Browsing: La Scena Online

La Scena Online is the digital magazine of La Scene Musicale.Contents: News, Concert reviews, CD reviews, Interviews, Obituaries, etc; Editor: Wah Keung Chan; Assistant Editor: Andreanne Venne
ISSN: 1206-9973

ORFORD – Orford Musique, as the festival in the Eastern Townships now calls itself, got under way Friday night, almost a month after it started. The educational camp fires up well before the concert calendar. Thus the first non-student program, paradoxically, represented a farewell for at least a few of the teachers who had spent most of June in residence. It also represented the kind of event that I would gladly cross several county borders to hear. Louis Spohr’s Duo for Two Violins in A minor Op. 67 No. 1? Just try to hum that one. Or more to the point, just…

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+ The marriage between text and music in contemporary opera is more important than ever, says William Littler, citing Fellow Travelers (Cincinnati Opera) and Les Feluettes (Opéra de Montréal) as recent examples. “Perhaps today, more than at any other time in the recent past, librettists are coming into their own as something approaching full partners with composers in the creation of successful opera. And tied to this development is the heightened importance in an age of film and television of casting singers who can give visual credibility to their roles. Tenor Aaron Blake and baritone Joseph Lattanzi both looked and…

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The archetype Russian violin concerto – Tchaikovsky’s – looms so large over the musical landscape that all others seem no more than sidebars. Two concertos (each) by Prokofiev and Shostakovich are rooted in political circumstances, inseparable from their history. Miaskovsky’s concerto never took off, despite the advocacy of David Oistrakh, Weinberg’s is emerging too slowly to be counted and the rest barely make up a respectable quorum. Apart from the present pair. Alexander Glazunov wrote his concerto in 1905 for the violin professor Leopold Auer, a formidable authority who once refused to premiere Tchaikosky’s concerto unless he made extensive changes.…

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+ Andris Nelsons has pulled out of a production of Parsifal that opens the Bayreuth Festival. “Owing to a differing approach in various matters, the atmosphere at this year’s Bayreuth Festival did not develop in a mutually comfortable way for all parties,” said a written statement that was issued on behalf of Mr. Nelsons and his management team, Konzertdirektion Schmid. + Long-time proponent of new new music, violinist Anahid Ajemian has passed away at the age of 92. + His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada announced 113 new appointments to the Order of Canada. See…

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+ A CD review of English composer Granville Bantock’s epic late-Romantic oratorio Omar Khayyam, re-released from the 1979 Lyrita version with the BBC orchestra and chorus under Norman Del Mar. + The results of the Seventh Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition, held in Fort Worth TX, are in. + David Lang talks with The Guardian’s Kate Molleson about writing music for memorials. A classic daunting Lang commission: construct exactly the right music for collective remembrance. “Right,” he nods, but he doesn’t look daunted. “How to write something that seems ancient, like a kind of music whose origins we don’t question.…

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+ Alan Fletcher, the CEO of the Aspen music festival in Colorado, asks why great American symphonists are neglected by American orchestras. + From the Archive: Jon Vickers interview from 15 March 1985 in The Guardian. “The foundation on which I stand as an artist is that all art must appeal to the intellect. Then we’re making a contribution to civilisation, to the uplifting of man. But if we chose to indulge ourselves and chase dollars and fame at the expense of artistic integrity, if we smear the line between entertainment and art, we’re in trouble. “And the operatic world…

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This is a great time for piano lovers, a terrible one for young pianists. The past four years have flung up the most phenomenal range of new talent, more than listeners can take in. Daniil Trifonov, the 2011 Tchaikovsky winner, set a new benchmark. Since then, the 2015 Chopin competition has yielded Seong-jin Cho and Charles-Richard Hamelin, the Van Cliburn has brought forth the prodigious Beatrice Rana, the BBC Young Musician winner Benjamin Grosvenor has quickly made a name for himself and there are more coming through all the time. And then there’s Lucas Debargue. Placed fourth in the 2015…

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+ R.E.M’s Mike Mills Concerto for Violin, Rock Band, and String Orchestra with the TSO was quite the hit with younger audiences. + A miniseries based on Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace begins shooting in August and will appear on both Netflix and CBC. + Sook-Yin Lee is moving onto a project called Sleepover, after Definitely Not the Opera got cut from CBC’s on-air programming earlier this year. + Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi is raising awareness for the environmental degradation of the North by playing on an ice floe in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Watch a video of his performance. +…

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In perhaps the coldest concert ever recorded, Italian composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi plays an ode to the Arctic while floating on a platform in the middle of the ocean. Associated with Greenpeace, this act of environmental activism is to raise awareness for the environmental degradation of one of the most fragile ecosystems on our planet. As Einaudi plays, parts of glaciers crack and fall into the Arctic Ocean, a chilling reminder of climate change due to the greenhouse gas effect.

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Welcome to today’s Daily News Roundup, where we celebrate great musicians from home and abroad. Plus, check out a rather large portrait of Beethoven. + Joshua Errett asks what type of music should make up a jazz festival in “If Sarah McLachlan plays a jazz festival, is it still a jazz festival?” for CBC News. + This portrait of Beethoven takes up a million square feet. + Tenor Juan Diego Flórez signed to Sony Classical in an exclusive recording contract. + Dutch bass and Baroque specialist Peter Kooij has received the Bach medal from the city of Leipzig (French).…

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