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Here’s an interesting article I stumbled upon a few weeks ago. It was in GigaOM. The title really caught my eye because it is upbeat at a time when one sees so much negativity about making a living in the arts being talked about.  It’s easy for musicians to bemoan the current economic state and […]

Deep in the weeds of yesterday’s NY Times story on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s reorganization plan was this little tidbit: The reorganization plan would call for unfunded pension liabilities to be transferred to the federally backed Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which has assumed responsibility for two of the orchestra’s defined-benefit pension plans. The corporation puts the […]

Chalk it up to the speed of light – or the speed of bits over the Internet. On Monday: Opera News, 76 years old and one of the leading classical music magazines in the country, said on Monday that it would stop reviewing the Metropolitan Opera, a policy prompted by the Met’s dissatisfaction over negative […]

Alex Ross may have said it best: A monumental, vastly influential figure is gone. I can’t help feeling shock at the news — a world without Fischer-Dieskau seems foreign and unnerving. He links to several other appreciations, as well as a fascinating – and sad – interview Fischer-Dieskau gave in 2005. Fischer-Dieskau was an artist […]

If you’ve read my book, Lessons From a Street-Wise Professor, you may recall some space given to the balance of power shift in the record business from label control to artist control.  Here’s a new record label that is committed to operating in the artist’s best interests.  .  .  .and it is set up as […]

Recently Carter Brey, principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic, interviewed his colleague Evangeline Benedetti, who retired from the orchestra’s cello section in 2011 after 44 years. I found the interview extremely interesting, as Ms. Benedetti was only the second woman to receive tenure in the NY Philharmonic, and had to wait to receive notification […]

Finally some good news from Louisville: After 20 months of contentious negotiations, the Louisville Orchestra’s musicians and its management have reached a one-year labor agreement that will allow for a 30-week season beginning this fall, and both sides are optimistic that a long-term deal will be reached by next spring. The deal, announced Wednesday onstage […]

While there’s been some public discussion about the Flanagan book, as I mentioned here, there’s been almost none about its genesis, with one exception that I’ll discuss below. This is unfortunate; how and why an analysis originates can be very informative about the substance of the analysis. So I will try to rectify that and […]

A few weeks ago I got a call from concert pianist Jeffrey Biegel, who wanted to tell me about a new consortium commissioning project he’s working on. At the end of a rehearsal with the Minnesota Orchestra, a young composer approached him about a piece he’d like to write for piano, chorus and orchestra. Jeffrey […]

Jose Luis Hernandez-Estrada is a member of the third class of The Sistema Fellows at New England Conservatory. An accomplished pianist and conductor, he studied at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, the Conservatori del Liceu in Barcelona, and the … Continue reading →