It’s been another eventful week. The Boston Symphony Orchestra announced that music director James Levine will be stepping down as of 9/1/2011 but no word on emeritus status while in New York City, the Metropolitan Opera says “Levine intends to fulfill his schedule here for the remainder of this season and in future seasons”…
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Musicians Behaving Badly?
The 2/28/2011 edition of the Boston Herald published a review by Keith Powers of a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) or Mahler’s Ninth. What makes the review unusual doesn’t have anything to do with the music so much as what Powers wrote about behavior he observed in the violin section. More to the point, behavior he defined as “disturbing”… According to Powers, members of the BSO violin section engaged …
Things That Make you Go “Buh?” Conductors
Does anyone else notice that conductors seem to be a bit more, shall we say, “artistically tempered” than usual? A few weeks ago, Ricardo Muti made headlines when he walked away from a gig for the Queen of England because he reportedly took issue with her programming suggestions and now the Boston Globe reports that conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky ditched a concert series with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) because he didn’t get equal billing with soloist, Lynn Harrell. Come on people; get a tighter grip on reality…