Category: music

The English National Opera has seemed to be in a perpetual state of crisis over the past few years. So when Edward Gardner signed on to be the company’s new music director, the question most observers had was why he would have wanted the job. “Is this inexperienced young man – whose biggest job to date has been as music director of Glyndebourne’s touring arm, hardly the white-hot centre of searing controversy – up to the traumas of being a public figure as well as the musical heart of this well-loved but somewhat disaster-prone company?”

Sixteen years ago the Philadelphia Orchestra embarked on a diversity campaign. “But in 2007 the orchestra is no closer to representing the city’s diversity. Peer out into Verizon Hall, where the audience is a sea of white faces. (Only 1 percent of subscribers were African American as of the last count, in 2001, the orchestra says.) Look onstage. Three players are African American – the same three whose arrival in the early 1970s elicited headlines that barriers in the orchestra world were crumbling. Go behind the scenes. The orchestra’s board has less African American representation than it did in 1991.”

The music director of North Carolina’s Charlotte Symphony announced his departure recently, citing exhaustion and the intense pressure of dealing with the orchestra’s “financial situation” as factors in his decision. So what will it take to put the orchestra on firm fiscal ground? A lot of things, as it turns out. The endowment must be built up, more tickets must be sold, and most importantly, a city with little to no history of high-end cultural philanthropy needs to discover one, and fast.

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra was recently asked to produce a list of all the things it would do if money was no object. The resulting list of ideas – a series of top-drawer commissions, a new conductor set to make a significant impact on the SCO’s programming and profile, and a standardisation of its ticket prices that includes reductions of up to 50% on the most expensive – was enough to convince the Scottish Executive to come through with an additional £350,000 of funding, a significant boost for the ensemble.

“Nearly 15 years after our launch, the belief persists that Classic FM should become a mirror-image of BBC Radio 3. But there is already an excellent service funded by the licence fee, which aims to super-serve an audience of classical music connoisseurs. Classic FM creates programmes for everyone else – that great mass of classical music lovers who do not consider themselves to be part of the artistic elite. We have 5.8 million people tuning in each week: and 900,000 of Radio 3’s two million listeners also switch over to Classic FM at some time each week.”

“It has long been obvious that exponents of bel canto have a tendency to obesity. But now, thanks to researchers at the Catholic University in Rome, we know they are also unusually prone to ‘wet burping’.”

Joni Mitchell is the latest pop star to write classical music. “I guess that the trouble is – and I hope this doesn’t sound condescending, because I have huge admiration for their gifts – that Joni, Elvis, Damon and co haven’t troubled to develop a technique with which to negotiate these larger forms. They may listen enthusiastically to Bach, Wagner, Debussy and Stravinsky, but there’s something superficial and magpie-like about the way they pick up on them.”

“Are these the final days of hi-fi sound? Judging by the 2 billion songs downloaded from Apple Inc.’s iTunes service, the ubiquity of white iPod ear buds, and the hundreds of thousands of folks file-sharing for free, the answer is yes.”

CD sales fell 13 percent last year. “Though sales of music in digital formats such as downloads and mobile ringtones more than doubled in some cases during the year, digital sales did not grow fast enough to cover the revenue gap caused by the downturn in CD sales. Consequently overall music sales were down by 6.2 percent to $11.51 billion.”

“The Munich Philharmonic is set to replace general manager Wouter Hoekstra after his falling-out with the orchestra and its musical director, the city’s mayor said Tuesday. Mayor Christian Ude determined the relationship between Christian Thielemann and Hoekstra was ‘shattered’ after he was called in to help seek a solution, Ude’s office said in a statement. It didn’t elaborate on the nature of the dispute.”