Category: music

“It’s a strange year when red ink can look like success, but that’s how the Toronto Symphony Orchestra sees its $475,490 operating deficit for 2010.”

“Barbie at the Symphony is a 90-minute showcase of singing, dancing, painting and skating drawn from the DVDs. As Barbie leads the audiences through her greatest screen hits, the show becomes a creative way to introduce grade-school children to the orchestra — as well as to the famous composers who have written music for it.”

“More than five years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ music scene remains vibrant and lively, despite the fact that some musicians forced from their homes haven’t returned and the doors to many places where they used to entertain remain closed.”

“The players have complained that management for months has refused to budge from its $33-million financial package, but the additional $1 million put on the table Wednesday wasn’t enough to maintain a top-tier symphony, cellist and spokesman Haden McKay said.”

Representative Vicki Barnett “said the DSO is an endangered cultural gem that adds to the region’s quality of life and can help attract new businesses. She said she was asked by DSO musicians who live in her district to consider a public tax to keep the orchestra viable and competitive with other major U.S. symphony orchestras.”

“The striking musicians of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra have withdrawn the unfair-labor practice charge they filed in September with the National Labor Relations Board that accused management of bargaining in bad faith. ‘They gave us an indication that they weren’t going to rule in our favor,’ cellist Haden McKay said Sunday.”

“The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra reported a $2.3 million deficit for fiscal year 2010 Thursday, fueled largely by a 20% drop in contributions from donors over the previous fiscal year.”

Robin Thompson, who was the artistic administrator and, later, producing artistic director at New York City Opera until that company’s near-death experience two years ago, will serve as artistic advisor to Virginia Opera while its board searches for a successor to longtime artistic director Peter Mark, whose contract was terminated last week.

“The Los Angeles Master Chorale will be teaming up with classical-music radio station KUSC-FM (91.5) in a broadcasting partnership in which 14 of the choir’s Walt Disney Concert Hall concerts from the 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons will be aired in two seven-week series.”

“Vivaldi. The world’s most forgetful composer? Why on earth have so many of his manuscripts been turning up in obscure collections across the British Isles in the last couple of months?”