Category: music

Pianist Andrei Gavrilov won the Tchaikovsky Competition at age 18. By age 30, he was a bona fide superstar with a dazzling array of career options. “It’s been all downhill since – a story of abandoned concerts, loss of confidence, the end of the [record] deal, a broken marriage. It was a personal and artistic implosion, though which fed which is hard to say.” Now Gavrilov is attempting a comeback. But will the music world give him a chance?

Choral singing is booming in Norway like never before, and not always in the concert hall. “Companies have also discovered that encouraging song in the workplace can boost morale. Employees who sing in a company choir do a better job, some say, and choirs are seen as a means of fostering creativity among staff.”

“San Francisco Opera has ended the fiscal year 2006 with a surplus of more than half a million dollars on a budget of more than $60 million. The audited final figure for the surplus is $557,367 on an annual operating budget of $60,401,983. The company’s operating revenue grew by almost 23%, from $24,292,464 to $29,866,346, with income from ticket sales for the core season surpassing $20 million for the first time in four years.”

Ontario’s Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, which recently averted bankruptcy, has offered its music directorship to Edwin Outwater. “Outwater, who recently concluded his tenure as resident conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, has accepted a four-year contract with the KWS which begins with the 2007-08 season. He has also agreed to serve as artistic advisor in preparation of plans for the coming season.”

Anne Applebaum was in attendance this week when Deutsche Oper’s controversial production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” premiered, severed prophet heads and all, and she writes that the supposedly inflammatory scene isn’t really the issue. “If one were trying to understand German society, or Western culture, or even Mozart by watching this production, one would have been seriously confused… Why did the first scene take place at a black table, for example, around which sat corpses? Why did the satyrs wear phalluses on top of their furry costumes?”

“Daniel Pinkham, a composer who had shared his music with peers and students at the New England Conservatory and the King’s Chapel since the late 1950s, has died of leukemia, according to colleagues… He was a prolific and generous composer concerned with making his music accessible to the masses.”

As orchestras begin to wade into the vast world of online music, most acknowledge that the investment likely won’t pay off big in the short term. Still, the Philadelphia Orchestra, which recently launched an in-house, online store offering downloadable recordings and live concerts, “hopes that one day the orchestra can earn 10 percent to 15 percent of its budget through its online store – including not only recordings but also advertising and sponsorships.”

Time magazine is out with a list of the 100 greatest albums of all time. What a bunch of hooey, suggests Frank J. Oteri. The list ignores most jazz and has no classical music. It is, he writes, “further proof that mainstream journalism totally doesn’t get the big picture when it comes to the music of our time.”

“The Deutsche Oper’s production of Mozart’s ‘Idomeneo’ (1781), which contains a severed head of the prophet Muhammad, passed off peaceably. A small group of Christians quietly held placards before the show. During the performance, there were two gentle ‘boos,’ countered by two polite ‘bravos.’ After so many overheated jeremiads and terrorist warnings in the press, it was a bit of a let-down.”

The Oregon Symphony’s new manager says bold steps are needed if she’s going to save the orchestra. What needs changing, according to her analysis? “We do a lot of classical programming.” Too much, she means. “At the beginning of the 21st century, you can no longer look at any market as homogenous. You’ve got to find niche markets, and I don’t see too much of that here.”