Classical Music

Breaking news: Seattle Opera has named Aidan Lang to succeed Speight Jenkins upon the latter's retirement next year.Jenkins is a legend in the opera biz, after 30 years of leading the company, where he has successfully produced several Ring cycles and launched any number of important careers, as well as overseeing the complete renovation of the opera house. He announced a couple of years back that he would be retiring, and the company started the search for the next general director. (Planning is a good thing. Yes, I'm looking at you, Met Opera.)Lang comes with a deep operatic background: he is a director who has worked at Glyndebourne and the Welsh National Opera; he was the artistic director of the Buxton Festival, and he is currently General Director of the New Zealand Opera. He directed the first Ring production at the tiny Teatro Amazonas in Manaus.Seattle Opera will present some challenges; the company has had financial difficulties and has cut back on productions. Given the renaissance at the Seattle Symphony, perhaps Lang can spark a comeback at the Opera. Welcome!

OK - who's ready to riot? #stravinsky #riteofspring

ArtsBeat: Black Sabbath Earns Its First No.1

Dream divulged: Doug Fitch demystifies #nypdream in advance of its nearly sold-out run next week:

how guitarists should play basketball

In the Orange County Register online, I review the opening of the 33rd annual Baroque Music Festival, Corona del Mar. Click here to read my review ($2 day pass or subscription required), or pick up a copy of Tuesday’s newspaper. The festival continues with concerts tonight, Friday and Sunday.

The shot that shocked the world in Jue 1914 left indelible stains on the Crown Prince’s shirt. With the exquisite taste exhibited best by the Viennese, the Archduke’s former capital plans to put on display the shirt he was wearing on the day he died. Yuk. And yuk again. Read it here. image (c) Lebrecht [...]

Bursting into the Nielsen sales charts this week at number two is an Ondine recording of Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, sung by the Latvian Radio Choir. It sold 815 copies – 730 CDs, 85 downloads – outdone only by Decca’s Benedictine monks with 2,060. Third in the charts was Cecilia Bartoli’s Norma. Why are Latvian insomniacs [...]

While everyone was at Peter Grimes on the Beach in Aldeburgh, true Britten fans were at the Church Parables at Orford. Curlew River is well established on its own merits but opportunities to hear it together with The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son are rare. The Church Parables will next be heard in Southwark Cathedral in London (tickets from the Barbican) and at the Buxton Festival. But hearing the Parables in Orford is a special experience. They were written for the church at St Bartholomew's. Frederic Wake-Walker's production with Mahogany Opera takes its cue from the design of the building and from the landscape surrounding. Curlew River (1964) is the most innovative and visionary Parable, (see my review h) but The Prodigal Son (1968), is much closer to a medieval mystery play. The stylized ritual movements and are very much part of this ancient tradition, and to the spartan orchestration. The production premiered earlier this month in a chapel in the Hermitage, in front of the very Rembrandt painting Britten and Pears saw when they visited St Petersburg. Hence colours of red, gold and ochre. As Claire Seymour points out in her book, The Operas of Benjamin Britten : Expression and Evasion, The Prodigal Son may have had many extra levels of personal meaning for Britten, so its apparent simplicity is deceptive..Mahogany Opera's production focused more on the church setting. The father does no violence and understands that the son needs to make mistakes in order to mature. The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) stimulated a more inspired response. Frederic Wake-Walker drew on the subtle parrallels between this work and Curlew River. The Babylonians are "exotic": gorgeous costumes, elaborate vocal lines, music which mixes pomp with sensuality. The Entertainers are boys dancing in vaguely Balinese costumes, their movements angular and ritualized. .In Indonesia, Britten and Pears watched wayang puppet theatre, where puppets are shown in silhouette. The real "drama" comes from the shadows thrown on the wall behind. It's a brilliant metaphor for Britten's personality. Britten creates the Fiery Furnace in his music and the players of Mahogany Opera act it out visually. The Babylonians converge over the three exiles, Sahrach, Mesach and Abednego. The Babylonians wear red caps, and gloves. Their head bob up and down, their hands raised in jerky movements like fluttering flames. Again, intelligent lighting design (Ben Payne), this time creating huge shadows that reached way above the stage. Their music roars. Britten has built the image into his orchestration. James Gilchrist san g Nebuchadnezzar and Lukas Jakobski sang and extremely impressive Astrologer, his voice booming with resonance, reaching the deepest recesses of the Church at Orford. The exiles aren't intimidated. Their God doesn't do graven images. They survive because they have faith in purity. Claire Seymour will be reviewing this production of the Church Parables for Opera Today.

On May 10th, my little company (Proper Discord Ltd) celebrated its first anniversary. Since then, I’ve had the privilege to work with some amazing clients, we’ve made some lovely records, built some interesting companies and welcomed a new baby into the family. I relaunched this blog a year ago with a video offering unhelpful advice on pronouncing composers’ names. I stole the idea, quite shamelessly, from this. My video clocked up more than 26,000 views* on YouTube, of which more than 3,000 happened last week, after (though not necessarily because) the New York Phil shared it on Twitter (which was nice of them). I really like playing around with all the statistics you can get from YouTube. It tells me, among other things, that the average viewer in the US and UK watched 50 seconds of that video: long enough to enjoy the funny bits, but not long enough to catch the message I wanted to get across. I’ll bear this in mind for other projects, where it might make more sense to put the commercial call to action nearer the start. You know what’s weird, though? While the average English-speaking user watches 85% of the video, the average Bolivian viewer watches 142% of it. Jordan, Estonia, Indonesia, Armenia and handful of other places also enjoy >100% “engagement”. To begin with, I thought this must be some sort of mathematical error, but then I realised these viewers weren’t watching it for fun. They were studying it. So next time you meet somebody from Estonia, write “Thomas Tallis” on a piece of paper, and ask them to read it out loud. Just in case. * Divide 26,000 views by Boyle’s Constant, and I should be able to sell almost two albums. Seriously. This stuff is commercial gold. I’ve never really made a coherent effort to turn YouTube views into blog traffic – this isn’t what the videos are for – but it’s interesting to see how little traffic it does generate. In the last year, a total of 13 days worth of video has been streamed from my channel. It probably wasn’t all watched at work, but any time you spent watching my videos could have been spent working, and at the US minimum wage, that’s $2,385 worth of time spent bringing 244 people to my blog. That’s right. Each visitor I get from YouTube costs the music industry $9.77. To give you an idea of just how bad this is, I got more incoming traffic (284 visits) from Google+. I didn’t know there were 284 people on Google+. Almost all the incoming traffic comes from Facebook, search engines and Twitter. Some posts go crazy on Twitter, others on Facebook, I can’t figure out any logic to what is popular where, so I put it down to luck: it’s unlikely enough that a post about statistics related to marketing classical music would go viral anywhere. $9.77 is about £6.23. My work website (andydoe.com) doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but that’s ok, because it’s well targeted: I make £16 for every visitor I get. Since properdiscord.com gets 60 visitors for each one that it refers to the blog, an entirely YouTube-based marketing campaign for my business (via this blog) would cost the music industry £23.50 in lost productivity for every £1 I made in increased revenue, assuming, well, a whole lot of “it would carry on just like this” stuff we should really have learned our lesson about by now. Anyhow. This footnote is now longer than the post to which it is appended, and we should probably both be getting back to work. But, like a Beethoven coda, this footnote keeps coming. I could have stopped there. Or the paragraph before. Really, it would have been perfectly adequate with just the first  paragraph. Or even just the first line. That had all the good bits in it. The rest was just excessive development. But I can’t seem to find a way. I should just stop typing. Like Miles Davis said, or is supposed to have said, just “take t