Category: music

The Dallas Opera has avoided a strike by musicians. The new contract provides raises of 3 percent in each of the first three years, 4.8 percent in the fourth year and 5 percent in the final year. The cumulative impact will be a pay raise a little over 20 percent.”

Its facade may be one of the world’s most recognizable sights, but inside, the Sydney Opera House is a cramped, outmoded and fast-aging structure. Some essential renovations are already planned, but “the big question is: should other work be undertaken at the same time that would ensure the Opera House has a future as a venue for the art form for which it was built?” It could cost as much as AUS$700 million…

Actually, the Sydney Opera House would probably not be that troublesome a space if not for the fact that some people continue to insist on performing operas in it. “We could fix its faults by admitting it is not an opera house at all, never will be. It is not, really, architecture. It is a fabulous, transcendent piece of sculpture. Iconography, even. No one expects the Eiffel Tower or the pyramids to do clever things with sound waves. Just bouncing the photons keeps the cameras happy. Ask Frank Gehry. Ask George Pell: isn’t that what icons do?”

New York’s classical music scene is moving out of the concert hall and into some unlikely locales. “Spurred on by a growing number of offbeat performance venues and enterprising young classical musicians, New York is experiencing a boom in small, largely below-the-radar concert series. There are opera nights at a Lower East Side dive bar, chamber music concerts at a boxing gym beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, contemporary music at a cabaret in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and avant-garde fare in a silo on the banks of an industrial canal.”

The musicians of the Dallas Opera orchestra have rejected a new contract that both sides believed was settled earlier this week. For the moment, the orchestra is continuing to work, though it hasn’t ruled out a strike. At issue is a provision in the new contract which would have reduced, through attrition, the number of core players in the ensemble.

Earlier this week, BBC Radio 3, the Beeb’s classical station, announced changes to its schedule which may (or may not) result in far fewer live performances being broadcast. The changes are causing no small amount of consternation in Britain’s classical music world: “The station has ventured quite far from its traditional ground. In 1992, Radio 3 was described in the BBC’s annual report as ‘the UK’s leading patron and broadcaster of classical music’. In the same document, in 2004, it was described as providing ‘a broad spectrum of classical music, jazz, world music, drama and arts discussions’. That is quite a shift.”

“A new collective bargaining agreement between the San Francisco Opera and the union representing solo singers, chorus members, dancers and the production staff promises labor peace in what has often been a tempestuous relationship.”

Chicago’s OperaMode is making one of opera divas. “Some singers declined, fearing the exposure would harm their budding careers. Others stuck out more than their necks. Within a couple of weeks, OperaModa had 40 applicants for 13 slots.”

Frederic Rzewski is, writes Mark Swed, “the greatest pianist-composer of our time and something of a legend in modern music. Less a Beethoven, perhaps, than a latter-day leftist Liszt, Rzewski is also our anti-Liszt. He refuses to play the celebrity or music industry game. He operates as a hit-and-run artist, usually gone before you know what hit you.”

The old Tulsa Philharmonic went under four years ago. Friday night, the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra opened its first concert season ever with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.