Category: music

“In a rare bit of good news for the New York City Opera, the company and its musicians have signed a two-year contract agreement. The American Guild of Musical Artists contract is still in play, but it has been previously reported that AGMA members would follow the musician’s lead.”

The board chairman “said a ‘fresh set of eyes’ would look at how the company could be more efficient with its government funding (currently $21.9 million [Aus] a year), but the review will also look at management structures, programming schedules, repertoire, and marketing strategies.”

The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition has made odd picks in the past. “Yet nothing in recent memory has been as shocking as this year’s top prizes,” awarded by a jury whose errors of judgment “are all too evident if we watch the archived performances on the Web.”

“In Macau, the [National Symphony Orchestra] was meeting a new audience in a new venue. But there was the same warm, wood-paneled auditorium with red plush seats; the same program bios, here in Portuguese and Chinese; the same ushers pouncing like hawks on young people trying to text on their mobile phones during the show.”

From the management: “JazzTimes has temporarily suspended publication of the magazine and has furloughed the bulk of its staff while it finalizes a sale of its assets. The brand and operation will undergo reorganization and restructuring in order to remain competitive in the current media climate.”

With the orchestra’s, and the region’s, economic troubles, the DSO’s new music director says that, if the musicians are to have a 52-week contract, they need some paying listeners year-round. “If there’s no audience, no revenue. … But maybe something can be found. There’s no summer opera festival in the Midwest, for example. Everybody wants to exhaust all possibilities before saying no more summers (of employment).”

“Rossen Milanov, associate conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra and artistic director of The Philadelphia Orchestra at The Mann Center for the Performing Arts, has been named music director and conductor of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, effective July 1. … [He] is also music director of Symphony in C in Camden (formerly the Haddonfield Symphony), one of three professional training orchestras in the United States, and the New Symphony Orchestra in his native city of Sofia, Bulgaria.”

“The centerpiece will be Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Francesco Cavalli’s Giasone, which opens April 24, [2010], for which Baroque Band will be the pit ensemble. In addition to The Newberry Consort and Baroque Band, other participating organizations include Music of the Baroque and the University of Chicago Presents.”

Nobuyuki Tsujii, one of this year’s two winners of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, “riveted the audience. And juries, even at the highest level, are not immune to audience responses.” Did the 20-year-old’s blindness play a role? “If all the contestants had performed behind a scrim, if no one had known anything about them, if they had been judged purely on musical values, I honestly believe some other pianists would have advanced ahead of Tsujii.”

“The San Francisco Opera set an attendance record Friday for its continuing simulcasts of live performances from the War Memorial Opera House to AT&T Park. An audience estimated by the Opera at 27,000 showed up for the free simulcast of Puccini’s ‘Tosca,’ shown on the scoreboard screen, starring soprano Adrianne Pieczonka as the doomed heroine.”