Category: music

“But it’s exactly this, this naivete of believing in the music at all costs, that is a hallmark of Christoph Eschenbach. It’s an attitude that has helped him build a star reputation in the conducting world – and has also threatened to be his undoing. … [Now] the question is whether he can make the NSO, and its audience, believe in him.”

When Stephen Wadsworth replaced Peter Stein as director of the Met’s new Boris Godunov, this is what he faced: “mostly completed set and costumes by two longtime collaborators of Mr. Stein’s; a cast and a conductor, Valery Gergiev, hired to work with his predecessor; and a dramatic conception of Russia’s greatest historical opera that was unknown to him.”

“Detroit Symphony Orchestra management and players have scheduled an eleventh-hour negotiating session Friday morning in an effort to settle a rancorous contract dispute before a potential work stoppage.” The previous day is the last one for which the DSO is legally required to pay its musicians.

“For the first time in 24 years, when the California Symphony opens its season in [Walnut Creek] on Oct. 3, founder and music director Barry Jekowsky will not be at the podium. &$133; [The] board of directors decided Tuesday evening to terminate the conductor.”

“If you really want to do something [in a concerto cadenza] that sounds like Haydn but not Mozart, something that sounds like Beethoven but not Schubert, there have to be a lot of switches that are triggered in your brain and they’re based on linguistic things,” comparable to various regional accents.

There are the hi-def simulcasts into cinemas (which subsequently appear on television and DVD), the company’s Sirius satellite radio channel, the Met Player online media library of 300 titles, and the good old Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts … Just last year, the Met’s net revenues from its media ventures totaled $11 million.

“Arizona Opera choristers and the company’s Phoenix stage employees have agreed to a three-year contract that freezes their pay and cuts by half travel reimbursements and housing per diems. … That leaves the opera with two union contracts still unsettled” – those of the Tuscon backstage workers and the orchestra musicians.

“The Philadelphia Orchestra may struggle for listeners in its Verizon Hall subscription season, but crowd size rose this summer at two of its outdoor venues.” Audiences at the Mann Center in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park were up 10% from last year, while attendance at the orchestra’s concerts in Saratoga Springs, NY rose by 21%.

“It’s clearly time for a generational change if orchestras are to survive. But it’s a shift in the way an orchestra musician’s job has come, under the current union rules, to be defined.”

“Tenor Plácido Domingo has renewed his contract with Los Angeles Opera and will stay on as the company’s general director through 2013,” despite criticism that he is too busy with performing and his other opera company (in D.C.) to provide the day-to-day leadership L.A. Opera needs.