Category: music

Facing its “most difficult financial year in decades,” the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is proposing a budget with an $876,000 deficit next year — its third consecutive year in the red. The orchestra foresees fiscal year 2011 as the most problematic in decades.”

“The Charleston Symphony Orchestra, dormant and still struggling, will try to organize a single concert for the beginning of what is supposed to be its 75th anniversary season in an effort to revitalize the ailing organization.” Yet there is currently no senior staff in place to help guide the CSO and no consensus in Charleston on how to operate or raise funds for the orchestra.

“El Sistema USA is making this country’s first official coordinated effort to learn from the Venezuelans, but programs with missions sympathetic to the goals of El Sistema have for years been doing inspiring work … What the Venezuelan model adds, beyond a powerful example of reframing the purpose of music education, is an enticement to think still bigger in terms of scale, intensity, and access.”

“In 1978, Lewis Spratlan wrote an opera but couldn’t get it staged. In 2000, he won the Pulitzer Prize for the second act of that opera in concert version but still couldn’t get it staged. This summer, Life Is a Dream finally [gets] its world premiere at Santa Fe Opera. Spratlan tells of a work that waited three decades to come to life.”

“The British label announced Sunday that the Benedictine nuns of the Abbaye de Notre Dame de l’Annonciation near Avignon were chosen after a worldwide search for female Gregorian chant performers.”

“Like gospel before it, reggae draws much of its symbolism from Torah. There is something bizarre yet poignant and undeniably American about a Jewish kid from the suburbs who found a path to his own ancient faith by hearing Jamaicans sing about it.”

“In the Soviet Union during the last decades of communist rule, dissidents listened to the Beatles and admired guitar-strumming bards like Vladimir Vysotsky, whose bitter lyrics contrasted sharply with the cheeriness of official propaganda. Nowadays, dissenters … have found a new source of musical inspiration: a homegrown version of Tupac Shakur and Public Enemy.”

“Deborah Voigt, a leading dramatic soprano known for portraying Strauss and Wagner heroines, will be packing heat next summer in the title role of Annie Get Your Gun at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival.”

“After more than two years of contentious negotiations, including an 18-month strike and this past spring’s mini-season, board members and musicians have agreed to a contract that will keep the full-time core musicians intact and include a 45 percent salary cut, instead of the initial contract proposal two years ago that would have included a 75 percent pay cut.”

Michael Tilson Thomas: “I regularly rehearse with people on Skype. Usually it’s the first time they’ve ever done it, but I have my computer right over my piano keyboard, and we work out whatever we need to work out.”