The world is mourning the passing of Yehudi Menuhin. The 82-year-old violinist, conductor, author, educator, and humanitarian died of heart failure at Berlin's Martin Luther Hospital on Friday, March 7. He was in Berlin to conduct performances of Brahms and Mendelssohn by the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra.
The musical road less traveled leads to places like New York's <A HREF="http://www.dtmgallery.com/">Downtown Music Gallery</A>. If your taste in music lies somewhere outside the marketing-demographic bell curve, DTMG has tunes for you: live tunes, recorded tunes, strange tunes, bargain tunes. There's something for <I>almost</I> everyone at recently launched www.dtmgallery.com---from Classical to Klezmer to Progressive Jazz to World Music to Absolutely Uncategorizable.
Classical music fans will be happy to hear that <A HREF="http://www.image-entertainment.com">Image Entertainment</A> has announced the signing of an exclusive license agreement with England's Reiner Moritz Associates (RMA) that will see the company releasing 50 classical-music programs on DVD in the coming year. In addition to the classical performance programming, Image will also release some of RMA's special-interest fare, featuring such luminaries as Marilyn Horne, Maria Callas, David Hockney, Jackson Pollock, and Margot Fonteyn.
S<I>tereophile</I> readers tend to exhibit above-average interest in the art and science of reproducing music in the home. Those whose interest extends back up the recording chain and into the recording studio may want to take a look at the <A HREF="http://www.studiosource.com/prestige">Prestige Studios of the World</A> website, developed by an Internet company looking to show off its digital wares.
In the race for technological superiority, audio electronics companies in the United Kingdom, with a few notable exceptions, haven't often been first out of the gate. <A HREF="http://www.arcam.co.uk/">Arcam</A>, however, may have already lapped the field with its Alpha 10 DRT (Digital Radio Tuner).
All right, 'fess up. Have you ever bought pirated music? Sometimes it's the only way to get what you want.
Last week, <A HREF="http://www.philips.com">Philips Electronics</A> and <A HREF="http://www.sony.com">Sony Corporation</A> announced the completion of Version 1.0 of the Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) format specification. According to a statement, the format specification will be released to licensees early this month to allow hardware manufacturers and software providers to begin preparing products for launch in the coming months.
Fans of Macintosh computers and Betamax videotape are fond of pointing out that in the free market, the best technologies don't necessarily win. That scenario may be playing out again in the case of <A HREF="http://www.vqf.com/">VQF</A>, a digital audio transfer and storage technology originally developed several years ago by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone.
Singer Dusty Springfield died at her home near Oxford, England last Tuesday, March 2, a few weeks before what would have been her 60th birthday and only one day before she was to have appeared at Buckingham Palace to be honored by Queen Elizabeth. The cause was breast cancer.