Category: music

The best-selling band of the decade isn’t even alive anymore. Billboard has the complete stats…

“The Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s deficit soared to nearly $3.8 million dollars on a budget of $29 million in 2009, underscoring the precariousness of the orchestra’s finances in Michigan’s depressed economy and jeopardizing the artistic growth and momentum that has been building under new music director Leonard Slatkin.”

“The Atlanta Opera, coming off the strongest production in its 30-year history, announced today that it will perform just three operas next season (down from the current four) and that its budget will shrink 21.5 percent to $5.3 million (down from the current $6.75 million). The company has almost no endowment.”

“The Louise Dieterle Nippert Musical Arts Fund will help maintain the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra as a major, full-time professional orchestra. It also will allow Cincinnati Opera to continue a 90-year collaboration with the Cincinnati Symphony in its pit, and allow dancers to pirouette to live music at Cincinnati Ballet well into the future.”

As the decade began, observes Tom Service, Covent Garden was just emerging from chaos, ENO was heading into it (in spades), and Scottish Opera was on its way to a near-collapse in 2004 and ’05. Now all of the nation’s opera companies are “in rude health.” And the UK’s major orchestras have attracted and kept some serious conducting talent, with impressive results.

“The instrument, called a clavi-viola in Italian or harpsichord-viola in English, has emerged from myth into Times Square. A realized version went on display Thursday at the exhibition ‘Leonardo da Vinci’s Workshop,’ which is running at the Discovery Times Square Exposition [in Manhattan].”

“Spain’s pistol-carrying Civil Guard police force descended on the Sigüenza Jazz festival to investigate allegations that [the] music was not, well, jazz. Police decided to investigate after an angry jazz buff complained that the Larry Ochs Sax and Drumming Core group was on the wrong side of a line dividing jazz from contemporary music.”

“Small and soundless, the baton goes unnoticed by most concertgoers but can be an obsession to conductors. Born out of necessity centuries ago, when rooms were lit by candles and the conductor’s gestures needed to be seen by musicians, the baton serves unseen roles.”

“If Old World Europe still has its great spectacle, it is this annual senior prom, at the end of which the so-called loggionisti, the diehard fans in the rafters who are opera’s original bloggers, rain ritual terror or roses down on the performers.” The singers got cheers, the director jeers.

“OrchKids, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s innovative educational initiative launched last year at an inner city school, will receive a $1 million gift from Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker.” The project “received its initial seed money of $100,000 from BSO music director Marin Alsop.”