Category: music

The Metropolitan Opera’s 2010-11 production of the “Ring” cycle, directed by Robert Lepage, “hit a speed bump” when “[t]he stagehands union, Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, filed a grievance yesterday against the Met concerning non-union work on the opera’s set.”

The company “said Tuesday that it ended its fiscal 2009 with a surplus of less than $5,000 but has frozen salaries and cut spending to prepare for an even harder fiscal 2010.”

The consolidation “has been prompted in part by cost considerations, given reduced state funding and the likelihood of further cuts. It would see Wexford Festival Opera, Dublin-based Opera Ireland and the Opera Theatre Company (OTC), also located in the Irish capital, replaced by a single national company” based in Wexford rather than Dublin.

“The Music Center said today that 7,439 people registered for 2,800 places for the free outdoor simulcast of Dudamel’s Thursday inaugural concert [with the Los Angeles Philharmonic] at Walt Disney Concert Hall.”

Audiences for the Canadian director’s new all-Stravinsky program, The Nightingale and Other Short Fables, “will confront an orchestra pit filled with 67,000 litres of water, a principal cast of water-borne humans and Japanese-influenced puppets.”

“It can seem slightly odd. The concert hall is aglitter with expensive evening gowns and tails; the audience is seated; the lights go down; the conductor comes out; and suddenly the lights come up and everyone stands up, as if in school, and sings along. Then the ‘real’ music starts.”

“U.S. restrictions on travel to Cuba that led to the New York Philharmonic calling off a trip to the communist country are outrageous and should be ended, a senator who has long called for lifting trade and travel restraints said Monday.”

“Orchestras have traditionally thought of themselves as being in the content- production business, but we’re actually in the content-distribution business. Our product has been delivered live and here in the concert hall, but, in my view, that’s too narrow a definition of who we are.”

Mark Swed: “Some have [even] taken to referring to the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic by his initials, thus: G*D. It’s all too much, we critics judiciously caution. But in his first return to the Hollywood Bowl since making his U.S. debut there in 2005, the Dude pulled it off. Joy reigned.”

“The Okavango Macbeth – based on a real life encounter Mr McCall Smith had with two primatologists in the Okavango Delta – transfers the plot of the Shakespearean tragedy to a troupe of baboons.” Performances are in a converted garage outside Gaborone (the African nation’s capital).