Category: music

It was a good year for upstate New York’s Rochester Philharmonic, where attendance for the 2005-06 season rose 6.5% and the orchestra ended the year with an $18,000 surplus on a $9 million budget. The ensemble has also committed to a strategic plan which calls for raising the salaries of its musicians to stay competitive with other orchestras its size.

Symphony Silicon Valley, which was created out of the ashes of the defunct San Jose Symphony in 2002, has balanced its books for the second year in a row. “The symphony showed a small decline in contributions, partially due to the bankruptcy of Calpine, previously its largest corporate sponsor. But the combination of low overhead and a marked increase in ticket sales had the effect of stabilizing finances. The orchestra’s endowment also showed modest growth.”

These days, anyone with a computer can record music. “But what is it that gives certain studios an aura, while others are cold and sterile? Today, technology allows whole albums to be recorded in a bedroom – yet still the great studios have high prices and long waiting lists.”

The Cincinnati Symphony is projecting a $2 million-plus deficit for the current fiscal year. “The short-term culprit for the deficit is a reduced contribution from the orchestra’s $73.1 million endowment… Two years ago, the CSO raised ticket prices but saw a bigger drop in its subscription sales than it anticipated, Reynolds said. And it negotiated a three-year musicians’ contract that froze salaries the first two years. But wages are scheduled to increase 2.4 percent this year.”

Donald Rosenberg says that the Metropolitan Opera’s new high-tech simulcasts, which allow opera lovers across the country to view live productions at their local movie theaters, is a revolutionary idea that is long overdue. “The close-ups allow us to take in facial expressions we might miss when sitting in an actual opera house. The shots from the stage into the theater provide perspectives most audience members never see. The experience is no substitute for the real, visceral thing, but it’s far better than merely listening to the matinee on the radio.”

Italian conductor Nicola Luisotti has been appointed music director of the San Francisco Opera, succeeding Donald Runnicles, who departs the post at the end of the 2008-09 season. Luisotti, who made his debut the company in 2005, will conduct a minimum of four productions each season. “Luisotti’s rise as a conductor has been strikingly rapid, dating from his international debut in Stuttgart in 2002. Since then, he has made acclaimed debuts in Paris, Toronto, Munich and Los Angeles.”

“If jazz is characterized as a blend of European and African elements that could only have taken place in America, then the French are entitled to take credit for the Old World side of that equation.”

David Patrick Stearns weighs in on “Bellini’s less watchable, theatrically antiquated I Puritani,” the Metropolitan Opera’s second simulcast offering. “A lesson lies in some of those 3-D movies from the 1950s: Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder is basically a stage play on film. That isn’t a problem with a 3-D print that puts you in the same room as the actors, but in a conventional print it’s as static as I Puritani. In present form, simulcasts are just a better variation on what came before. It’s still a relay medium.”

“Operetta, once the most popular European form of musical theater, has declined in its native lands, while in the United States it never caught on strongly. Today Johann Strauss’s ‘Fledermaus’ and Franz Lehar’s ‘Merry Widow’ are the only two operettas Americans are likely to have encountered, apart from the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.” A festival called Mostly Operetta, presented this month in New York by the Austrian Cultural Forum, updates the aging art form and puts it in an intimate space.

Most record labels prefer music formats such as the ones sold by Apple’s iTunes, because they make it harder for people to share music. But “evidence is mounting that major labels may start to prefer the MP3 format, as impossible as that used to seem. Here are seven reasons why MP3 is the future of the music industry.