Category: music

Superstar tenor Placido Domingo is teaming up with the Vienna Philharmonic for a unique project designed to bring assistance to the hearing impaired in developing countries. “A key issue is some people’s reluctance to use a hearing-enhancing device for fear of appearing elderly or handicapped, or being ridiculed… Domingo and members of the Vienna orchestra were expected at a Carnegie Hall news conference on Tuesday to announce the new, non-profit Hear the World Foundation, based in Zurich, Switzerland.”

“The new contract calls for incremental pay raises over the next four years. The current 52-week minimum salary for rank-and-file ASO musicians is $79,300. That figure will rise to $88,400 by the 2010-2011 season.”

“For at least two years the players have been leaking to the press their complaints about Mr. Eschenbach, who is said to be willful in his interpretations and inefficient in rehearsals. Though he almost always seems a kinetic and limber presence on the podium, the musicians maintain that Mr. Eschenbach, 66, has gotten lost during performances.”

“Lawrence A. (Larry) Johnson has joined the Miami Herald as its classical music critic, effective immediately. In so doing, he exits the South Florida Sun-Sentinel after six years, where he had succeeded Tim Smith, now at the Baltimore Sun. The Sun-Sentinel will not replace Johnson and has apparently eliminated his position.”

The LA Philharmonic music director has taken a post with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. “The cost of touring a U.S. orchestra, combined with union restrictions and post-9/11 fears, keep these ensembles mostly at home, to the mounting frustration of European maestros. Five top American orchestras — Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Detroit — lack a music director. While it might be premature to say conductors are deserting the U.S. in droves, one has only to look at the burgeoning London landscape to compare crisis with progressive renewal.”

Older people are now the biggest market for music. “The graying of the music market crept up on America. Now they control too much disposable income — and live too long — to be ignored. And nowhere is the shift in attitudes more pronounced than in the beleaguered pop music business, which desperately needs their money (who do you think is buying all those $750 Barbra Streisand tickets?) and shares their aversion to illicit music downloads.”

In the current New Crowned Hope Festival, “Vienna has entrusted Peter Sellars, the festival’s director, with creating a four-week event within the official Mozart Year 2006 festivities and has given him a budget of nearly $13 million with which to do so. The opera and theater director, who has previously created festivals in Los Angeles and Adelaide, Australia, that were more ambitious than those cities could accept, has now been allowed to think on the scale he has always wanted. And, as before, he has thought globally and controversially.”

A Thai composer says government officials threatened to ban his opera just before it was due to open. “The composer said officials told him that any misfortunes which befell those in power would be blamed on the opera.”

“Miya Masaoka is a composer, koto player and inventor of the Laser Koto — a tripod-mounted laser array that she plays by passing her hands through the beams, triggering a variety of sampled and processed sounds from her G4 PowerBook. Each flick of the wrist and twitch of the finger is interpreted as a stroke on the instrument’s virtual strings.”

“It is the fifth-largest private gift ever to an American orchestra, said Larry Tamburri, the PSO president. The gift is meant to give the orchestra some short-term breathing room while it restructures its long-term budgeting and goals.”