Category: music

Around London on the streets there are 30 pianos, waiting to be played. They’re “part of an interactive art project meant to challenge people to come out of their urban insularity and also to provide some summertime music.”

“As the miserable ad climate continues its toll, one music title is bucking the trend: online upstart Pitchfork Media. Unlike its better-known competitors, Pitchfork.com delivers few major scoops and lacks famous financial backers. But it also has no distribution or printing costs. Its quirky, passionate staff express little concern over the state of its balance sheet, which appears to teeter from one year to the next between profitability and losing money.”

“The rising cost of air freight and the sudden scarcity of corporate sponsors (at least $3 million is needed to tour a US orchestra in Europe) have made matters worse. So have tighter security requirements, which mean that vital hours are forfeited in tight schedules while expensive musicians hang around airport check-ins.”

“Opera Naples, like many first-time homebuyers this year, has taken advantage of the market to snare its own administrative and activities base, a 10,000-square-foot commercial space in East Naples.” The facility will enable the four-year-old company “to create and store sets and costumes, rehearse for productions and even stage some workshop operas.”

“A piece of music celebrating the defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden should not have been chosen to open the Edinburgh International Festival, a prominent Scottish philanthropist has told The Scotsman. Sir Tom Farmer said Festival regulars were ‘quite disturbed’ by the choice of Handel’s Judas Maccabeus and that the oratorio should not have been included in the programme.”

“Last week, Manchester County Court was the scene of an extraordinary victory. A man called Adrian Bradbury had taken his family to see a professional staging of The Wizard of Oz at the Lowry Theatre” and “felt that if you had paid to see what was billed as a ‘magical family musical’ you were entitled to expect live musicians. So he sued under the Trade Descriptions Act. And, astonishingly, he won.”

For his final project as head of the Paris Opera, and to mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Opéra-Bastille, Gérard Mortier commissioned a work from Anselm Kiefer, “who has made his art out of the destruction he saw as a child in southern Germany, when he played happily in the wreckage of his family’s bombed house.” Kiefer created Am Anfang (“In the Beginning”) with 36-year-old composer Jörg Widmann.

“Michigan Opera Theatre has reached a critical deal with its banks to cut its loan payments in half for the next 18 months, resolving a year-long cash flow crisis that threatened to force the company into foreclosure or bankruptcy.”

“Strong ticket sales and fund-raising support allowed the Minneapolis-based organization to balance the books for the seventh year in a row, on a budget of about $10 million. The opera, which presents its work at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in St.  Paul, played to 92.5 percent capacity, up from 87 percent in 2008 and 81.3 percent the previous year.”

“In a grievously misguided attempt to broaden the classical concert experience, Ravinia has installed two 15 x 20-foot screens on either side of the stage, where simultaneous video transmissions are projected à la pop events and Andrea Bocelli stadium concerts. The video projections … will be standard for all of this summer’s pavilion performances, including all classical and CSO concerts, a Ravinia spokeswoman said.”