To my surprise, he's still at it. Record magazines, record stores, and new operatic recordings have become pretty rare birds, but Osborne doesn't limit himself to silicon and vinyl - he also writes about live performances. Currently he's on about Adès's "Exterminating Angel" and "Thaïs," both seen recently at the Met. The blog is here:
http://conradlosborne.com/blog/
Writing for the Web is perishable, it can be gone in an instant, as I was reminded when CompuServe wiped out 100 forums and their contents last Friday. Print is durable; copies of High Fidelity can still be found, not only in libraries and some private collections but in second-hand bookstores that also carry magazines. But print is also expensive to produce and therefore its content is rigorously limited in length, while the Web is effectively infinite and we can write at whatever length we choose.
Osborne has exploited this, and I say it's a good thing. Instead of three column inches about "Exterminating Angel" he gives us three pages. Along the way he takes up important general topics relevant to the work at hand. For example:
A tribute to Osborne is in the first part of this blog by Jaime J. Weinman:Osborne wrote:...What still seems to me the essential failure of most contemporary operatic writing—the inability to musically identify with characters in a way that makes us feel something for them. The anonymous author of the “In Focus” feature of the Met’s program booklet evidently believes Adès has done something of that sort. “Despite the ensemble nature of the work,” he or she writes, ” . . . a unique musical personality differentiates each character,” and I guess I did pick up some distinctions of general stance or mood among them. But I felt nothing for them. Terrible things happened to them, and they sang about their feelings, and three of them actually died, but I remained an onlooker in objective mode.
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2004/05/con ... ritic.html