Congratulations to Shyam Bhatt and Vanette Van Note, who respectively scored 18 and 16 on our testing Christmas Quiz, winning a month’s subscription each to the Berliner Philharmoniker’s fantastic Digital Concert Hall. Here are the answers:
1. Which famous choreographer turned Lorca’s play La Casa de Bernarda Alba into a ballet?
The Royal Opera announced its 2012/13 season today. New director Kaspar Holten has been there for a year now, so it’s fair to expect that he influenced a great deal of the new programme, albeit not all of it. The big season opener was announced several months ago: a set of four full Ring Cycles. They sold out on the first day tickets were offered, demonstrating the huge pulling power of Wagner’s magnum opus.
Since Bachtrack maintains a highly structured database of many thousands of classical music and opera performances across the world, we're in a unique position to show you some statistics about what gets performed. Following on from my blog about the top composers, I've taken a deep dive into our statistics for 2010: here are the results.
As you can see, we've made some big changes to the site. Apart from the obvious changes in colour, fonts and styling, there are some important new areas of the site and subtle but important changes in some of the ways you use it.
As you will see as soon as you hit the home page, we've made some radical changes to the site. There's a completely new home page and menu system which support a set of three separate finders for concerts, opera and ballet, each of them specially adapted to give a better experience to fans of that particular genre. Behind all of this is a new input system geared at making it easier, faster and more accurate to get listings into our database. Here are the details:
The trial of our Artifax Bachtrack Exporter has been suspended. Please contact us if you need to know more.
Since the summer, Bachtrack has had a substantial number of concert listings in the US, including the major orchestras and opera houses. With this week's release of the site, you'll notice a country flag in the top right hand corner, together with a "Change" link that lets you switch between UK and US content. This is in line with our intentions to be a truly multi-national site.
Any of you who visit Bachtrack regularly will have seen that we're continually making adjustments to how the site works. There's usually a new release of the site software every couple of weeks, with new additions to some feature or other.
Today's release had a couple of things which I've enjoyed putting in:
For many of the concerts on Bachtrack, you can now click on a link to go directly to a booking web site. When you have searched for a concert or opera, press on the red "Info/Book" button to see the choice of links to click on to book tickets.
Some of these bookings are directly with the site of the venue or orchestra putting on the event. Others are with our affiliated booking services:
