Author - Robert Levine

1
Conductors and the cult of personality
2
Better seen than heard
3
Why we won't die of Baumol's Disease
4
Apologies
5
The future of classical recording – Part 1
6
About that Salome next season…
7
Hard duty
8
Technology and recording sales
9
What he said
10
Stick a fork in it?

Conductors and the cult of personality

Two conductor profiles in the New York Times in recent days highlight the dangers of thinking that conductors are special people. The first was on Riccardo Muti, and was an unadulterated puff piece: Realizing that the Met musicians might not have been familiar with the opera, he occasionally paused to clue them in on the[…]

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Better seen than heard

Norman Lebrecht thinks conductors should STFU: By some intuitive affinity or massive failure of imagination, both Gramophone and BBC Music magazine asked ’10 leading Mahler conductors’ to explain in their current issues what his symphonies mean to them. Three maestros – Zinman, Jansons, Tilson Thomas – took part in both features. The rest included most[…]

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Why we won't die of Baumol's Disease

I was at work one night a few weeks ago, waiting for the 3rd movement of the Shostakovich 1st cello concerto to end (no slap at our soloist, Johannes Moser, who played wonderfully, but it’s a long sit with no need to count), when, for some unaccountable reason, I began to think about Baumol’s cost[…]

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Apologies

Did you know that getting flu shots doesn’t actually mean that one can’t get the flu? Me neither. We’re doing Petrouchka this week. It’s my least favorite of the big ballets that Stravinsky wrote almost 100 years ago, I suspect because it’s the most programmatic. But it works wonderfully well as a ballet, as this[…]

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The future of classical recording – Part 1

In my previous two posts on the state of the classical recording business here and here, I talked about Anne Midgette’s observation that even top-selling classical recordings aren’t notching up impressive sales numbers: The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales[…]

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About that Salome next season…

This might be related to why orchestras seem to have so much trouble in the Sun Belt: “It was like an invitation to a date,” says Sarasota artist Pablo Rodriguez of his painting, “Modern Venus,” which he installed in early January in the Sarasota Orchestra’s Harmony Gallery as part of his exhibit, I’ll Be Seeing[…]

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Hard duty

This past week has been one meeting after another devoted to various personnel issues (not, thankfully, any terminations, in case you were wondering). The cumulative effect on me has been that I feel as if I’d gone 5 rounds or so with the front line of the Green Bay Packers. Orchestras are villages. We orchestra[…]

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Technology and recording sales

One of the problems with looking at historical trends in recording sales is that such sales are driven to a significant degree by technological change. Over the 100 or so years since the first recording of an orchestra was made, there have been constant improvement in the technologies for both producing recordings and playing them[…]

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What he said

Alex Ross of the New Yorker wrote an absolutely brilliant summary of the recent studies by the League of American Orchestras and the National Endowment for the Arts on the state of classical music audiences. It’s in print in the magazine’s February 8th issue, which is unfortunately behind a paywall. But Ross blogs about it[…]

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Stick a fork in it?

Ann Midgette of the Washington Post writes about the current state of the classical CD business. It’s not good: The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales of 200 or 300 units are enough to land an album in the top[…]

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