Category: music

“Mack Wilberg, who has earned international acclaim as a composer and arranger of religious music, is the new director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir… He replaces Craig Jessop, who resigned earlier this month.”

Craig Jessop, who resigned abruptly as director of the Mormon Tabernacle choir last month, will apparently become head of Utah State University’s music department. “Jessop’s resignation fueled widespread and continuing speculation about his reasons for leaving.”

A group of fans and supporters of the beleagured Columbus Symphony are launching a web site designed to call attention to the CSO’s struggles and connect more music lovers to the orchestra. “Though the management’s call to cut both the symphony’s size and the length of its season has caused angry divisions between it and the musicians, the website’s founders plan to promote the orchestra without favoring one side over the other.”

A regional orchestra in New Zealand has been stirring up debate recently, claiming that too much government funding goes to the Wellington-based New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, at the expense of smaller groups that need the funds more. Now, the NZSO’s CEO is firing back, and the media have picked up the scent…

Violinist Maxim Vengerov is one of the world’s best, but repeated shoulder injuries have sidelined him often in recent years. Now, Vengerov says he will put down his violin completely to focus on his other love, conducting.

New EU workplace noise regulations have thrown orchestras “into a tailspin. They are spending tens of thousands of pounds consulting acoustic engineers and compiling complex databases, installing noise-reducing screens and buying earplugs for their players.” The regulations were meant to protect factory workers from excessive noise. “The irony is that for orchestras noise is their business.”

“No glare is more searing in the operatic world than that which beats down on the opera Norma… The title character’s music is early 19th-century bel canto – great stuff – with vocal lines as intricately woven as lace. The soprano/mezzo-soprano duets can be especially thrilling. None of this, however, quite explains why the opera’s infrequent productions are greeted with such profound reverence and reality-defying expectation.”

“If successful, plans now being hatched by the Toronto Symphony and the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa would create an international summer music festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake by 2012. The ambitious scheme, which could cost $50 to $100 million, would transform a 100-hectare site at the north end of town into a 2,000-seat outdoor amphitheatre.”

“The swift collapse of Red (an orchestra) two weeks ago came as a surprise to everyone who thought the audacious Cleveland ensemble was on the right artistic and financial track… Until this season, its sixth, Red appeared to be a model arts organization. But a crisis evidently had been simmering.”

“A day after posting a first-quarter loss of 12 billion Swiss francs ($11.9 billion), UBS AG, Europe’s biggest bank by assets, defended its sponsorship of the London Symphony Orchestra, which runs until 2010… UBS backs nearly two dozen orchestras and festivals across Europe and the U.S.”