The roots of Thor and many other comic book figures stretch back to Wagner’s epic and earlier. Look, up in the sky! In case you haven’t noticed already, our entertainment stratosphere has grown crowded with muscle-bound superheroes in almost every conceivable shape and size: the franchise-rebooted likes of Spider-Man and Superman, battle-armored warriors such as Robin Hood and Perseus.
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It was announced today, Monday, April 12, that ASCAP composer Jennifer Higdon has won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The Pulitzer jury awarded Higdon’s “Violin Concerto” (Lawdon Press), “a deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity.” The piece premiered on February 6, 2009, in Indianapolis, Indiana.
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Break-dancing combines with Bach in Berlin this month as an award-winning dance group and an avant-garde musical director put an ultra-modern spin on the composer’s almost 300-year-old music. For 12 nights from Tuesday, Berlin-based Flying Steps, four times world champions in break-dance, perform to works from Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.
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AN Australian musician has become possibly the world’s greatest guitar teacher after placing his lessons on YouTube. Justin Sandercoe’s free online tutorials for beginner guitar players have been viewed more than 60 million times in the past four years.
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Robert Gupta, violinist with the LA Philharmonic, talks about a violin lesson he once gave to a brilliant, schizophrenic musician — and what he learned. Called back onstage later, Gupta plays his own transcription of the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1.
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In the German city where J.S. Bach was a choirmaster, Sarie Teichfischer is using music to ease the plight of people in Leipzig who, like her, have lost their jobs. She co-founded and manages the Bohemian Choir, an effort to help the unemployed.
The cast of Verdi’s “Traviata” at the Metropolitan Opera Saturday night looked much relieved to have the conductor Marco Armiliato in the pit instead of Leonard Slatkin, who had conducted on Monday, the opening of the run.
Smarting from his rejection by British orchestras, the conductor Alex Prior went off to conduct the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in January, having beaten 180 applicants for the post. Nothing too remarkable about that until you realise he is 17 and travelled there with his mother.
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Make way for the Young Turks: the Borusan Philharmonic is riding a new wave of enthusiasm for classical music in Turkey. It is the place in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that the tenor dreads. The orchestra turns “Turkish” — signposted by bass drum, cymbal and triangle — and jangle along as the singer fields an exposed verse of the Ode to Joy.
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Vienna, which never accepted him as one of its own, is paying homage to Gustav Mahler. As head of the opera from 1897 to 1907, Mahler had outraged the city by denouncing its traditions as mere laziness. When he was conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, he updated Beethoven’s scores. As a composer, he unsettled audiences with subversive symphonies of painful ambiguity.
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