Category: music

Rampant cancellations, aging or blown-out voices, injured or unprepared conductors … In an open letter to Met management, one twenty-something subscriber says he’s sick of not getting what he signed up for a year in advance and will henceforth buy tickets only last-minute. Is he justified? La Cieca’s cher public hashes out the question.

“In the second act, as Simon Keenlyside’s Hamlet was singing about clouds, the [upper reaches of the] Metropolitan Opera House began to fill with smoke.” A few audience members beat a retreat (“Cowards,” sneered one die-hard fan), but the performers kept right on going.

Music director Daniel “Barenboim said he would compensate by working even harder and trying to lure the opera’s fans across the city’s former Cold War divide. ‘Moving for three years can be seen as a calamity or as a challenge, and we have decided to see it as the latter,’ Barenboim said at a news conference.”

“Players Association spokesman Ryan Leveille said musicians, under the auspices of the American Federation of Musicians Local 502, are in the process of filing a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board” over the Charleston Symphony Orchestra’s suspension of operations.

Marco Armiliato, who conducted the “Aida” matinee Saturday before taking over for Leonard Slatkin on “La Traviata” that night: “Afterwards, I went home, cooked myself some pasta, played some Playstation and called my wife in Genoa. When I looked at the clock, I was surprised to see it was 3:30 in the morning.”

“The music biz isn’t the first British leisure industry to have a suspicious, even adversarial relationship with its own fans. Another of last week’s news stories hints at a way out of it.”

“That a city with a population of 3.4 million, less than half the size of London, can support such operatic bounty never ceases to amaze. Five years ago, with Berlin’s looming bankruptcy, there was talk of closing one. But partly through the setting up of an opera foundation (“Stiftung”) to provide financial support and unified working practices, each is secure for now.”

Despite the absence of dachshunds, Dobermans and dirigibles, Ring Festival LA is being billed by Plácido Domingo, the superstar Spanish tenor and L.A. Opera’s general director, as “the largest, most significant cultural festival in Los Angeles since the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival.”

“Dylan’s planned tour of east Asia later this month has been called off after Chinese officials refused permission for him to play in Beijing and Shanghai, his local promoters said. China’s ministry of culture, which vets planned concerts by overseas artists, appeared wary of Dylan’s past as an icon of the counterculture movement.”

According to the Met, Levine is “to undergo corrective surgery for an ongoing lower back problem.” Press Director Peter Clark said there would be no further comment.