Category: music

Last year several executives and board members of the Honolulu Symphony resigned after the musicians themselves audited management practices. The orchestra is still looking for a new music director, but a new manaqgement team is beginning the task of rebuilding the organization.

The biggest sign, writes Norman Lebrecht, is that “the BBC announced Jiri Belohlavek last year as chief conductor of its flagship ensemble, times of music downloads, media convergence and multi-skilling. Broadcast orchestras are breaking out of stereotype, as the BBC Philharmonic demonstrated from Manchester with its million-download Beethoven cycle. The whispering Czech was hired for London to raise standards and restore self-belief.”

The Belgian chamber orchestra that put itself up for sale on eBay has taken down the ofer after bidding topped 100,000 Euros. “eBay representatives had contacted orchestra management over the weekend and reminded them of two important facts. First, listing, bidding and sale on eBay constitute a binding contract: the seller must sell the object listed to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder must pay the price he or she bid. Second, buying and selling people is against the law.”

New York City Opera has had a rough few years. High among those problems is the company’s stymied search for a new home. “Over just the last few years, the company has publicly debated renovating the State Theater (a plan abandoned after differences with the ballet); building a new home in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center (vetoed by the Metropolitan Opera and Beverly Sills, then Lincoln Center chairwoman); moving downtown near the World Trade Center site (where it lost out to other arts groups); and moving into a reconfigured City Center building (deemed too small for the necessary scenery fly space).”

The Israeli government ranks the country’s orchestras based on examintaion by a committee of 13 auditors. “The vote rates only two groups – the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra and the 21st Century Ensemble (which specializes in modern music) – as ‘excellent.’ Three other orchestras were classified as “good” – those of Rishon Letzion, Jerusalem and Haifa – as were the Israel Camerata, the Tel Aviv Soloists and the Israel Baroque Orchestra.” The orchestras that ranked only “satisfactory” or below were told they have to improve.

As Daniel Barenboim was finishing his tenure as music director, a group of Chicago Symphony musicians got together and voted to name him their honorary “Music Director for Life”. But now other musicians who were not present at the meeting are objecting that the designation was not put to a vote of the entire orchestra.

“Big-name, established acts with fleets of buses feel the gouge of those gas prices, but the initial pain is softened by the equally big bucks they bring in. It’s the smaller bands living hand-to-mouth on the road that are feeling the money pinch the hardest. The price of gas has forced many to rethink how they travel. A new practicality — a rare condition for free-wheeling rock bands — is becoming the norm.”

“The iPod experience is a smooth ride, as sleek and impervious as the minicomputer itself-set it to shuffle and you’re sealed up in a dream machine, a twinkling drift through your own forgotten highlights. But for the Gen X-ers among us there’s a problem. The signal squeezed through an iPod’s white earbuds is not the warm and spacious headphone mindblow of old; to me it sounds bruisingly compressed, stripped of nuance, all bunched up in the midrange. Increasing the volume only distorts the bass and produces a nasty precipitation of treble, as if the drummer is flogging his cymbals with bicycle chains.”

CD sales are down in the first half of 2006 by 3.4 percent. Yes downloads are up, but they don’t make up the gap. And “cassettes, are on their way to join vinyl and 8-tracks on Boot Hill. Cassette music sales fell a whopping 54 percent in the first half of 2006, peddling only 632,00 units, compared to the 1.3 million tapes sold in the first two quarters of ’05.”

“This is the seventh time in the past two decades that a Quebec government has promised a new home for the [Montreal Symphony]. One could put together a modest bus tour of all the sites around Montreal that have been touted as the orchestra’s future address. This one will be different… because the plan is clear and the process foolproof. A private developer will design and build a hall to the orchestra’s specifications (1,900 seats, shoebox shape), assume all the risks of construction and pocket $105-million during the course of a 40-year lease by the province. At the end of the lease, the province would own the building.”