Donald Nally, newly appointed music director of Cincinnati's Vocal Arts Ensemble, is committed to introducing audiences to new music.  He will open the VAE's 30th anniversary season accordingly, with James MacMillan's powerful "Cantos Sagrados" November 6 at St. Peter in Chains Cathedral.  Each of the VAE's four concerts during the 2009-2010 season will feature new works, with, among others,  music by Kaija Saariaho, John Tavener, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Steven Stucky and David Lang.
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Music Hall, Cincinnati Will it eat the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra?

It's the question few orchestras today want to answer.
   How’s your attendance?
   The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra makes figures available once a year and the results for 2006-07 were disappointing.   - [Read more]

Charles Parsons discovered opera at approximately 2:03 p.m. Feb. 6, 1952.  He was 11 years old:
“I was just wandering around my parents’ house and I went into the guest bedroom and turned on the radio.  A man’s voice (Milton Cross, hosting a Metropolitan Opera broadcast from New York) said, ‘the music vividly portrays a thunderstorm at sea.’  I thought, ‘how does music do that?  I’ve got to hear this.’   - [Read more]

Post letters in hallway outside offices at 125 E. Court Street

The Cincinnati Post and The Kentucky Post -- afternoon daily newspapers serving Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky for more than a century -- will cease publication on Dec. 31, 2007, the newspapers' owners announced today.  The last edition of the newspapers, owned by Cincinnati-based E.W. Scripps Co., will be published on that Monday, New Year's Eve. The decision by Scripps to cease publication comes three years after the company was notified by the Gannett Co., owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer, that the 30-year contractual agreement would not be renewed (first published in The Cincinnati Post July 7, 2007).   - [Read more]

This weekend’s Cincinnati Symphony concerts might have been authorized by an act of Congress.
Friday is “National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day” and according to 36 U.S.C. §129,  “The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day with appropriate ceremonies and activities” (first published in The Cincinnati Post Dec. 6, 2007).

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Four finalists have been named for the J. Ralph Corbett Distinguished Chair in Opera at University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, vacant since former chair Sandra Bernhard left last summer to take a
position with Houston Grand Opera (first published in The Cincinnati Post Nov. 27, 2007).   - [Read more]

It would seem the future of jazz in Cincinnati, as embodied by the legendary Blue Wisp Jazz Club, is in good hands now that a dedicated group of jazz lovers - who happen to be successful businessmen - has purchased the club (first published in The Cincinnati Post Nov. 15, 2007).   - [Read more]

Cincinnati Opera and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music have entered into a partnership agreement with all the right chemistry.  Called the Corbett Foundation Opera Fusion Program and funded by a “generous grant” from The Corbett Foundation, the three-year venture will bring the nation’s second oldest opera company and CCM into an even closer relationship than they have enjoyed over the years.   - [Read more]

Sherri Prentiss, new marketing director for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, did not see red when she had her first look inside Music Hall.
She saw opportunity instead (first published in The Cincinnati Post Nov. 13, 2007).   - [Read more]

Igor Stravinsky, iconic composer of the 20^th-century, guest conducted the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra three times.
   His first visit was in 1925 when he was 43 and the toast of the music world following the premieres of “The Firebird,” “Petrouchka” and especially “The Rite of Spring” with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris.  He returned in 1940, just after he had come to live in the United States, and again in 1965, six years before his death at age 89 (first published in The Cincinnati Post November 1, 2007).   - [Read more]

Which of this season's Cincinnati Symphony guest conductors made his
conducting debut leading Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story" with
drum sticks, has the same birthday (June 7) as CSO music director Paavo
Järvi's father Neeme Järvi, and was his country's junior lightweight
boxing champion? (first published in The Cincinnati Post Oct. 26, 2007)   - [Read more]

First Peter Frampton, then Bootsy Collins, now Wayne Brady. No, the three don't have that much in common - except they have all hooked up with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. It represents a conscious effort by the Pops to feature performers that might be considered "non-traditional" for the orchestra (first published in The Cincinnati Post, Oct. 18, 2007).   - [Read more]

Ripley, Ohio, population 1,822 (2004 estimate), 53.1 miles east
of Cincinnati on the Ohio River, once played a very big role in American
history.  Little Ripley, now a quiet village in Brown County,
was on the front lines of the "war before the war," the strife over
slavery that led to the Civil War.  Ripley resident John P. Parker, a key player on the Underground Railroad that conveyed slaves from the South to Freedom in the North, is the subject of a new opera commissioned by Cincinnati Opera, "Rise for Freedom" by Adolphus Hailstork, with libretto by David Gonzalez (first published in The Cincinnati Post Oct. 11, 2007).
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A smile can be worth a thousand words and the one Paavo Järvi cast over his shoulder during a Cincinnati Symphony concert at Lakota Freshman School in West Chester Oct. 9 was one of them.   - [Read more]

“We’ve lost at least a generation and a half,” said Kentucky Symphony Orchestra music director James R. Cassidy, speaking of the decline in concert attendance due to vanishing music education programs in the schools.  Cassidy, 49, who calls himself “half coach, half missionary,” is dedicated to bringing classical music to a wider audience.   - [Read more]