The Royal Opera's £10 Revolution Royal Opera House boss Tony Hall says a sponsorship that will reduce some of the best seats in the house to £10 is revolutionary. "The adjectives are extreme, but it is hard to argue. Best seats in the house to see some of the biggest opera and ballet stars in the world - including Plácido Domingo, Cecilia Bartoli, Bryn Terfel, Darcey Bussell, Carlos Acosta - for less than the price of a West End cinema ticket. In some cases, that represents a saving of £165. Hall can scarcely contain his enthusiasm. 'This is really opening up the opera house'." Financial Times 04/07/04 

Watch The Robot Conduct Beethoven Let's see - we've replaced musicians with "virtual orchestras" in theatre pits. And more and more movie scores are being synthesized. What's next? Conductors. A robot has successfully(?) conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Japan. "The 58-centimetre-tall humanoid robot led the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in a unique rendition of Beethoven's 5th symphony during a concert held at the Bunkamura Orchard Hall in Tokyo on 15 March." New Scientist 04/05/04 
 
London's Newest Opera Company Debuts Raymond Gubbay's Savoy Opera opens. With cheap tickets, the opera attracts an audience you don't typically see at Covent Garden. "It's a myth that opera is posh; it's the most visceral of art forms, preoccupied with love, sex and death. It's just opera-goers who have given it a bad name. If Gubbay can reclaim it for coach parties who might otherwise go to Mamma Mia!, good for him." The Guardian (UK) 04/08/04 
 
Whither The American Sound? Nationalism can be a dangerous thing, but a love of country and all that it stands for is the only thing that can lead to the development of a serious "national sound" among composers, says Robert Jones. Individuals like Copland and Bernstein aside, America has never really had its own tradition of classical music, and even works identified as distinctly "American" are often written by European composers like Dvorak. "America always seemed nervous about nationalism in music," and Jones says that will have to change if anyone expects the U.S. to develop a compositional tradition as easily recognized as those of countries like France, Finland, and the Czech Republic. Charleston Post & Courier 04/11/04 
 
Emerson Quartet Wins Avery Fisher Prize This year, the administrators of the $50,000 Avery Fisher Prize for American musicians changed its rules of eligibility to include ensembles, and the first beneficiaries are the members of the Emerson String Quartet, who will be announced as the 2004 winners of the prize in a Monday ceremony. The group says it will "try to do something creative [with the money.] We won't just spend it." The New York Times 04/11/04 
 
Beethoven's Ninth In 24 Hours There are many recorded versions of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. But a radical new interpretation by the Norwegian conceptual artist Leif Inge, which he calls "9 Beet Stretch," "digitally elongates a recording of the symphony to make it last 24 hours. The piece slows symphonic time so that movement is barely perceptible. What you hear in normal time as a happy Viennese melody lasting 5 or 10 seconds becomes minutes of slowly cascading overtones; a drumroll becomes a nightmarish avalanche. Yet the symphony remains somehow recognizable in spirit if not in form, its frozen strings fraught with tense, frowning Beethoven-ness." The New York Times 04/11/04 
 
Doing The Homework To Listen Should the music critic look at a score or listen to a recording before attending a performance of a new work? Tim Mangan says yes: "Virtually any piece of serious classical music that a listener is not familiar with is 'just an overwhelming event' the first time he hears it. There's so much going on that our ears can't comprehend it in one gulp. And who knows whether, that first time we hear a piece, be it Brahms' Third Symphony or Adams' 'Transmigration,' it's a good performance or bad?" Orange County Register 04/11/04 
 
Re-re-reconsidering Shostakovich. Again. The debate over whether Dmitri Shostakovich was a talented but limited composer in the pocket of the Soviet leadership; or a secret dissident, hiding messages of anti-Stalinist revolt in his music, is unlikely to ever come to a satisfactory conclusion. But a new book by Solomon Volkov, whose earlier book Testimony reignited the Shostakovich debate a quarter-century ago, sheds some new light on the complicated relationship between Shostakovich and his chief antagonist (and chief sponsor,) Josef Stalin. Volkov divides the composer's career into two periods: the brash, exploratory years before Shostakovich penned his opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtnsk," and the cautious, paranoid period after Stalin denounced "Lady Macbeth" as an anti-Soviet muddle. The New York Times 04/10/04 
 

Marc Neikrug's 'Through Roses' was commissioned by the 92nd Street YMHA New York. The first performance was given on 21st August 1980, as part of the South Bank Summer Music.  It has has been translated into 11 languages and received hundreds of performances in England, North and South America, Austria, Germany, Israel, Scandinavia, Australia and Japan.

by Deborah Kravetz