Blog Archives

Copyright Is Broken

6/27/2012

Is this medium's message "don't buy me"?

Last week, an innocent-looking article posted online by National Public Radio in the USA became the focus of a major controversy. (See here.)

Emily White, a young intern at NPR, wrote candidly about the fact that she almost never buys compact discs. She’s built up a sizable library of songs by downloading music from the internet and copying CDs.

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Australian Opera Leads the Way

6/23/2012

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Famous yet dysfunctional (like Mel Gibson).

This just in: the Australian Opera is piping its own orchestra into its theatre, for performances of Erich Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt.

Apparently, the cramped pit of Sydney’s famous yet dysfunctional opera house can’t accommodate an orchestra of the required size. So the musicians will be in a studio next door, and their performance will be heard through the auditorium’s sound system.

It occurs to me that it might have made more sense to acknowledge the limitations of the available space – and not even attempt to do an opera that doesn’t fit in the theatre. Yet I also think there’s something inspiring in this technological leap forward. Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, this approach to staging opera might develop in exciting new directions.

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Will the Real Kevin Lau Stand Up?

6/22/2012

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Kevin Lau has a new gig at the TSO.

Emerging Toronto composer Kevin Lau has been emerging quite conspicuously, of late. On June 18, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra announced he would be the orchestra’s first Affiliate Composer. And last week, I received in the mail a CD called Premieres (Cambra CD 1204) that includes a performance by Sinfonia Toronto and violinist Conrad Chow of Lau’s composition Joy.

I’ve met Lau once or twice in the halls of the University of Toronto (where he just completed his doctorate in composition). He’s a pleasant guy: unaffected and unpretentious, and certainly no “angry young man.”

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Symphony of a Thousand at the TSO

6/14/2012

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The TSO tackles Mahler's Eighth (photo: John Loper).

I was at Roy Thomson Hall last night – and was reminded of the first time I saw the inside Toronto’s flagship concert venue, way back in 1985. At the time, the hall reminded me of the core of a nuclear reactor.

The reactor image sprang vividly back to my mind last night, when I heard the TSO, with sundry choirs and soloists, perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 – the “Symphony of a Thousand.” From the first downbeat, the TSO’s performance exceeded critical mass, and was at times in danger of a complete meltdown.

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The Heckeler Heckled

6/12/2012

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Conductor Kevin Mallon.

A musical brouhaha has sprung up in the ordinarily placid city of Ottawa. It seems that Kevin Mallon, music director of Ottawa’s Thirteen Strings orchestra has taken exception at a recent review published on a blog called The Heckeler. (You can find the review here, and Mallon’s letter follows directly beneath.)

It is pretty widely known that the blogger is an Ottawa musician named Andrew Burn.

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Tailgating with the TSO

6/11/2012

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RTH parking lot: enough asphalt for a tailgate.

I crossed two personal thresholds on Saturday night. For the first time in my life, I attended a tailgate party. (More on that later.) And also for the first time in my life, I attended a Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert where most of the audience-members were younger than I am.

It wasn’t some kind of “young people’s concert,” per se – although it wasn’t exactly a typical TSO program, either.

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Philip Glass, Explained in Two Columns

6/7/2012

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Confounding modernists since 1976.

Philip Glass’s 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach has come to Toronto, courtesy of the Luminato Festival. I’m planning to attend – and so I’ve gone into training: building up my stamina with excerpts from the opera on Youtube. Will I last through all five hours of the performance? We’ll see.

Every time I hear an early piece by Philip Glass, I find myself contemplating a fanciful little theory. It occurs to to me that one day in the 1960s he sat down with pen and paper, with the aim of defining his new musical style.

The first thing I imagine he did was divide the page into two vertical columns. Then, in the top left he wrote “The Modernists,” and in the top right he wrote “Philip Glass.” And then I like to think he proceeded to list the stylistic attributes of modernism (at its most extreme) on the left, and to describe each attribute’s polar opposite on the right. The list came out looking something like this:

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Yo-Yo Ma in Toronto

6/4/2012

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Elgar, and a contemporary work.

Yo-Yo Ma was in Toronto last week. Here’s my review, from the Globe and Mail newspaper.

How long should a piece of string be? Ideally, it should be the right length for the purpose at hand.

And so it is with orchestras. There’s no standard size – but there must be as many musicians as each musical work demands.

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Copyright Is Broken

Australian Opera Leads the Way

Will the Real Kevin Lau Stand Up?

Symphony of a Thousand at the TSO

The Heckeler Heckled

Tailgating with the TSO

Philip Glass, Explained in Two Columns

Yo-Yo Ma in Toronto

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