Blog

Broadway Compromise Near

Broadway producers and musicians are said to be close to an agreement on a new contract, with the contentious issue of ‘minimums’ more or less left to be battled out at every individual production site. “The minimum number of musicians required in the larger theaters… will be reduced from 26 to 18, and more flexibility will be built into the so-called ‘special situations’ clause, which allows producers to petition the union for fewer musicians on a show-by-show basis. Minimums will be preserved, but in theory only; for all practical purposes, every show will negotiate its own minimum.”

Disney Hall Almost Paid For

The Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall, which will play host to the Los Angeles Philharmonic beginning next fall, has come within $10 million of being fully paid for. The hall is estimated to cost $272 million, and has taken 15 years to go from initial planning stages to final construction. Backers say they are optimistic that the final fundraising push will go quickly, and the county has stepped in with an additional $14.5 million of street and neighborhood improvements around the hall.

Editors To Symphony: Don’t Let It End Like This

The Houston Chronicle editorial board has weighed in on the bitter dispute between the Houston Symphony Soiety and the orchestra’s musicians. “The symphony management promises to present a five-year plan for artistic growth and financial stability in May, but the society demands that the musicians accept its final offer of reduced pay and benefits by Saturday. This precipitous ultimatum might reflect the symphony’s dire financial state, but surely the final hour can wait until the society has a plan to climb out of its hole – a plan the musicians might be willing to accept and aid… Once that compromise is reached, it will fall to Houstonians to give the Houston Symphony the same generous and enthusiastic support they give to rodeos and ball games.”

Cinefranco Rejects Ultraviolent Films

Toronto’s “Cinefranco” festival of French-language films gets underway this month, but the lineup will not include Gaspar Noe’s celebrated Irreversible, which is part of a new wave of ‘shock-violence’ films. Cinefranco “has also refused to screen several other French art-house films using extremes of violence in recent years. These new films, which blend sophisticated scripts with protracted and gratuitous use of violence, are the object of great controversy among critics.”

Why People Don’t Read “Serious” Fiction

Terry Teachout writes that “it’s common to run across ‘well-read’ people who no longer read any new literary fiction at all, American or otherwise. I don’t, and neither do many of the professional writers I know. Like most Americans, we go to the movies instead.” So why is that, he wonders. “Our ‘major’ writers tend to be chronically verbose, stylistically ostentatious and agonizingly earnest (though the flippant Irony Lite of Generation X now appears to have replaced earnestness as the style du jour). Such books are unreadable, and so nobody reads them, save under academic duress.”

Somewhere, Charles Dutoit Is Smiling

It was nearly a year ago that the musicians of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra went to their union chief, Emile Subirana, and asked him to take action against music director Charles Dutoit, who was attempting to remove two tenured musicians from the ensemble. Subirana subsequently wrote an open letter which referred to Dutoit as a ‘tyrant,’ leading directly to the conductor’s abrupt resignation from the orchestra he had led for nearly a quarter century. Months of public and private finger-pointing and bitter argument followed, and this week, the members of the Quebec Musicians Guild voted overwhelmingly to replace Subirana with a reformer who promised a more responsive and responsible union.

Setting An Example In San Antonio

The mayor of San Antonio announced this week that he will donate $5000 from his office’s discretionary fund to the struggling San Antonio Symphony, which missed payroll last Friday and is facing more than $500,000 of immediate debt. Mayor Ed Garza also exhorted other city leaders to match his contribution, and called on corporate leaders to broaden the base of support for the ensemble. The symphony’s musicians have agreed to keep playing despite going without their paychecks, at least for the moment.

Forget the Women And Children! Board Members First!

The entire board of the financially shaky Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra has resigned after learning that its members could be on the hook for more than a million dollars if the organization were to file for bankruptcy. The resignations occurred after the WSO was informed that its liability coverage was being cut back from $2 million to $1 million. The orchestra is operating under a CDN$1.8 million deficit. For now, the WSO is being run by a 6-member management committee, and the provincial culture ministry is promising to help the organization make payroll in the short term.

Pushing Ahead

Members of the Winnipeg Symphony management team, as well as leaders among the musicians, are moving to assure the public and the press that the mass resignation of the orchestra’s board does not mean that the organization is near filing for bankruptcy. But while the ensemble does not appear to be in imminent danger of collapse, “since the extent of its financial troubles became known late last fall, the WSO has lost three of its four professional fundraisers and three chief executive officers.”