Category: music

For Phyllida Lloyd, directing theatre is in many ways vastly preferable to directing opera. “So why would I direct opera? Because when the conditions are right, to be a part of that massive collaboration with 80 musicians in the pit and 100 on the stage is to be part of something much greater than oneself, to help to give the audience a raw emotional experience like no other. Opera operates on a subterranean level and can reach parts of you that other art forms really do struggle to reach. Opera is an event.”

Hip-Hop, an American art form that went global long ago, might seem an odd fit with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, but planning for a major exhibition on hip-hop culture is under way there.

“Not so long ago, complete performances of the Ring presented within six days, as Wagner intended, were infrequent outside of Bayreuth. (The premiere took place in the span of five days.) But in the last 25 years, producing the Ring has almost become a calling card for any company claiming top-rank status in the opera world.”

Plenty of orchestras have embraced the trend of performing concert versions of the musical scores to video games, so it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Houston Symphony is planning a concert of music from the National Football League. You didn’t know the NFL produced original music? Silly you. The league has, in fact, had not one but three composers on call over the last 40 years, writing the full orchestral scores you hear under the voice of Harry Kalas on the film-quality highlight reels put out by NFL Films.

A new online music service making use of the motto “We Are Not Evil” is bucking industry trends and bypassing what it sees as an obstructionist recording industry. “Magnatune sets out to be fair and friendly to both artists and consumers. You can listen to any Magnatune album streamed complete for free from its website, download it for a suggested fee of $8, or order it on a finished CD (suggested price $8 a disc, plus $4.97 for duplication costs and postage). Fifty percent of all revenues go directly to the artist(s). All music on Magnatune has been cleared for licensing, so it can be broadcast or used in films or other audiovisual and Web-based productions.” And yes, Magnatune has plenty of classical…

The West Virginia Symphony has been in debt since the moment it moved into its new home at Charleston’s Clay Center three years ago, and the orchestra is hoping a major endowment drive will plug the seemingly permanent hole in its finances. The WVS’s accumulated debt stands at nearly $800,000, with $640,000 more on various credit lines. Worse, the orchestra’s subscriber base is less than half what it was a decade ago, and cuts to the musicians’ roster and the season schedule have done nothing to alleviate the problem.

The former president of the Buffalo local of the American Federation of Musicians has pled guilty to embezzling $74,000 from the musicians he purported to represent. Mark Jones “charged items on the local union’s credit card, then charged the same items to the parent union and pocketed the money… Jones repaid $21,000 of the amount he had taken before the investigation began, and has since repaid nearly all the rest, according to the United States Attorney’s office.”

Upstate New York’s Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra has set an in-house fundraising record for the second year in a row, taking in nearly $2.2 million for the 2006 fiscal year. “At a time when many orchestras in the country are posting deficits, the RPO, flush from its fundraising success, made another kind of record this week, a recording of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F.”

The Edmonton Symphony has resolved a long-running dispute with the Winspear Centre for Music over the estate of a deceased philanthropist. “[Stuart] Davis, who died in July 2005, was a great supporter of both the Winspear Centre and the ESO, which plays at the venue. Symphony officials had been under the impression that Davis, a retired professor who found success on the stock market, had left a substantial bequest to the company in his will.” When the truth turned out to be far more complicated, lawyers got involved and the dispute spilled into the press. Under the settlement, the ESO will get several hundred thousand dollars, and the Centre will get nearly CAN$2 million.

Bayreuth has only just opened and German newspapers are pondering whether the festival circuit has become too much. “The festivals in Bayreuth and Salzburg are the most prominent examples of an increasingly close network of festivals that now stretch across Europe from the south Pole to Andalusia,”