Category: music

La Scala opera house says some performers and musicians appeared in casual street clothes for the last performance of “Carmen,” conducted by Daniel Barenboim, in a labor protest.

“The Chicago reporters seem to like slanting every article to favor Chicago’s orchestra, even if it makes everyone else look bad. I never said or thought any negative things about the LA Phil, in fact I feel quite the opposite.”

“Labor relations have been bad for years at the SSO, so resolution won’t be easy. Meanwhile, pressure will grow on the orchestra management to get a settlement, so they can plan next season and sell tickets to it.”

“A million-dollar gift from the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation will keep the state’s flagship arts organization playing awhile longer, but more life support is needed to ensure the orchestra’s survival. For Utahns, there is more at stake than the possible loss of a music ensemble.”

“The reason artists need to care about net neutrality is that, should an open internet disappear, it’s likely that the free-flowing manner in which we now conduct our business would as well.”

Reading behind what the year’s sales figures mean…

Daniela Dessì, one of Italy’s top opera stars, walked out of the new Opera di Roma staging after its director, the notoriously outspoken Franco Zeffirelli, said of her, “A woman of a certain age and plumpness is not credible in the character of Violetta.” The 52-year-old soprano says she weighs 65kg (143 pounds).

The CSO’s 47-year-old music director “told orchestra musicians on Thursday that his last concert will be in May of 2011, at the end of his 10th season. ‘There was no kind of traumatic experience that made me want to leave,’ he said of his decision. ‘I always trusted my intuition’.”

“Donald Runnicles has extended his contract as the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s principal guest conductor for one year, through the 2011-12 season. For the past nine years he has conducted about four weeks each season, and many of these concerts have been highlights of the entire musical year.”

“[They] swim into view before each performance by the San Francisco Symphony, and the … sort of mechanized aerial ballet as each one finds its precise location has become a familiar ritual of local musical life. But for all its grace and apparent ease, this is a dance whose steps are rigidly predetermined.”