Category: music

“After Leonard Bernstein passed away,” he says, “a memorial concert was given by players from orchestras he had worked with in Vienna, London, New York, and so on. I gave my downbeat and they came in with about six different attacks, because there was no agreement where ‘now’ was. We know from their auditions that the YouTube musicians play with great heart and skill, but it isn’t clear what is going to happen when we put them together.”

Perhaps the most intense discussions have occurred within the 26-year-old Wagner Society of Southern California, a 300-member association of enthusiasts led by Sherwin Sloan, a retired eye surgeon who has seen 87 “Ring” cycles since discovering Wagner in the mid-1970s. “I’m a real Wagner cuckoo,” he says.

“The cultural fallout could spill into every bar, bar mitzvah, community center and concert hall in Montana. Some people involved in the Montana music business say that if the dispute isn’t resolved soon, it could all but spell the end of live concerts in the state.”

Staff was told Friday that the budget would be reduced by 7 percent based on a projected budget of $32 million in 2009-10. That includes an existing $1 million cut, an additional $300,000 in this budget year and $1 million in fiscal 2009-10. The orchestra is the state’s largest arts organization by budget.

Soprano Christine Brewer, citing a knee injury that keeps her from moving on stage, has pulled out of next month’s run of Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera. Her appearances as Brünnhilde, Brewer’s first in a complete, fully staged Ring, were among the most anticipated events of the season. Meanwhile, vocally troubled tenor Rolando Villazón has withdrawn from at least the first two performance of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, beginning next week.

Toronto-based Diamond and Schmitt Architects, the firm that designed the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto and the expansion of Detroit’s Orchestra Hall into the Max M. Fisher Music Center, will design the new home of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra on the vacant northeast corner of the Plâce des Arts. Collaborating will be the Montreal engineering and construction firm SNC-Lavalin. The C$267 million building should be complete in 2011.

“In a belt-tightening move, the Minnesota Orchestra has scaled back this year’s Sommerfest from four weekends to three. […] Also gone this year is the 24-hour Day of Music that has marked the Sommerfest opening for the past eight years, sponsored first by Marshall Field and, in the past three years, by Macy’s.”

In January, the Vancouver-based period-instrument group launched a fundraising campaign around the idea of engaging harpsichordist Alexander Weimann as artistic director. (“If we can get the money.”) Well, it worked: the orchestra has officially engaged Weimann, beginning next season.

“The Augusta Symphony has a new conductor. His friends call him Z. Shizuo Kuwahara is set to be named today as the third conductor in the organization’s history. He succeeds Donald Portnoy, who is retiring at the end of the performance season.”

A community orchestra in Woodstock, N.Y., “is, with its instrumentation, uniforms and repertory, emulating one of the best known of the concentration-camp ensembles: the Birkenau women’s orchestra of some 54 Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz from 1943 through 1945.” The program “is meant to be a poignant reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust and of how a group of women used music to survive. While this mission has been hailed by numerous Jewish groups, some survivors find it too poignant.”