Mock Turtle

A good new kids’ album for those interested who haven’t run across it - Snacktime by Barenaked Ladies.  Tested on a recent long car trip with success.  Worth getting just for the alphabet song, which starts with “A is for Aisle” and goes downhill from there.  The kids may not get it but they’ll want to know why you’re laughing.

http://www.bnlmusic.com/snacktime/

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This was two weeks ago, but I am still very excited that COC has appointed a new General Director, Alexander Neef. He is currently the Director of Casting at the Opera National de Paris.

http://www.coc.ca/flash/neef/main.html

Sondra Radvanovsky, Adrienne Pieczonka, and now Neef. Toronto is becoming world class!

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Given the state of the classical music market you can’t blame people for trying to be inventive.

But we are still recovering from the design of one of EMI’s latest releases, a Chopin disc by the Argentinian pianist Ingrid Fliter. Donald Manildi raved about it in International Record Review this month and I picked up a copy as part of our CD shopping binge a few weeks ago.

I’m starting to think the disc is really pretty good. But I’ve found that to get there, we’ve had to purge the effect of possibly the weirdest bit of marketing design I’ve seen in a serious classical release. The packaging features numerous pictures of the pianist, all of them subtly but unmistakably drawing attention to cleavage. OK, so sex sells. But then the overall theme of the design is this soft-focus ultrafeminine garden wedding fantasy theme in pink and green. So we’ve covered both halves of the market (or at least the heterosexual portion thereof), but meanwhile poor Chopin, not to mention the considerable musical merits of Ms. Fliter’s playing, get buried in some weird combination of Maxim lite and Martha Stewart Weddings.

It’s an interesting example of how packaging can affect the view of the product, at least until the packaging effect wears off.

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…is not so much with music downloading, it’s with the math.

Let’s look at this piece from yesterday’s Star, shall we?

THE PROBLEM

Sales of CDs are down 20 per cent worldwide and 35 per cent in Canada, compared to 2006.

An estimated 1.6 billion music files are downloaded in Canada each year on “grey-market” peer-to-peer systems, representing $1.6 billion in lost revenue, using the iTunes price model of 99 cents per download.

Well, if you do the math correctly it would be $1.584 billion. Let’s not shove that extra $16 million in there.

But first, can we see some proof that lost CD sales are in some tangible way related to peer-to-peer sharing? Because just putting those two sentences side-by-side isn’t doing it for me.

…oh, hang on, there is no proof. The data say something else entirely. Digital distribution has been good for Canada’s music industry. (Alright, that’s 2005 data, but I don’t imagine the expense end of the equation has altered all that much in the last year or two, and the data below are also from 2005.)

And again with the oft-repeated falsehood that one peer-to-peer download = one lost sale. Two problems here.

1. People will always try things for free that they wouldn’t risk even 99 cents to purchase. What’s the real proportion of peer-downloaded tracks to tracks that would otherwise have been purchased? I have no idea; if anyone has any real data I’d be curious to see it. My money says it’s pretty far from 1:1.
2. How many people acquire one track for free and then go on to purchase more tracks from the same artist? Again, I have no good data source, but my money says it’s not likely to be zero.

Virtually every song ever recorded is available through peer-to-peer file-sharing (more than 79 million recordings). Only 3 million songs are available on legal sites.

This implies all peer-to-peer file sharing is not legal. Not so. There’s material there that’s past copyright expiry. As well, lots of artists allow their stuff to be shared freely. How much is there legally? These sources are certainly not going to tell us:

Sources: Songwriters Association of Canada; Canadian Record Industry Association; PricewaterhouseCoopers LLB

Just for fun, Toronto Star, next time how ’bout consulting some sources that aren’t just corporate bumf?

If this pathetic mishmash of lies and innumeracy is the best the industry can do, no wonder they keep turning out craptastic music that nobody wants to buy.

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An interesting piece on string quartets  and the psychological dynamics thereof, in the Times of London. It marks the disbanding of the Alban Berg Quartet after nearly 40 years.

(Kind of reminds me of Vickram Seth’s An Equal Music, a book I remember being inexplicably fond of when I read it some years ago.)

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One of the first things we did in setting up our calendar for Ottawa to get season’s tickets for the National Arts Centre Orchestra. I used to go with my Mom ages and ages ago when I was in high school, and my parents now share two tickets with another couple down the street (usually used by my Mom and Mrs. M.), so it was an obvious thing to start going again now that we’re back in town.

We were a bit nonplussed at our first two concerts, both conducted by principal conductor Pinchas Zukerman. The notes are there, no doubt, but for a piece to come to life you need things like focus, energy, and colour, and well, if these things were there we weren’t hearing them.

So we approached last week’s concert with guest conductor Eri Klas with a mixture of hope and trepidation.

In fairness, unlike the stalwarts Zukerman was conducting last week’s music was almost completely unfamiliar to me: a new NAC commission, Barber’s Cello concerto (which I don’t think I’ve heard before in any form), and Dvorak’s 9th (which is one of those pieces that’s kinda sorta familiar but I’ve never actually owned a recording). Nevertheless, to my ears, the contrast was like night and day. All of sudden, well, there’s “there” there–energy, focus, and structure–and unsurprisingly the audience was enthusiastic, with several curtain calls after the Dvorak and about 2/3 of a standing ovation.

The NACO is a smallish orchestra and has certain built-in limits in terms of the kind of sound it can produce and the repertoire it can perform convincingly. In the right hands, though, it’s very definitely on my “worth going to” list.

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Fireworks!

Foomp!

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Although I suspect it won’t be here for much longer, contrary to what I told TB yesterday it looks like The Lives of Others is going to be in the theatres at least for the weekend.

We finally got around to seeing this movie after J. saw the Globe review maybe two months ago. It’s set in pre-Glasnost East Germany, circa 1984, in the days when virtually everyone was either a employee, a informer, or a target of the secret police. It’s a memorable film and well worth your time, if you get a chance to see it before it leaves town.

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While I’m at it, by comparison Luisa Miller isn’t half bad. The production suffers from indifferent (and occasionally bizarre) sets and costumes, but whatever, all these things cost big money and we don’t seem to have that kind of money around here. (By far the best sets this year were Lady MacBeth, and those were funded with a special gift from the estate of Bud Sugarman.) But hey, the director has figured out he has a story to tell, even it’s not exactly the most subtle thing ever written, and manages to do so in a way where you get a sense of connection with the characters–especially Luisa in her interactions with her father (Miller), the bad guy Wurm (effectively portrayed as quite the incarnation of evil), and her rival Federica.

Not that I’m recommending that anyone rush out and buy tickets for either of the Verdis on offer right now. But from a dramatic point of view, Luisa is middling with occasional moments of more-than-middling, whereas unless you want to go, close your eyes, and treat it as an extended Verdi recital (hint if you are tempted: CDs are cheaper than live opera), Traviata is really a complete write-off.

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We went to the COC Traviata this evening with a sense of foreboding, since Kenneth Winters wrote a thoroughly negative review in the Globe a few days ago. Unfortunately I have to agree with him. There’s really nothing whatsoever wrong with the music–the singers are all quite good, the orchestra plays very well etc.–but the 1999 production that the COC decided to revive this year is as close as I’ve ever seen to an act of on-stage butchery.

You’d think it would be really hard to mess up an opera like this–the story is relatively straightforward, lots of great music, etc., etc. But somehow the director has managed to transform Verdi’s music into something resembling nothing so much as a soundtrack for a bizarre attempt to make a PG-rated triple-X movie. It’s not as though I have an issue with sexuality in opera or even (where reasonably appropriate vis-a-vis the plot) for fairly explicit sexuality. But here we have reached the point where it’s become gratuitous and in several scenes has in effect become a substitute for an attempt to tell the story. You shouldn’t be able to walk away from an opera like La Traviata feeling no emotional connection with what’s going on onstage. But somehow they’ve accomplished this with this production.

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