But they’ll need 14 more like Carol Lazier… and a whole new board and management team.
Still, it’s a start. Read all about Carol’s gift here.
But they’ll need 14 more like Carol Lazier… and a whole new board and management team.
Still, it’s a start. Read all about Carol’s gift here.
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, director of the music cognition lab at the University of Arkansas, has a theory – expanded in her book On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (2013) – that music cannot survive without repetition. What the brain seeks on first hearing is something familiar. It is only with repeated hearing that music becomes music.
Apparently, the average iTunes user listens to the same album 347 times.
Read on here.
The players are London orchestra regulars. The audience is not. Not yet, that is. Just watch.
David Frost meets Baldur von Schirach, butcher of Vienna’s Jews. He tells Frost that he met Hitler first at the opera. ‘He was so well informed about music.’
Read more about the character of Richard Strauss here.
h/t Michael Haas
Peter Phillips, director of the Tallis Scholars, has a blast at his colleague John Eliot Gardiner in The Spectator today, apparently in the interest of soliciting public views on the cult of the awe-inspiring maestro. Phillips refers to…
the story that John Eliot Gardiner recently lost his temper with a brass player in the London Symphony Orchestra. His ‘notorious rudeness to performers and colleagues’ has been referred to in these pages by Stephen Walsh. What do we think of that? Do we love his music-making so much that we forgive him the odd peccadillo? Perhaps we think his music-making must be all the better for it. What is certain is that Gardiner is no Wagner: his achievements are likely to be forgotten soon after his death, as is the case with just about every conductor there ever was. If this is true, do we still indulge him?
vs
Phillips (c) Albert Roosenburg JEG (Royal Albert Hall)
This just in from Bob Keefer, in Eugene, Oregon:
I’ve been fired by the Register-Guard. Since I retired from full-time work in July, I’ve been contributing a couple art reviews to the Arts section each month as a freelancer. But according to a one-line email I just received, “We won’t be needing your freelance services anymore.”
There was no explanation, but this follows closely on my public support of former colleague (arts reporter) Serena Markstrom Nugent, who was fired by the paper last month, while on medical leave, after working there 13 years. See today’s Eugene Weekly for details on that story.
Let’s just say I’m not devastated. Of course I’ll miss the opportunity to review more art shows around town, but it’s time to concentrate on my photography and writing projects, as well as working with Wordcrafters writing conference and Lane Arts Council.
See you on the Art Walk!
Small town stuff? No, a sign of the times.
The least capricious of tenors has pulled out of a prestige date with Bryn Terfel in front of the Zurich Opera House on April 26, marking the inauguration of the redesigned Sechseläutenplatz. Jonas cited ‘personal reasons’ for the cancellation. Go figure.
Bryn will have to make do with Julie Fox, Anna Goryachova and Benjamin Bernheim, the Philharmonia Zurich and conductor Alain Altinoglu.
l-r: Simon Keenlyside, Kaufmann, Terfel
The U.S. Postal Service pays tribute to a rock and roll legend. Artwork by artist Rudy Gutierrez. Out now.
Professor Claudia Fritz blew up a storm four years ago by blind-testing pedigree and modern violins in Indianapolis. In September 2012 she took the project in great secrecy to a second round in Paris. Now, the results are about to be published.
Here’s an exclusive sneaky peek at a documentary film on the experiment, with an accompanying Violin Channel report.
The death is reported of Harris Goldsmith, piano teacher at Mannes College and, after Harold Schonberg, Manhattan’s polymath of the instrument. He was 77. Starting with Guido Cantelli in the 1950s, he was an indefatigable searcher of talent for Musical America and other outlets. Here’s a recent Harris report:
Yuja Wang, piano
At age 17, Yuja Wang played an astonishingly mature and technically finished interpretation of Schubert’s late CMinor Sonata, D. 958, in Weill Hall on April 12, 2004. And—from the sublime to the ridiculous—at a Rockefeller University recital on February 2, 2007, she tossed off an unexpected encore, Arcadi Volodos’s indulgent paraphrase of Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca. Volodos had given her the music
only a week earlier. “It’s not so hard,” she shrugged. Most important is Wang’s self-proclaimed ideal: “For me, conveying the music through the piano is more important than the instrument itself. The music is what interests and intrigues me.” After substituting for several of the most celebrated pianists Argerich, Perahia, and Lupu, to name a few), Wang at 23 has amassed a repertoire of by now over 35 concertos and has two spectacularly successful recordings for Deutsche Grammophon to her credit. What particularly endears me to her playing is the inviting warmth and touching vulnerability in tandem with her fiery brilliance. •
Harris was no mean artist himself and a well-known face about town.
Allan Kozinn adds: I knew Harris pretty well in the 1980’s when we both wrote for High Fidelity and Opus, and I commissioned him to write a piece for a booklet the New York Philharmonic published in connection with a Beethoven festival – one of my few editing projects. More recently, I used to run into him periodically at concerts – mostly piano recitals at Carnegie. Harris knew everything there was to know about the piano repertory, and particularly Beethoven, and he was a sweet man with an interesting, sometimes peculiar, and usually groanably pun-encrusted sense of humor.
The European Parliament has voted to fix all mobile calls and internet access scrap at local rates in all 28 member countries. From December 2015, the cost of making a call or downloading internet data in any other EU country will be the same as at home.
COMMUNIQUÉ DE PRESSE – Bruxelles, le 3 avril 2014
Marché européen des télécommunications
Un bon jour pour la neutralité du net et la fin du roaming
Ce jeudi 3 avril, le Parlement européen a adopté un règlement établissant des mesures relatives au marché
unique européen des communications électroniques et visant à faire de l’Europe un continent connecté (A7-
0190/2014).
Un vote salué par Malika Benarab-Attou, députée européenne, membre de la commission de la culture et de
l’éducation :
“Aujourd’hui, le Parlement européen a défendu le principe de la neutralité du net au sein de l’UE. Les fournisseurs de
services ne pourront pas conclure d’accord avec des fournisseurs d’accès à Internet afin de prioriser certains flux.
C’est une grande victoire qui permettra de garantir l’accès aux contenus, la liberté d’opinion,
d’information et des médias ainsi que le pluralisme culturel et des médias en général. Nous demandons
aux gouvernements des États membres de soutenir fermement notre approche.”
L’eurodéputée ajoute :
“Les parlementaires européens se sont également prononcés sur la question des frais d’itinérance (“roaming”). Les frais
de communication téléphoniques sont scandaleusement élevés lorsqu’on appelle d’un État membre à l’autre. En dépit
des pressions très fortes exercées par certains lobbies, nous sommes restés fermes : les frais d’itinérance doivent
être supprimés d’ici fin 2015, une autre grande victoire pour les citoyens européens”.