Category: music

The Cape Town Opera has fired tenor Richard Mbovane after he was caught on camera – twice – stealing electronics from a store in Berlin, where the company was touring.

Ryan Smith, a first-year member of the Ryan Opera Center at Lyric Opera of Chicago and a 2007 winner of the Met’s National Council Auditions, died last week at age 31 of lymphoma.

“General Director David Gockley acknowledged the obvious truth in a brief address to the audience before Sunday’s opening performance of ‘La Bohème’: The financial picture at the San Francisco Opera isn’t pretty. … There had been a small drop in ticket sales, he said, but the more pressing problem was the decline in the value of the company’s endowment and fears about possible future shortfalls in contributions.”

If established singers “don’t have to pay attention to new songwriters, what happens to the great American songbook? Even modern pop songs need interpretation. … Performed at a different tempo, transposed to another key, given a new arrangement or sung by a gifted singer, a song takes on a new life.” But older singers looking for cover songs tend to look to classics, not new work.

“A vast fleet of pianos is expected to arrive in Cincinnati next month, part of the largest order — by number of instruments — ever filled by the Steinway & Sons piano company. The College-Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati said it is plunking down $4.1 million for 165 pianos, to be delivered over the course of the academic year.”

“London’s Royal Opera House, which seeks to open a branch in Manchester that would cost 60 million pounds to 80 million pounds ($90 million to $120 million), said the project would be dropped if it failed to receive state money.”

“If any city knows how to hype someone, it’s LA. But it says something that even in a place more internationally famous for its silicon implants than its orchestral music, they can really put out the bunting – literally, since Salonen’s mugshot is all over downtown LA – for their music director.”

“[D]espite the Mortier fiasco, a bold, exciting (but cheaper) agenda remains exactly what the company needs,” Justin Davidson prescribes. “It needs to reconnect with the reasons Fiorello La Guardia founded the ‘People’s Opera’ in the first place–as a frothier, less pretentious, and more affordable alternative to the Met.”

“A recent survey by the League of American Orchestras showed that blacks made up less than 2 percent of professional American orchestra musicians, while Latinos made up less than 3 percent. They are similarly underrepresented among chamber musicians and soloists. But that is slowly changing, thanks largely to the Sphinx Organization, a nonprofit venture dedicated to increasing the presence of blacks and Hispanics in classical music as composers, performers and listeners.”

The storied quartet, together since 1964, is playing its final concerts. “People always ask do we have a five-year plan or a 10-year plan. The truth is that we’ve never had more than a one-year plan. I don’t think we ever talked about retiring someday.”