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Three Orchestra Strikes: Considering Artistic Health
As the fall 2016 concert season begins, the musicians of three big-city orchestras are on strike: the Philadelphia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony and Fort Worth Symphony.
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Lars von Trier Film Gets an Operatic Makeover
Opera composers and their librettists have always mined familiar stories for inspiration and, in the past two decades, movies have provided especially rich source material. This year alone brings the upcoming Houston Grand Opera premiere of It’s a Wonderful Life by composer Jake Heggie (whose credits also include Dead Man Walking), and the Salzburg Festival debut of Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angel, based on Luis…
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Gershwin in Concert: When Orchestras Prefer Jazz Pianists
During the 1990s and early 2000s, several improvised, jazz-based versions of George Gershwin’s 1924 Rhapsody in Blue arrived in concert halls. Jazz pianists, including Marcus Roberts, Herbie Hancock and Michel Camilo, unveiled deconstructed, semi-improvisatory versions of the score. There were few protests from purists – the piece is a rhapsody, after all, and it can withstand or even be enhanced by…
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Cracking the Fourth Wall Between Audiences and Performers
A noted classical soloist recently told me in an interview that there was nothing she found more terrifying than speaking to an audience, with its breach in the fourth wall between the concert stage and audience. Certainly, not every artist possesses the gift to gab. But a number of concert productions and modern pieces have made this blurring of…
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Pops Means Maximum Variety for Many Orchestras
LENOX, MA – Dispelling any notion that the living is easy for orchestra musicians in August, the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, Aug. 21, presented two-and-a-half-hour, Shakespeare-themed concert at Tanglewood featuring four works: Berlioz’s Overture to Béatrice et Bénédict, Saint-Saens’s Egyptian Concerto (with pianist Dejan Lazić), George Tsontakis’ Sonnets and Prokofiev’s Suite from Romeo and Juliet.
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‘The Girl From Ipanema,’ Opera and Olympic Comebacks
Never underestimate the power of a global sporting event – aided by a supermodel – to drive interest in a song, artist or composer. Google Trends shows that worldwide searches for “The Girl from Ipanema” spiked dramatically after Daniel Jobim performed the bossa nova classic during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on Aug. 5, with Gisele…
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5 Takeaways from Classical Music Virtual Reality Projects
The classical music field has had an on-and-off relationship with online gaming and personal technology. Back in 2007, users of the Nintendo Wii could play a new virtual reality-type game called the Virtual Maestro, which turned the Wii controller (which resembled a TV remote) into a baton to manipulate a digital orchestra’s tempo. Before that, there was the Concert Companion, a pre-smartphone…
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The Olympic Piece That Received 122 Performances
The opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics on August 5 featured an assortment of the country’s musical talent, including the preeminent singer-songwriters Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and performers from the worlds of samba, funk, hip-hop and bossa nova. Perhaps a bit of Heitor Villa-Lobos will yet appear before the games conclude.
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The Top 10 Classical Music Capitals on Spotify
In a recent article for MusicalAmerica.com about classical music’s appeal on streaming services, I looked at the profile of an average Spotify user. In brief, the typical classical listener is a 35-year-old male who listens at work (chiefly, mid-afternoons and mid-week), enjoys soft piano music and lives in an urban area or college town.