Category: music

“Fans of Jacques Brel battled to buy the singer’s possessions, including guitars, photos and manuscripts, at a Sotheby’s auction last night in Paris. Admirers of the Belgian-born star of French chanson spent a combined 1.03 million euros ($1.4 million), beating a presale estimate of as much as 470,000 euros. Only one lot was unsold….”

As Karita Mattila finishes her Dance of the Seven Veils this Saturday afternoon, the Metropolitan Opera’s live simulcast into movie screens worldwide will not show what she calls her “slutty, two-second nude pose.” A spokesman pointed out that the company markets the broadcasts as “family-friendly events.” (He also observed that one can find the pose on YouTube.)

The folk-pop divo’s first stage project, originally commissioned by the Met and subsequently withdrawn, will premiere next July in a MIF co-production with Opera North. The director, conductor and four-person cast have been announced as well.

Burial at Thebes, a treatment of the Antigone story directed by Derek Walcott and adapted from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles (with music by Dominique Le Gendre), premieres in London this weekend.

“The resolution of a months-long contract dispute at the Columbus Symphony Orchestra has prompted the Greater Columbus Arts Council to unlock more than $180,000 in operating support.”

“The Los Angeles Philharmonic has created a special new-music fund in honor of Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, who steps down after 17 years at the end of the season. The fund will support the commissioning of new work, something Salonen increasingly has brought to the orchestra’s repertoire through the years.”

The new music director of Scottish Opera ” is forthright, straight-talking, to the point and fearlessly provocative.” In fact, Francesco Corti is unlike anything the company has seen before. “I’m sorry; probably this is heretical, but I believe that opera is still something for the elite… You don’t have to be commercial to sell it. You have to aim always at the top.”

Look at orchestras from coast to coast in Canada, and you’ll discover very different ways of running things. “Ottawa’s orchestra is a bit on the conservative side, sticking with the more classic classical… Across the country, the Victoria Symphony’s conductor Tania Miller eyes that line between pop and classical.” And Kent Nagano’s Montreal Symphony “peppers its programs with post-tonal scores and edgy guest conductors.”

At the Sydney Opera House last night, Opera Australia’s new production of The Makropulos Case was stopped in its tracks when the theater’s lighting desk (“one of the most heavily used pieces of theatrical equipment on the planet”) malfunctioned and plunged the auditorium into darkness for several minutes.

On the 30th anniversary of his death, a Sotheby’s auction of the singer’s manuscripts is taking place amidst a messy legal dispute among his heirs.