Category: music

September is the time when most orchestras settle in for the long winter season at their home concert hall, but no such relaxing schedule awaited the Cleveland Orchestra this fall. “The ensemble and music director Franz Welser-Möst began their winding journey in mid-August at Blossom Music Center [in Kent, Ohio.] Then they tested out the new concert hall at Miami’s Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, performed in eight European cities and opened the 2006-07 Severance Hall season.” Now, they’re in New York, wrapping up a 3-concert residency at Carnegie Hall.

“Physical album sales so far this year totaled 370.5 million units, down 8.3% from the 404.2 million racked up in the year-ago period. However, digital album sales climbed 115%, with 22.6 million sold through September. Downloaded tracks soared 72%, to 418.6 million.”

Dmitri Shostakovich was always the composer who couldn’t get no respect, even (or especially) in his own country. Now, with celebrations of Shostakovich’s centennial underway around the world, the birthday boy is under fire once again, this time by the Russian Orthodox Church. “The State Theater of Opera and Ballet of the Republic of Komi, a region once notorious as a center of the prison camp system, or Gulag, recently bowdlerized a commemorative performance of ‘The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda’… after the local diocese objected to the portrayal of the priest in the work.”

The much-beleagured Scottish Opera, so recently forced to shut down for a year as a federally imposed cost-cutting measure, is taking a unique approach to fund-raising for its latest production. “In an attempt to raise extra funds towards the cost of the production, and give audiences a chance to get more involved, the company offered patrons a chance to sponsor individual characters for any sum between £25 and £5,000. It was inundated with requests and ended up with each character being sponsored more than once.”

Montreal Opera was once a vibrant company on the rise, but these days, it’s happy even to still exist. “Money does make the opera world go round, and there is definitely not enough of it in the Montreal opera company coffers. The accumulated deficit is $1.95 million, generated over two years — quite a sum for a company that spent only $6.9 million in 2005-2006… There is no artistic director, Bernard Labadie having submitted his resignation in June, more or less on the grounds that in such an atmosphere there were no serious artistic decisions to be made… So what went wrong?”

The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, a regional ensemble in Canada’s most populous province, says it needs to raise CAN$2.5 million by the end of the month to avoid immediate bankruptcy. That goal might well prove unreachable – the total contributions of the orchestra’s board members to the emergency drive total only $230,000.

One day after San Francisco Opera announced an unprecedented $35 million gift, the San Francisco Symphony has great news of its own. The SFS is the recipient of a $10 million challenge grant designed to bolster its endowment, which already stands at an impressive $180 million.

As San Francisco’s arts groups rake in the cash, arts leaders in the wealthy and heavily populated Silicon Valley, less than an hour to the south, are left wondering why their own cultural scene has stalled out. “Generally speaking, people here don’t care about the arts the way people do in San Francisco. The apathy extends into the moneyed community… We probably have the greatest concentration of billionaires on the planet, yet no one steps forward to reward the organizations that are trying so hard to make this a richer, more cosmopolitan, and stimulating place to live.”

The Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic Orchestra has extended the contract of its music director, Gianandrea Noseda, through 2010. “The partnership has proven fruitful, with nine CD’s for Chandos and dynamic performances of large-scale choral works and operatic repertoire… [Noseda’s] Beethoven Symphony Cycle last year – offered free for download via the BBC’s website – won ITV’s South Bank Show Award in January.”

“Most of us have a soft spot for records, whether for the memories that the picture sleeves conjure up or simply because we think a slab of vinyl is a lovely thing. And for vinyl lovers, the news is good: last year, sales of 7in singles were 1,072,608, compared with a dismal 178,831 in 2001.”