Category: music

The Milwaukee Symphony will end its fiscal year with a $688,000 deficit, and $8 million in outstanding credit lines. But it’s not all bad news – the orchestra has hit its fundraising targets for the year, and even the red ink is within the bounds of the ensemble’s strategic plan to eventually balance the budget. “Subscriptions fell from 10,285 to 9,805 in 2005-’06, continuing a seven-year trend. But the orchestra set records for single-ticket sales, which jumped from about 14,200 in 2004-’05 to 21,000 this season.”

The details surrounding the Montreal Symphony’s new concert hall have been officially announced. “But long-suffering local music lovers should not hold their breath. While the proposed facility on the neglected northeast corner of Place des Arts has an estimated price tag – $105 million – it does not yet have a builder or architect and is not expected to materialize before 2011, the last year of Kent Nagano’s contracted tenure as MSO music director. What was unveiled yesterday was less a concert hall than a hypothetical five-year plan to build one as the first cultural private-public partnership in Quebec.”

Jerry Springer the Opera is winding up its controversial tour in the UK. Despite rave reviews, the tour was a financial disaster after fundamentalist Christians attacked the tour. Many theatres pulled out and ticket sales were low. “This will be the last chance to see it, as its co-author Stewart Lee says glumly that he doubts it will ever be performed again. It shows how insidiously the tentacles of religious zeal invade every sphere of national life, despite the very small number of religious practitioners in this most secular of nations.”

A UK phone company will offer the service. “While tuning in to digital radio stations through headphones, listeners will be able to click a ‘buy’ button on their phone and have the track downloaded to their phone. Record labels, buffeted by digital piracy in recent years, and commercial radio stations suffering an advertising drain to the internet hope the digital solution will help them to fight back. But it will pose another challenge to high street record stores, already struggling to compete with the convenience of digital downloads.”

James Levine is back after missing several months of conducting engagements with an injured shoulder, and reports say that he has lost a noticable amount of weight during his rehabilitation. Levine will open the Boston Symphony’s summer season at Tanglewood on July 7.

Mere weeks after extending the contract of music director Gerard Schwarz, the Seattle Symphony has been thrown into chaos amid what appears to be an open revolt against Schwarz’s leadership. Executive director Paul Meecham, whose tenure got off to a rocky start a few years back when he suggested that the SSO might need to look beyond Schwarz, has resigned, and the orchestra’s musicians are preparing to publicly release an internal survey expressing widespread dissatisfaction with Schwarz’s leadership. One well-respected musician who recently questioned Schwarz’s extension in a letter to a local weekly has also been tagged for dismissal from the SSO in what the musicians say is an obvious act of retaliation.

A tumultuous year continues apace at the Louisville Orchestra, where the chief operating officer is leaving to become executive director at the Portland Symphony in Maine. Louisville previously accepted the resignation of its own ED in the midst of a bitter battle with the orchestra’s musicians over a proposed reduction in the number of full-time players in the orchestra, before managing to stabilize its perennially precarious finances without such reductions.

Daniel Barenboim leaves the directorship of the Chicago Symphony. Alex Ross likes what the orchestra has accomplished under a conductor he had some questions about ten years ago. “Ultimately, Barenboim is a fiery traditionalist, who can revitalize the most familiar scores.”

Texas classical radio station KTPB has been sold to a Christian broadcaster. So classical music will go off the air, but not without a fight. “Just because we live out here in the middle of nowhere doesn’t mean we have to be a cultural void. This radio station has reached people who have no other access to the arts. Meanwhile, three other Christian music stations lie just to the north on the FM dial.”

The Saratoga Performing Arts Center unveiled a new logo with a picture of a left-handed conductor. Nothing unusual about that. Except… how many left-handed conductors are there?