What’s Opera, Doc?

It has just been announced that Angela Gheorghiu will take part in an historic gala concert to take place during the Olympics in Beijing. As part of the “Meet in Beijing” arts festival organized by the Ministry of Culture for the People’s Republic of China, Gheorgiu will perform on 7 August in the new Concert Hall in the National Centre for the Performing Arts – Beijing’s most prestigious venue for the performing arts – with the National Opera Orchestra of China conducted by Emmanuel Villaume. The concert – sure to be one of the cultural highlights of the Olympic Games (8-24 August 2008) – is part of Divas In Beijing and will reach a global audience of more than one billion viewers in 80 countries through worldwide television network coverage and internet access. Further information can be found at www.divasbeijing.com.

I had not visited the Canadian Basso in quite a while, and he had this to say about vocal technique - a fascinating read, but not for the faint of heart.

Can classical music survive in the New Millenium?

Here at WOD, we took a close look at this paragraph:

DOWNLOADING VERDI? Classical sales fell with all the rest — but for different reasons. Piracy of classical music is relatively infrequent because it takes so much more bandwidth to download a three-hour Verdi requiem than it does the latest three-minute song from Britney Spears. Also, your average classical music fan doesn’t fit the profile of a restless young file-sharer.

ahahaaaaaaa! Wait let me clarify - ahahahaaaaaaa! Maybe the author needs to spend some time on Yahoo Groups.

The main problem is that the advent of CDs in the late 1980s sparked a boom in rerecording classic music from vinyl. But now just about everything worthwhile has been reissued, so that boom is winding down. “It’s not that people are listening less to classical music,” contends Robert Levine, principal violist at the Milwaukee Symphony and chairman of the International Conference of Symphony & Opera Musicians. “It’s just how many Beethoven’s Fifth CDs do you need?”

Obviously this author did not do their homework and most likely misquoted Mr.Levine - one of the hallmarks of classical music collectors is their “must have every version” mentality. Spend one week on any classical music forum or newsgroup, and you will see very heated discussions about how the Furtwangler Beethoven set is inferior to the von Karajan and vice-versa. This is the type of discussion you just don’t have in other genres and formats.

Technology could easily come to the rescue again. Satellite and Internet radio — to say nothing of Internet shopping — are ideally suited to niche businesses with the passionately devoted adherents classical music has.

ED Note: Um hello? WOD has been around for 3 years, and the first online radio station was - you guessed it - a classical station - KING FM in Seattle Washington.

So readers, what do you think? Is classical here to stay?