Category: music

The oboist alleging anti-gay discrimination in his dismissal from the Buffalo Philharmonic will have his case heard by New York’s state Division of Human Rights. “Roach filed a state discrimination claim in December [2003] and less than two months later, in February 2004, was denied tenure. Roach then filed a second complaint alleging retaliation by the BPO.”

London’s Royal Festival Hall reopens next month after a major renovation designed to bring “a restored clarity” to the original 1951 design. In fact, in the hall’s relatively brief history, it has been renovated, rethought, and redesigned repeatedly, always in the hope of finally bringing a truly great concert venue to the South Bank.

As Anne Ewers prepares to take over as chief of Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, the Utah Symphony & Opera will be scrambling to replace her as CEO even as they begin to organize a search for a new music director as well. The dual challenge will likely stretch the organization’s resources.

The president of South Carolina’s Charleston Symphony Orchestra, which nearly had to shut down mid-season because of financial problems, says that the ensemble should end the year in the black without needing to tap into its credit line. The turnaround is “largely because of the efforts of the Symphony Orchestra League, a fundraising committee.”

He’s 27-year-old Finnish former heavy metal guitarist and footballer Pietari Inkinen. He replaces British conductor James Judd. Inkinen conducted his first orchestra at the age of 14 and is the youngest person to hold the key NZSO position since the 1950s.

“When you ask the players of a major orchestra what they want in a conductor, they answer almost as one: a great musician steeped in the heritage and repertory, an interpreter of insight and depth with the technical skill to convey ideas and elicit results. In other words, they want someone who reminds them of the master teachers they revered in music school. Naturally, others in the orchestral circle have their own ideas of what to look for in a music director.”

“Plans call for New World Symphony to move from its converted movie theatre premises to a new 700-seat concert hall designed by Frank Gehry. It would be hard to imagine an orchestra more deserving.”

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross is off on the kind of road trip usually favored by baseball nuts, only with orchestras. If all goes well, he’ll see concerts by the resident symphonies of Indianapolis, Nashville, and Birmingham within a single 36-hour period.

The battle over music piracy and illegal downloading has been going on for years now, but it’s sort of difficult for an independent observer to whip up any sort of real sympathy for anyone involved in the debate. The people downloading free songs are thieves (yes, they are,) the recording industry trying to stop them is made up of a bunch of greedy corporate bullies, and everyone just seems to be looking out for their own wallet.

Amateur orchestras are everywhere, fed and cared for by groups of musicians whose commitment to music is matched only by their inability to play it at anything approaching a professional level. So why not embrace the half-baked quality of performance? Scotland’s Really Terrible Orchestra (yes, that’s really its name) has done exactly that: “the RTO website proudly states that the main ethos of the orchestra is a commitment to lowering standards wherever possible.”