Category: music

“Conductor Hans Graf is crafting an exit strategy that means he will leave his position as music director of the Houston Symphony in four years. … Graf and the board of trustees agreed to extend the Austrian conductor’s contract through the 2012-2013 season. After that, Graf will become the symphony’s first conductor laureate.”

“Many fear her, a few turn her down and some of those who play Wagner’s famous heroine in Tristan und Isolde never quite recover. We talk to singers who have been brave enough to take her on.”

“Against the dark backdrop of financial crisis and a leadership overhaul in progress, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association met yesterday to present its traditional state-of-the-orchestra snapshot.” Though “the meeting was notable for what it did not cover,” the institution’s “leaders emphatically articulated the seriousness of the orchestra’s financial condition.”

“From the start, the organization has built jazz awareness from the bottom up. Yet there’d be no Jazz at Lincoln Center were it not for the ability of its artistic director, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, to win support for jazz from the top down.”

“The number of young women studying to become conductors still lags far behind female instrumentalists, singers or even composers, which is another traditionally male-dominated area. … According to the League of American Orchestras, not even 12% of American orchestras of any size are headed by women.” But that seems to be changing.

“Colorado Symphony Orchestra musicians have agreed to a 12.5 percent pay cut and up to four weeks of unpaid leave as the orchestra copes with the economic downturn.”

“A few hours before raising the curtain on its 234th season, Russia’s famed Bolshoi Theatre revealed the latest addition to its team: new music director Leonid Desyatnikov.” He’s not an experienced conductor or administrator, but he is the composer behind one of the great artistic scandals of post-Soviet Russia: the opera Rosenthal’s Children.

From its opening in 1770 up to the French Revolution, the ornate 660-seat theater hosted fewer than 20 performances. (Each show burned through several thousand very expensive candles.) “But in a revolution of sorts for the theatre some 30 performances have been scheduled for the 2009-2010 season alone.”

Beginning the season as he did, “with a brand-new, pared-down production of an opera that was a trademark of the old Met, was ‘not an accident,'” Peter Gelb said. “His self-proclaimed mission from the beginning has been to revivify an institution whose core audience he thinks is rapidly aging itself to extinction…. ‘I didn’t understand fully how difficult it was going to be,’ he added.”

Allison Vulgamore, president of the ASO since 1993, has announced her departure from the job for “new challenges.” The Philadelphia Orchestra’s board has made a “unanimous choice” for their organization’s next president, which several sources say is Vulgamore. Yet the PhilOrch staff refuses to confirm the selection, saying only that the search is “ongoing.”