Category: music

Director Trevor Nunn is turning Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” (the opera) into “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” (a musical). So why does such a great opera need to be reimagined (or at least repackaged)? “It’s the most sensational, wonderful, wonderful score, and so many of the people in the world know it but they don’t know they know it,” Mr. Nunn said in a telephone interview yesterday from London, where he was attending auditions. The problem, he said, was that the operagoing audience is small.

A new study reports that “one in five Americans over the age of 12 now own a portable digital music device, and one in 20 of those quizzed said they possessed more than one.”

London’s South Bank Center is reopening next year after a 110 million pound makeover. What will go inside? A plan has been announced “intended as a radical blueprint for a new era of cultural activity in Britain’s most prestigious and heavily funded arts centre. The heavily-trailed ‘vision’ incorporates closer collaboration between four resident orchestras at the Royal Festival Hall – the Philharmonia, London Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.”

“In recent years, the air guitar has become a cult phenomenon, sparking air-eoke tournaments in cities across the nation. Undoubtedly, the most impressive offshoot of the air-guitar craze is the invention of the Virtual Air Guitar, a computerized pair of gloves developed by students at the Helsinki University of Technology that monitors a player’s hand movements and pumps accompanying electric guitar riffs through an amp.”

Orchestras in Great Britain won’t have to pay a potentially disastrous health insurance bill that could have pushed several of them into bankruptcy. “Many orchestras are formed of self-employed musicians and have not paid national insurance on the income paid to them, as they would have had to for permanent staff… Revenue and Customs has advised the chancellor that the orchestras do not have to pay the contributions, thus averting not only the back tax bill of £33m but an annual future bill of £6m.”

Dressed up in tuxedos and hard hats, the Nashville Symphony gathered this week to pay tribute to those without whom their glittering new concert hall would never have been built. No, not the high-rolling donors, or the architect, or even the politicians who approved the funding plan. The audience for this private concert was made up entirely of the construction workers whose part in the success of such venues is frequently overlooked.

Valencia’s impressive new opera house, known as Palau de les Arts, designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, was hailed as an unqualified success at its opening last year. But controversy has sprung up over the high salary and expenses run up by the hall’s superintendent. Helga Schmidt earns over €180,000 a year, far more than her counterparts at other Spanish opera houses; and in the last two years, she has reportedly racked up nearly €300,000 in travel, hotel, and car service costs. Whether such costs are actually out of line is up for debate.

Music giants EMI and Warner have rejected offers from each other to be bought out. Clearly there’s synergy here, but… “A merger between EMI and Warner Music has long been mooted and the companies have had merger negotiations before. Although the companies rank third and fourth on the list of the largest music groups, they have the biggest music publishing assets, together accounting for around 32pc of the market.”

No Canadian pianists have made the cut for this year’s Honens International Competition in Calgary. “More than half of the 150 pianists who entered were eliminated without playing a note, on the basis of their applications and reference letters. Seven Russians and six Americans made the cut. The other successful contestants, whose average age is 25, are from Korea, Israel, Brazil, China, Germany, Ukraine and Georgia.”

“On June 23, just before a rehearsal, the Belgian chamber orchestra Beethoven Academie was informed that its government grant was to be eliminated entirely as of 2007 — in effect, that it has six more months to live. In desperation, and figuring that you can buy and sell anything on eBay, it put itself up for auction on the web site.”