Category: music

The president of the orchestra’s board and the orchestra’s general manager have resigned. They follow the departure of executive director James Glicker. The orchestra recently raided its endowment fund to pay off debt, and is about to start negotiations with its musicians on a new contract.

“The New York City Opera is close to a deal to build a concert hall in the base of a new apartment building planned for the former American Red Cross site near Lincoln Center… In the new building, the opera company is to have a theater of about 1,800 seats with the expected cost about $350 million…”

For mainstream rock fans, the very idea of Christian Rock can cause sneers and laughter. But the genre has exploded in the last two decades, and increasingly, Christian bands are nearly indistinguishable from their secular counterparts, save for two things: the lyrics are about God, and the Christian albums sell better.

Opening night may yet be weeks away, but a packed house got a chance this week to hear the first full test of the acoustics of Toronto’s new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. “It was immediately clear that music is truly front and centre in this space. The singing from the stage and playing from the orchestra pit sounded clean and mellow. The lyrics were clearly intelligible.”

Hot on the heels of having hired one of the few female tubists in the professional orchestra world, the Philadelphia Orchestra has hired another prominent woman as its new principal french horn. Jennifer Montone, who has been principal horn of the St. Louis Symphony, will become the first female principal horn of any of the so-called “Big Five” orchestras in nearly sixty years. Orchestras have been hiring women for decades, of course, but the brass sections of many ensembles have remained overwhelmingly male.

South Carolina’s Charleston Symphony is on pace to end the current season $211,000 in the red, even after extra contributions to the orchestra’s endowment fund by the outgoing board chair and his wife. There are also concerns about advance ticket sales for next season, which are down from previous years.

A chamber orchestra can be a tricky ensemble to maintain – there aren’t many that qualify as full-time employment, and that can hurt the ability of the orchestra to attract the best players. But the Chamber Orchestra of Europe has found a unique model which has attracted (and kept) some of the best musicians in Europe coming back season after season for what is sometimes described as the world’s best pickup band.

Anyone who says that classical music is a purely aural medium has probably never seen an orchestra in action. The movements of a conductor can range from subtle to violent, and musicians can be seen moving independently or in concert. Charlotte Higgins says that observing the physical movement of an orchestra is half the fun of the performance.

The chief executive of the Roanoke Symphony in Virginia has resigned after running $480,000 in deficits and clashing with the orchestra’s musicians over cuts in the concert schedule. Paul Chambers had also faced criticism for contracting the orchestra’s marketing work out to his wife. The musicians are openly celebrating Chambers’ resignation, saying that “There wasn’t any aspect of Paul’s tenure that [we] felt really good about.” Chambers had come to the Roanoke Symphony after running the Savannah Symphony in Georgia, which went bankrupt on his watch.

The eight-year-old Lyric Opera of San Antonio (which has already been through one name change since it launched as San Antonio Pocket Opera) will become San Antonio Opera next season, in conjunction with a move to a smaller theater more conducive to opera. The move will likely mean more than the name change to local audiences, who were in near revolt this season after the company began presenting its performances in the massive Municipal Auditorium, which reportedly does not sport the finest acoustics. Mike Greenberg reports that, while the company has made significant progress since its 1998 debut, it is still being run on a skeleton staff, and will have to continue searching for a more permanent venue.