Category: music

Colorado Symphony music director Jeffrey Kahane was diagnosed with severe hypertension in March, and hasn’t conducted since. But his medical leave is set to end this month, and Kahane is reducing his commitments for future seasons in an effort to avoid a repeat crisis.

“Look at our opera stages: underused and unloved, the understudy who triumphs is rare. Why? because they have so few opportunities. Typically, operas run for six or seven performances across two months, compared with the nightly schlepp of a West End hit. Of course, opera singers do fall ill, but even then an understudy can be denied his or her chance. Covent Garden, for instance, will jet in a big-name singer when there’s a perfectly adequate understudy waiting in the wings.”

The internet retailer will sell downloads without copy restrictions. “Millions of songs will be sold without Digital Rights Management (DRM) software, allowing – for example – customers to burn their own CDs freely. Amazon says it will launch the new store later this year.”

The Dallas Symphony has canceled a planned performance of Britten’s War Requiem because of money. “We were reviewing the budget for next year, and we determined the need to make a few programming adjustments. It’s a very expensive piece to produce, and we just determined it would be prudent to postpone it.”

Ontario’s Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, which came dangerously close to shutting down earlier this season, has presented a new financial plan it says will keep the orchestra solvent going forward. A key component of the plan will be boosting the KWSO’s endowment, and new directors of marketing and development are being sought.

“Having come through the financial struggles that jeopardized its continued existence earlier this year, the Opera Orchestra of New York has announced a complete three-work season for 2007-08… Reports of OONY’s money woes seem to have galvanized what company spokespeople describe as an outpouring of support from legions of fans, many of the opera world’s leading singers, and members of the orchestra.”

The Budapest Symphony is one of Europe’s oldest orchestras, established in 1853 and playing concerts ever since in the celebrated Hungarian State Opera House. But this year, the Hungarian government declined to pay the usual subsidy that kept the orchestra afloat, and the organization finds itself scrambling to find new revenues to replace the public funds.

“Writing for the concert hall means waiting for a commission (probably for a concert opener, if it’s an orchestral gig; maybe an unusual chamber combination if you’re lucky), writing the piece, and much later on hearing it played two or three times as a novelty, or as a warm-up to masterpieces of the established canon. Your overture, no matter how good, probably won’t have a chance with audiences against the Mozart concerto that follows it and that Schubert/Brahms/Tchaikovsky symphony after intermission.” For the theatre, on the other hand…

The Metropolitan Opera saw a seven percent increase in ticket sales this season. “It was the opera house’s first ticket-sale increase by season in six years, with 810,225 sold, compared with 755,255 in 2005-06, Gelb said today in an interview. In all, the Met sold 83.9 percent of tickets offered this season for its 3,800-seat opera house at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, compared with 76.8 percent last year.”

“More than anything else, Peter Gelb’s first season as general manager of the Met will be remembered for his video innovation, transmitting six operas live around the world in high-definition as part of a series that will expand to eight productions next season.”