Posted inInterview

Next to a Miracle

On Alexander Melnikov’s latest album, titled “Fantasie,” the Russian pianist performs music by seven composers including two Bachs, Mendelssohn, Busoni, and Schnittke. Despite the Romantic reveries implied by the title—in the feet of a lesser pianist, this would be a washed, pedal-heavy album—Melnikov’s approach to the fantasies is decisive and articulate, full of precision and […]

Posted inOpinion

Exotic Educational Experiences

In October 2020, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) acquired the management company Opus 3 Artists. In May 2022, the conservatory bought the boutique Dutch record label Pentatone. And in December 2022, SFCM added the prestigious London agency Askonas Holt to its portfolio, consolidating Opus 3 under Askonas chief executive Donagh Collins.  These acquisitions […]

Posted inReport

Pay to Sing

“When I was at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, I was so startled that all the singers were running around and doing anything other than what I could see seems necessary,” Mark Sampson, a bass and the founder and artistic director of the Berlin Opera Academy (BOA), tells me. “And they were too […]

Posted inInterview

The Head Dishwasher

Eamonn Quinn, the self-described “oddball” who founded the Louth Contemporary Music Society in the northeast of Ireland in 2006, is neither a composer nor a performer. It shows in the best way. Quinn, who works in education, was introduced to new music through his wife Gemma while studying at Queen’s University in Belfast, beginning with […]

Posted inEssay

Clothing the Future

Drummers, as a species, are generally granted asylum from the dictates of onstage formal dress. Their counterparts in classical percussion, however, are not so liberated: When Mike Truesdell, then a graduate student in percussion at the Juilliard School, arrived backstage to a fall 2011 solo performance in a t-shirt, he was promptly asked to change. […]

Posted inInterview

More Than a Symbol

Opera is often a long game. Voices take time to mature (which is why so many 40-something singers play teenage lovers). Singers also face pressure to commit to a career early on in order to get into the right schools and study with the right teachers. The economics of an opera house or major recording […]

Posted inEssay

The Price of Luck

Imagine there is a contest, one that will run in perpetuity until the end of time, in every city on Earth. There are no true losers, and there’s no limit to how many people can win. If you win this contest, you’re set for life: No matter where you live or how long you live […]

Posted inReport

Trial and Error

In November 2021, two trumpets of the Sinfonieorchester Wuppertal in western Germany slithered up a chromatic motive at the beginning of the fourth movement—the “Tuba Mirum”—from Antonin Dvořák’s Requiem before disappearing into an unsettling augmented woodwind chord. The kind of exposed orchestral passage that only registers as difficult when someone cracks a note or the […]

Posted inOpinion

Consumed in the Culture

Orchestral musicians have unusually challenging jobs. Many musicians have had to move to a new city for their careers and work odd hours that separate them from the support of family and friends. There are exacting physical demands, and training for their livelihoods starts at a very young age. Auditioning for a job is highly […]

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