Category: music

So Roberto Alagna walked out on La Scala, writes Manuela Hoelterhoff. La Scala is hostile territory. “Baiting singers is part of the La Scala experience, though the recent makeover of the theater eliminated the standing room once occupied by La Scala’s polarizing claques.”

Daniel Wakin says that while the opera world is full of outsize egos, Roberto Alagna’s onstage tantrum this week is one for the ages. Moreover, Alagna’s subsequent ban from the La Scala stage affects more than just a week’s worth of ticketbuyers in Milan. “The cancellations will also probably trouble executives at Decca Classics, which was making a DVD of the production. No decision has been made about whether to issue it.” UPDATE: Here’s the video of the walkout

The family foundation of pianist Carol Colburn Hogel has donated £500,000 to allow the Edinburgh International Festival to clear some of its mounting debt. “Grants from the Dunard Fund, financed by the family business, have run from concerts by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to exhibitions at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. This year alone it will give away about £1.5 million. It has also built a reputation as a donor that responds quickly, without layers of red tape.”

Musically speaking, Venezuela is best known for “pulsating salsa and down-home folk ballads, songs with bawdy lyrics played on four-string guitars and maracas. But for 31 years, an ambitious state program aimed at instilling a love of classical music in children — particularly poor children — has drawn the admiration of conductors from as far away as Berlin and Boston, while producing musicians who have excelled in Europe’s most hallowed concert halls.”

Plans for a new performing arts center in Bakersfield, California, are in flux after the initial cost estimate for the project came in at a whopping $341m. If built, the center would play host to the Bakersfield Symphony and other area arts groups, but several of the project’s prominent backers pulled their support after seeing what it would cost.

To most orchestras, “youth outreach” means packing a couple thousand kids into a concert hall and playing music at them for an hour or so. But the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is offering four local junior high students an opportunity to really get inside the orchestra’s head – the four will join the SPCO for its upcoming European tour, and will report back to their classmates via blogs, radio, and video.

Tenor Roberto Alagna walked off stage in mid-performance after the audience booed him. “What if they had thrown stones at me, or some crazy person had attacked me? La Scala should have protected me. The show should have been suspended. Instead they carried on as if nothing had happened. After all, John Lennon ended up being killed.”

Vienna’s International Mozart Foundation is offering free downloads of Mozart scores. “More than 600 musical scores are available for download on a new site, set up at the end of the year marking the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. The site received 400,000 hits in its first 12 hours of operation on Monday, so many visitors that it became overloaded.”

Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin is to succeed Valery Gergiev as music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, effective Sept. 2008. Nézet-Séguin, 31, is the current artistic director and principal conductor of the Orchestre Metropolitan in Montreal.