Category: music

The Glastonbury Festival has been swamped with orders for tickets. With 145,000 tickets up for grabs, organisers have announced that as many as 395,000 people have registered to buy one.

New Yorkers are buzzing about Gerard Mortier’s appointment to lead NY City Opera. But Parisians offer a reality check: “Some see his tenure here as a disappointment; most view it as a failure, marked by hostile, sagging audiences, acid press criticism and unfilled promise. His campaign to ‘reinvent opera’ has yet to show any positive effect, and with his penchant for intemperate public statements and his widely criticized management style, one has to wonder how his tenure in New York will unfold.”

“Every generation finds new and better ways to ruin things, and one of the best today is the classical ring tone, which follows in the noble tradition of turning snippets of serious music into theme songs for radio shows, backgrounds to TV commercials, medleys on greatest hits records and divertissements in elevators.”

“The founder and artistic director of Ottawa’s Chamber Music Festival resigned suddenly Tuesday. Julian Armour, who started the festival in 1994 and helped build it into the world’s largest during his 13 years as artistic director, blamed differences in vision between himself and the board of directors of the Ottawa Chamber Music Society.”

The Baltimore Symphony’s decision to slash all its subscription ticket prices to $25 for Marin Alsop’s first season as music director is already paying off in a big way. “When the box office opened last Saturday morning, about 150 people were already in line at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, ready to snap up the tickets. [Alsop] was on hand to give out doughnuts to the eager subscribers.”

The moment Gerard Mortier was named as the new director of New York City Opera, the speculation began: would Mortier be able to build his new company into a formidable challenger to Peter Gelb’s Met? Charles Michener says that every American opera lovel should be hoping that he can. “The most salutary thing that could happen to opera in New York would be for the David and the Goliath of Lincoln Center to go head to head. May the best–not necessarily the biggest–man win.”

The Cleveland Orchestra took a chance last month, making a new live concert recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony without actually having a deal in place with any record label to market and distribute the disc. But it didn’t take long to find a partner – Deutsche Grammophon, which has a long history with the orchestra, will release the recording this fall.

“Miguel Harth-Bedoya, music director of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, has agreed to a three-year contract extension that will keep him in the post through June 2011… Under his leadership, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra has expanded its schedule and raised its profile and artistic standards, offering more music year-round and attracting top players in key positions.”

German-born conductor Andreas Delfs has been named the next music director of the Honolulu Symphony, beginning in the fall. Delfs is soon to leave his decade-long music directorship with the Milwaukee Symphony, and in Hawaii, he will inherit a financially strapped ensemble in need of strong leadership.

France is tired of losing in the Eurovision Song Contest. So it’s undertaking a national effort to win. “We’ve had enough of being humiliated by Ukraine and of calamitous scores well behind Bosnia-Herzegovina or Macedonia. France wants to reclaim its dominant position . . . Operation reconquest has begun.”