Category: music

“By a 13 to 5 vote, council made city taxpayers the backstop to an organization whose financial distress is even worse than orchestra officials had revealed last week – a shortfall projected to grow to C$900,000 by the end of June.”

“Bach had to wait 110 years before the first complete performance of his B minor Mass, by which time he had long since departed to the great choral extravaganza in the sky. For today’s composers, though, the elapsed time between composition and performance can be a matter of seconds – as long as you are willing to accept that your performers may not be entirely, you know, real.”

“The Ninth Symphony runs over an hour, even when performed at breakneck tempo. In the era of LP records, it generally took three sides — and hence had to be coupled with one of Beethoven’s shorter symphonies, like the Eighth, to complete a two-disc set.” With the switch to CDs, the race to fit all of the Ninth on one disc began — or so the story goes.

“A member of the National Arts Center orchestra spotted the 1955 German-made Heckel contrabassoon on the online auction site and contacted police, said an Ottawa police news release Friday. The instrument is worth between $60,000 and $100,000, and went missing between August and Oct. 17.”

“The arts economy strikes again: Because of lagging ticket sales as well as a rapid decline in individual and corporate donations, the Santa Clarita Symphony is canceling its 2009 season.”

This week, the Canadian Music Centre launched Centrestreams, an audio-streaming service that makes the CMC’s collection of 8,000 recordings, by about 700 Canadian composers, available online at http://www.musiccentre.ca.

Ticket sales for the Kansas City Symphony’s holiday program are off by 30%. And it’s not just the tight economy that’s hurting them. “The other [factor] is something new to Kansas City during the holiday season: the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.”

The president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, angered by Michael Tilson Thomas’s $1.6M salary as an Francisco Symphony music director, wants to cut all of the city’s $1.8M funding to the orchestra. But, MTT having made the SFS into one of the world’s best orchestras, the question “is not how much MTT is worth but how many millions might it cost San Francisco to once more promote itself as a sophisticate city if a Philistine supervisor actually has his way?”

The tenor is singing Wagner’s Tristan for the first time at the Met, and many opera lovers are tut-tutting at his use of an electronic earpiece to get cues from a prompter. “It has long been standard practice for an operatic artist who has prepared a role thoroughly to take cues from a house prompter. But does a singer cross a line by putting an electronic gizmo in his ear?”

‘[P]erhaps it’s time opera stopped digging those trenches between the ‘money roles’ – think anyone involved in the main love affair, or in planning its imminent passing – and the rest, a motley crew that are variously covered by labels including ‘comprimario’, ‘character role’ or simply ‘cameo’. Rarely remembered, they are rarely well cast.”