Category: music

Early this week, rumors were rampant in the orchestra biz that Edmonton Symphony managing director Elaine Calder was about to be snatched up as the next president of the Oregon Symphony. As it turns out, the rumors weren’t true, but Calder has agreed to serve as a consultant in Portland. The unusual arrangement will require the Edmonton Symphony board to approve Calder’s double duty.

Anyone who doubted whether a fully staged production of Wagner’s Ring could thrive at a suburban opera house (in this case, the Orange County Performing Arts Center outside L.A.) clearly doesn’t understand the obsessive nature of Wagner devotees. “If you stage the operas, pretty much anywhere, they will come, from pretty much anywhere else… ‘It helps to be a bit mad,'” says one Ring addict.

Opera tends to be a fairly rigid form, from the narrow range of repertoire embraced by its devotees to the seemingly unbreakable tradition of the evening performance. But in the last several years, Lyric Opera of Chicago has discovered a surprising niche audience that has apparently been patiently waiting for someone to start offering weekday matinees. “The decision to add the extra matinees may have had a Field of Dreams effect on a certain demographic — the one made up of folks who might not feel quite as energetic as they used to when it comes to staying awake through an evening three-hour opera and, possibly, a long drive back to the suburbs around midnight.”

As Ontario’s Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony continues its drive to raise the $2.5 million it needs to avoid bankruptcy, civic leaders are debating whether public money should be spent to help bail out what some see as an expensive and culturally irrelevant organization. Some observers are also concerned that helping the symphony achieve its short-term funding goal would only delay the organization’s inevitable collapse.

Huge, acoustically superior new concert halls designed by superstar architects are all well and good for orchestras that can afford them, but those can be counted on one hand. So what is everyone else supposed to do to improve the quality of live sound? A California company is marketing its supposedly undetectable electronic enhancement systems. There’s plenty of resistance, of course, but “we live in an electronic, computerized, rock ‘n’ roll world. How can electronics be kept at bay in the concert hall?”

The former executive director of a small regional orchestra in Indiana has been arrested and charged with solicitation of a minor. Edward Williams, formerly the head of the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra, was arrested when he traveled to an Indianapolis suburb to meet what he thought was a 15-year-old girl he had chatted with online. The “girl” was, in fact, a police officer. The orchestra, which had already cut ties with Williams, is stunned by the news.

Austin City Limits, the popular public television program featuring live performances by up-and-coming musical acts in various genres, is getting a splashy new home, courtesy of a major downtown development plan in the city known as America’s indie-music capital. The new venue will triple the size of the ACL audience, and bring the popular performances downtown for the first time.

Tower Records is having a giant going-out-of-business sale before closing its doors. “In a download-happy, file-swapping era, the discreet joys of browsing among record racks and losing oneself in reverie while pondering album cover art — the boilerplate experience of shopping at a brick-and-mortar outlet operated for and by music lovers — seem lost on a generation of young shoppers.”

Ten media outlets voted on the best orchestras. The Vienna Philharmonic tops the list, barely edging out the Royal Concertgebouw…

“Big-band leader Toshiko Akiyoshi, pianist Ramsey Lewis and vocalist Jimmy Scott were among those selected by the National Endowment for the Arts as the newest jazz masters, the nation’s highest jazz honor.”