Decorated Musicians

Discovered in 2004, amongst a collection of drafts and rejected sketches, the prologue to Shostakovich’s incomplete and forgotten opera Orango received its world premiere in Los Angeles in December 2012. The work was intended to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Soviet revolution but became a satire on the bourgeois Russian press. The world premiere was directed…

This short feature from the BBC Music magazine has some interesting facts about the piano as well as a video on how a grand piano is built. Magnificent!

Declared “a resounding triumph”, George Palmer’s new operatic adaptation of Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet, produced by the State Opera of South Australia, had the audience rising to its feet. Read the review.  

Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollheim of the New York Times, writes about this form of ‘high-culture hooliganism’.