Category: music

The musicians did turn up in the pit for Saturday night’s season-opening gala, despite the fact that their last contract expired in April and negotiations for a new one broke down Friday. The players want a four-year agreement with givebacks now and payback later; Lyric management wants to wait out the recession with a single-year contract with a wage freeze.

The column by a pair of contributors observes that the catcalls at the Met’s new Tosca are nothing new. “[Booing is] a prerogative that though common to other arenas of spectatorship is the signature privilege of opera. … [T]he earliest audiences took aim mainly at composers; later patrons focused their attacks on singers; and, most recently, designers and directors have taken the heat.”

Thanks to a shortage of storage space at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, “the technical crews [have] to store sets and other movable equipment on the veranda facing 1st Street. … Some of them are protected from the elements by tarps; some are not.” Thank goodness for L.A. weather.

They need a CEO; they need a music director; they need more ticket buyers; they need $15 million ASAP. But James Oestreich agrees with the orchestra’s temporary chief exec that “the orchestra is still making great music.”

Soprano Antionette Halloran: “I’d be lying in bed with buckets and towels, feeling so sick … But then I’d go on stage and feel great. The best time of that whole first trimester was the hours I spent on stage. The nausea just goes away.”

Is careerism trumping institutional loyalty among some principal musicians in some quarters of today’s symphonic world.? “Star players seem to be jumping from orchestra to orchestra more casually, and more often, barely sticking around long enough to make a lasting imprint on their ensembles. And that’s a pity.”

“The company has announced it ended its fiscal year on June 30, 2009, with a modest surplus of $54 on a budget of $9.1 million. Earned and contributed revenue streams increased, it says, and its January 2009 production of Carmen set box-office records for the fastest-selling show in its history.”

In six years as the Minnesota Orchestra’s music director, Osmo Vänskä and his band have garnered so much attention in the US and Europe that fans in the Twin Cities keep worrying about when he’ll be lured away. They can stop fretting for a while: Vänskä has extended his contract through the 2013-14 season.

Thierry Fischer, a 52-year-old native of Geneva who is currently chief conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Nagoya Philharmonic in Japan, has succeeded Lockhart as music director of the Utah Symphony | Utah Opera, effective immediately.

“The musicians filed the [unfair labor practice] charges with the National Labor Relations Board, saying the orchestra failed and refused to bargain in good faith … [The] charges stem from the [unilateral] imposition by the Sarasota Orchestra of a ‘final offer,’ which the musicians previously rejected.”