Category: music

“As the Orchestras of Pasadena face up to a financial crisis that threatens their survival, all hopes are pinned on a 41-year-old whiz kid from Modesto. Paul Jan Zdunek, who is credited with putting the troubled Modesto Symphony back on a sound financial footing during his five-year stint, has been hired to do the same in Pasadena.”

“Its name is a footnote in history now, but the opening of Germany’s State Office for Music in January 1933 marked the effective beginning of the Nazi purge of undesirable music and musicians.” A Toronto ensemble has been revisiting the composers and music that were banned and persecuted under the Nazis.

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, one of the most covered songs of the last two decades, has been chosen as the winner’s song for this year’s edition of “X Factor,” the UK answer to “American Idol.” It seems an odd choice: “While it’s not like they’ve chosen Nirvana’s Rape Me, it still seems a bit odd that [the show’s producers] would choose a Biblical-referencing song about David shagging Bathsheba.”

For aspiring opera singers, it can be a very tough road to the front of the stage. “Auditions are tense business. Singers dressed to the nines, lugging the omnipresent water bottles, are ushered into a rehearsal hall to face” judges who have little mercy, and few spots to fill.

“It was an odd sight, to be sure: a rock show amid a tempest of luggage carts, weary airline crews and rushed passengers.” It was part of You Are Hear, a curated series of concerts at San Francisco International Airport, intended “to give travelers and the 30,000 employees at the airport a bit of entertainment during the hectic holiday season, and maybe make the whole travel routine a little less stressful for everyone involved.”

“The FIALS union, representing almost half of La Scala’s orchestra and choir members, is rejecting contracts accepted by about 90 percent of the company’s employees in October, and is seeking a bigger share of the opera house’s earnings from broadcasting. Management refuses to negotiate further.”

With corporate giving down by $100,000 and single ticket sales off by almost $50,000, the orchestra is economizing by replacing a program of Mahler’s Second Symphony with Orff’s Carmina Burana, not hiring substitute musicians for rehearsals, and cutting back on office supplies. No layoffs are planned for the time being.

“Conductor Jin Wang, 48, has been sacked from his post in Germany, municipal authorities said Tuesday, after an allegation that he sexually harassed a young woman musician. Chinese-born Wang, who was director of music at the Mainfranken Theatre and conducted the Wuerzburg Philharmonic Orchestra, had resisted pressure to resign after the city of Wuerzburg suspended him on full pay.”

Under new music director Manfred Honeck, the Pittsburgh Symphony becomes the latest American orchestra to move to what Honeck calls the “old German seating,” with antiphonal violins, and cellos and basses grouped at stage right. “Honeck feels the old German seating could lead to enhanced listening between sections and a ‘better feel’ for each other.”

“There is an honorable tradition in opera of singers relying on a prompter to provide cues for pitches or words. But during rehearsals for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” which opens on Friday night, the German tenor singing Tristan, Peter Seiffert, has been using a personal electronic prompter: an earpiece through which he can hear the cues directly.”