Category: music

The Columbus Symphony ended its season this weekend, and may never be heard from again. “Whether there were any dry eyes by the end of the concert was open to question. But there was no doubting the feelings of the crowd, who filled Ohio Theatre to the rafters and offered several standing ovations during and after the show.”

“The board of directors for the Shreveport Symphony Orchestra announced late Friday afternoon it will move forward with its proposal to move core musicians to a per-service payment structure… The board’s offer includes a 75 percent cut to core or full-time musicians, from $12,693 to $3,123 for the 2008-09 season. The proposal would also include the elimination of 24 full-time core positions as of Sept. 1.”

Classical music a niche genre? Don’t tell the concertgoers of Montreal, where 4,200 members of the paying public recently attended three separate classical concerts on a Monday night! “The wonder is that all this happens at the end of a long season, when one might suppose classical fans to be financially drained and musically saturated.”

Colorado’s Fort Collins Symphony has tapped the director of the National Repertory Orchestra in Breckenridge to be its new executive director. “When she began, the NRO was in a deficit, but during her time there, the orchestra’s budget more than doubled with a 14 percent surplus, and attendance increased by 10 to 15 percent each season.”

Rock legend David Byrne is thinking big with his latest project – really big. Byrne is transforming the Great Hall of New York’s Battery Maritime Building into a giant musical instrument. “At least for the next two and a half months, the building will serve as a gargantuan cast-iron orchestra.”

“Rock is all about daft theatre. It’s not like mainstream pop, which sparkles cheaply and perfectly like a good local panto, or folk and country classics, which summon up the spirit and sadness of dusty novellas. Mainstream rock is something else: a 20th-century twist on Shakespearean madness and excess fed through a Marshall stack.”

This weekend, novelist Ian McEwan’s first opera, ‘For You,’ written with the composer Michael Berkeley, is scheduled to premiere in Wales. McEwan was hardly a likely candidate for such a project: he’s not even a big opera fan. “It’s precisely the lack of real interest in what’s said or what happens that’s often the major problem.” Update: The premiere has now been postponed…

“With the Columbus Symphony Orchestra’s season swan song days away and contentious contract talks far from over, the group’s musicians are asking the board to come back to the table with the slate wiped clean and a non-binding third-party mediator in place.” The CSO board hasn’t flatly rejected the idea, but hasn’t accepted it, either.

“Universal Classics and Jazz, the worldwide market leader in classical CD sales, announced on Wednesday the formation of Universal Music Classical Artists Management and Productions. According to an internal statement the new division is meant to provide management services for and produce live events for prominent classical musicians.”