The ongoing conflict between the musicians and management of the Montreal Symphony is intensifying, even as both sides continue contract talks. The dispute couldn’t be more basic: the musicians believe that they are grossly underpaid compared with comaprable North American orchestras, and the management insists that it simply cannot afford significant raises now or in the near future.
Blog
Scottish Opera Chief Ready For A Fight
The music had not even subsided at the gala concert opening Scottish Opera’s new season last week when the company’s artistic director, Sir Richard Armstrong, mounted a furious challenge to the fiscal reorganization plan being forced on the Opera by the Scottish government. “Armstrong’s words suggested that the cuts forced by the Executive will, after the initial shock, be increasingly challenged… The structural underfunding which caused the gradual descent into debt has not been addressed, although clearly the hope is that there will be some future rectification.”
New Hemingway Publication Dispute
“A simmering row over the modern publication of a long-lost short story by Hemingway, written in 1924 while on a drunken spree in Pamplona, Spain, has revealed the American writer as a champion luncher but a poor humorist.” The story, which is a slapstick description of a bullfight, was initially intended for the magazine Vanity Fair, but was never sent. Now, the magazine stands ready to print it, but lawyers for the Hemingway estate have blocked publication without explanation.
Design Museum’s Chairman Quits
Vacuum cleaner magnate James Dyson has angrily resigned from his position as board chairman of London’s Design Museum, declaring that the institution is “ruining its reputation” and “betraying its purpose”. Dyson had been in a years-long feud with director Alice Rawsthorn over the true mission of the museum, and his resignation letter accuses her of allowing it to “become a style showcase [when it should be] upholding its mission to encourage serious design of the manufactured object.”
Art That First Does No Harm
St Bartholomew’s hospital in London has been around since medieval times, and as you might imagine, it can be a dreary place to convalesce. But a major renovation of the hospital’s cancer wing has transformed the place into an art-filled oasis for patients, made up of “calm, elegant spaces, flooded with daylight… The art is everywhere, included in the design from the start and taking up 3% of the £15.5m project cost.”
The Musician’s Steroid?
Music is probably not the first profession that springs to mind when one thinks of the problem of performance-enhancing drugs. And yet, the use of an anxiety-reducing drug called Inderal to get an increasing number of classical musicians through stressful auditions and solo performances is a hot-button issue in the industry. The drug is legal, non-habit-forming, and has no serious side effects, and yet, many musicians believe that using it amounts to a kind of cheating every bit as serious as an athlete’s use of steroids.
Orchestra Bumped From Weekend By Touring Shows
The Florida Orchestra is hoping that audiences in Tampa enjoy the music enough to attend concerts regardless of what night they’re held. “In a risky move, the orchestra has switched all 12 of its masterworks programs during the upcoming season in Tampa from Friday to Monday night. It is an attempt to bring some consistency to the orchestra’s schedule at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, where the preferred, 2,500-seat Morsani Hall isn’t always available to the orchestra because the center gives priority to lucrative Broadway tours and other presentations.”
Unusual Library Mulling Cross-Country Move
The Brautigan Library in suburban Boston may be the only library conjured into existence by a 1960s counterculture novel. It is almost certainly the only library to consist entirely of unpublished work: “From 1990 to 1996, the Brautigan Library accepted manuscripts from all over the world, as long as the authors paid binding costs.” But like all good ’60s icons, the Brautigan collection looks likely to spend its mature years in Northern California – specifically, in the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library.
French Impressionism Impresses Australians
A blockbuster exhibit of French Impressionist paintings in Melbourne has shattered Australian attendance records for an art exhibition, drawing 333,000 patrons in the three months it has been on display at the National Gallery of Victoria. The state government is touting the attendance record as evidence that it was “the right move to invest in the Winter Masterpieces exhibition – a move to be continued next winter with works of the Dutch golden age from the Netherlands’ Rijksmuseum.”
This Is Why You Don’t Mix Football And Art
A famous nude, painted in Paris in 1875 by Jules Lefebvre, was damaged over the weekend as it hung behind glass at the Melbourne hotel which has displayed it for decades. Chloe, as the painting is known, suffered scratches to its canvas when an individual attending a football rally at the hotel stumbled into the glass, shattering it. Experts say that the damage is reparable.