 2012
By

His life was as romantic and colourful as his exquisite music, yet his works are rarely performed today. Delius deserves better, writes Julian Lloyd Webber.

No other composer polarises opinion like Delius. You either love or loathe his music. And it is rare to find someone who has grown to like it. Although this coming year – the 150th anniversary of his birth – will bring opportunities to reassess his work, that central fact will never change.

I feel as if I have known Delius’s music forever. My father was a devotee and I must have heard all of his most famous works (On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, The Walk to the Paradise Garden, La Calinda, et al) well before I started playing his cello music. I always felt instinctively attuned to Delius’s unique musical language, which seemed akin to watching a painting that is slowly changing in a constantly moving canvas of sound. Under the inspirational guidance of Delius’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby, I included his Cello Sonata both at my Wigmore Hall debut in 1971 and on my first recording, made the following year….

The Guardian