Category: music

Outgoing Met Opera general manager Joseph Volpe went out in style on Saturday night, as the focal point of a five-and-a-half hour gala featuring the biggest stars of the opera world. “About 30 solo artists, along with the Met chorus and ballet troupe, performed 36 selections under the direction of a tag team of conductors… Even with a top ticket price of $5,000, the house was packed.”

One of the toughest things about being a young conductor is finding opportunities to learn the craft in front of a real, high-quality orchestra. So a spot at the National Symphony’s annual National Conducting Institute, where participants get to spend three weeks learning from one of America’s top orchestra and its music director, Leonard Slatkin, has become one of the most sought-after privileges for up-and-coming conductors.

When conductor Lorin Maazel purchased a 550-acre farm in Virginia, his original intention was to have a place where he could escape the music world and live like a hermit. Instead, though, Maazel chose eventually to open his house “to local children in an expansive home-schooling project; to neighbors for chamber music concerts by the likes of stellar cellist Mstislav Rostropovich; and, lately, to music students and young professional singers, who have created a fully staged opera production.”

“Where is the nerve centre of classical music in the early 21st century? Answering that question depends on your criteria. If it’s to do with possessing a venerable tradition, you might choose Vienna. If it’s the location of the best orchestras and opera houses, you might choose Berlin. If it’s finding exuberantly creative ways to reinvent the tradition, London or New York seem strong contenders. But if the true measure is a passionate devotion amounting almost to idolatry, Tokyo would win the palm.”

Daniel Barenboim’s departure from the Chicago Symphony is finally at hand. So what has the enigmatic conductor’s 15 years at the helm in Chicago meant to the orchestra? “Some players, critics and concertgoers complained that he was inconsistent, rarely conducting the same piece of music the same way twice, often wildly distorting the musical fabric in the process. Why, Barenboim wondered in turn, would anyone want to give the same performance night after night?”

The Chicago Symphony may not have anyone waiting in the wings to replace Daniel Barenboim, but the ensemble is still sitting pretty both artistically and financially as one of America’s top orchestras. The CSO will be a glittering prize for whatever conductor eventually seduces it, and with Bernard Haitink in place as a stopgap solution, the CSO can take its time with the wooing.

The Perth-based West Australian Symphony Orchestra, which just completed a major tour of China, ought to be flying high right now. Instead, the orchestra has declined to renew the contract of its music director (and informed him the week before the WASO headed to China,) and the tour was plagued by logistical problems and half-filled halls. For the WASO, it’s clear that there are a lot of things not working the way they should, and many management problems that will have to be addressed once the ensemble returns home.

One of Northern Ireland’s largest orchestras may have to begin its next season without the use of its concert hall, and orchestra officials are furious that they weren’t consulted before the closure of Ulster’s Waterfront Hall was announced. The Ulster Orchestra “had made provisional booking for four concerts during this period, including the important opening concert of the 2007-2008 season and… ‘had been led to believe’ that the Waterfront would be closed during the quiet season from June-August, and not later on.”

James Levine “is returning to the podium after an unprecedented four-month hiatus. The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director fell onstage in Symphony Hall at the end of a concert in March, sustaining a rotator-cuff injury to his right shoulder that required surgery.” But the conductor will emerge this summer at Tanglewood…

Japanese traditional music isn’t much of a player in the international Woorld Music scene. “There are no travelling stars of the ancient music of the Imperial Court known as gagaku, no sell-out albums by players of the sighing bamboo flute called the shakuhachi. The music doesn’t lend itself to “fusion”; you couldn’t really imagine the deep meditative twanging of the koto or zither put against a Latin beat.”