Uncategorized: Page 30

The General Director of the San Francisco Opera has a vision for the future of the company, and it’s…a multi-storied annex? David Gockley has a dream, and it’s to transform a parking lot behind the Veterans Building into a multi-storied annex for the San Francisco Opera. Of course, like any dream, there is a reality […]

Riccardo Muti, who last week taught us (and the Met Opera orchestra) about Verdi, this week is teaching us about the value of some American orchestras: The Riccardo Muti era at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra officially began Thursday at Symphony Center, as the CSO’s 10th music director announced plans for his first season. He did […]

It’d be a a shame if something happened to it. Oh wait… something just did: The Pension Protection Act of 2006 requires the funding “zone status” for defined benefit multiemployer plans like the American Federation of Musicians and Employers’ Pension Fund (the “Plan”) to be certified each year by the plan’s actuary. The actuary for […]

This article on composer/programmer David Cope and the compositional software he’s created is absolutely amazing: It was here, half a dozen years ago, that Cope put Emmy to sleep. She was just a software program, a jumble of code he’d originally dubbed Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, hence “Emmy”). Still — though Cope struggles not […]

We’ve published another article — about an amazing marketing success with a program that should have been hard to sell. Now, of course, our own Robert Levine, with Ilana Setapen, was featured on the first half playing the Mozart Symphonie Concertante, so that must have done it right there! But seriously (no offense meant, Robert…), […]

My BBB Charles Noble wrote a good post the other day on the perils of being an assistant principal string player: This morning, at the dress rehearsal for this weekend’s classical program, my principal had to leave midway through the rehearsal for personal reasons. It took place during the middle of the first movement of […]

The other New York Times piece to which I referred in the last post was on Manfred Honeck, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and focused to a remarkable extent on his religious beliefs: Manfred Honeck, the music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, is a Roman Catholic who prays before every concert, sometimes in […]

Two conductor profiles in the New York Times in recent days highlight the dangers of thinking that conductors are special people. The first was on Riccardo Muti, and was an unadulterated puff piece: Realizing that the Met musicians might not have been familiar with the opera, he occasionally paused to clue them in on the […]

Julie Ayer, author of More Than Meets the Ear, How Symphony Musicians Made Labor History, a history of the founding of ICSOM and symphonic unionism, has written a very moving tribute to her mother and sister, both violinists in the Spokane Symphony. They overlapped in the orchestra for 12 years, and both held the 4th […]

Norman Lebrecht thinks conductors should STFU: By some intuitive affinity or massive failure of imagination, both Gramophone and BBC Music magazine asked ’10 leading Mahler conductors’ to explain in their current issues what his symphonies mean to them. Three maestros – Zinman, Jansons, Tilson Thomas – took part in both features. The rest included most […]