The soprano, 55, tells Reuters she’s booked for three more years of new productions, but after that she might give up opera.
‘I’m really happy with my opera life – 54 roles was a lot to learn and perform and so I think I may leave well enough alone. I have another three years of various new productions and so I’m not stopping yet – let’s not put the cart before the horse, but I’m thinking down the road.’
She enjoys the stadium life, she added.
The Ulster Orchestra could go bankrupt at any moment. The BBC orchestras are under threat again. The Scottish ensembles are in varying degrees of difficulty.
So today, the Association of British Orchestras launched this short film to tell us why we need orchestras.
To help with the household chores, of course.
Despair?
You see it here first.
Bramwell Tovey got home from a Remembrance Day concert in Vancouver, Canada, to find that his briefcase, with two batons and a valuable score, had been nicked from his car.
One manuscript contained 30 years worth of conducting notes. The other was an almost-finished string quartet.
The founder of the streaming service, Daniel Ek, has come out fighting against claims that his service undervalues music, following withdrawals by Taylor Swift and others.
He said Spotify was defending music against theft: ‘Piracy doesn’t pay artists a penny – nothing, zilch, zero… Spotify has paid more than two billion dollars to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists.’
Told that 500,000 listens to a song ill yield a payout of up to $US4,000, he said that is far more than radio stations pay in royalties for the same number of plays.
He has a point.
This old master appeared on the streets of Worcester earlier this year. It’s the work of artists Lee Morris and Tom Brown and the locals liked it so much they produced another on a bus stop.
And then some more.
See here for full collection.
A forthcoming book by Geoff Baker, lecturer at at Royal Holloway, University of London, is puffed in the Guardian today on claims that it unpicks the Venezuelan music system that has been adulated and adopted the world over.
The book, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (Oxford University Press), describes el sistema in its Venezuelan heartland as a tyrannical cult with regressive teaching methods and disturbing accounts of sexual and other abuses. He also claims it ignores the poor.
None of this is substantiated in Dr Baker’s article in the Guardian, which offers nothing more than general assertions.
Rumours of isolated abuses have flourished for a while, and there is no ignoring the personality cult that has grown around the system’s founder, José Antonio Abreu, and his stellar protégé, Gustavo Dudamel.
Nor can one cover up their intimate connections to a loathsome regime that fosters civil terror and lawlessness in Venezuela while cultivating intimate relations with Iran, Russia and other totalitarian states.
My own limited contacts with El Sistema graduates have yielded few suspicions of dissent or dissatisfaction on their part. I await the book to see what evidence Dr Baker has gathered on the ground.
The piano firm are reported to be negotiating a 15-year lease for 40,000 square feet at West 43rd Street/6th Avenue.
57th Street, it ain’t. And never will be. Gone are those days.
It appears that four dozen musicians of the Primosky state opera and ballet, twice as many as we reported earlier, were rushed to hospital. Nineteen of them were kept overnight.
Latest on the food scandal here.
The conductor of the St Petersburg Symphony, and former chief of the Mariinsky, says he won’t conduct any more new productions.
‘I’m too old for compromises,’ he told a press conference in Russia. ‘Boyars in Red Army uniforms, Don Jose on a motorbike – all irrelevant to the classics.’
Rehearsals have resumed with Robert Spano after the ten-week lockout. Back on full power.
(Click on word ‘Post’) if video does not pop out.
Not many people were happy with the Frank Castorf Ring. That included its conductor, Kirill Petrenko.
He has pulled out from the 2016 revival.
The Wagners have roped in the veteran Marek Janowski to replace him.
Twelve years after his death, the city yesterday named a street after Luciano Berio, in the presence of his widow, Talia Pecker Berio.
The street connects via Senofonte to piazza Elsa Morante.
