Category: music

The Toronto Symphony, which has struggled to stay solvent in recent years, was significantly buoyed this week by news that it would be receiving a $5 million gift from a single donor – the largest such donation in the TSO’s history. “With a Toronto building spree that includes an opera house, two museum makeovers and two great arts-education institutions, the TSO has been having a rough time wooing donors. After all, it has no building project — just a scarily mounting deficit, currently at $9.5 million.” $4 million of the gift must go to the orchestra’s long-term endowment, but the remaining million can be used to pay down debt.

The good news is that the Baltimore Symphony is about to rid itself of all the red ink it accumulated over the last several years. The bad news is that the cost of doing so will be nearly a third of its entire endowment. The move, which is extremely unorthodox, will pay off the BSO’s $16 million accumulated debt all at once, and leave the orchestra with $8 million in cash on hand. The remaining endowment (around $62 million, low for a major American ensemble) will be transferred to a new, independent trust which the BSO hopes will give donors confidence in the organization’s fiscal prudence.

“The Princeton Laptop Orchestra, or PLOrk as it is known, has caused something of a sensation in academic circles, and avant-garde musicians are queueing up to compose for them.”

Britain’s Halle Orchestra has canceled an impending tour to the US because of the cost of visas. “Managers said yesterday they had cancelled the tour when they realised that the cost of arranging the visas, estimated at £45,000, would render the trip uneconomic. Other agents said rock musicians, also fed up with the process and expense, were refusing to visit the US to work.”

San Francisco Opera is following the lead of other companies such as Covent Garden, and will simulcast its first opera of this summer’s season. Tyhe broadcast will take place in an outdoor plaza. “What we want is to establish an overall image of the company as being community-friendly and very accessible, and to emphasize what I believe — which is that opera as an art form is accessible. Civic Center Plaza could accommodate as many as 12,000 to 15,000 at the outside if the circumstances were right. But I’d be happy with 5,000.”

The Music Toronto Chamber Society played its last program this week. But the group is disbanding not because it can’t survive, but because its members have too much else to do…

“The Kirov Opera’s Ring Cycle, which tours to the Wales Millennium Centre in November, sold out in just three hours on Monday. The cheapest tickets were £80 (standing, mind you) and the most expensive (wait for it) £750. My first thought was: you could have a luxury holiday for that. The second went something like this: stand? Eighteen hours? £80? What madness is this?”

Music to Mobile phones is a huge hit in the UK. “Nearly 7% of all chart music bought this year has been downloaded through a mobile service. That represents nearly 70,000 chart singles bought every week by people on the move. Users of the 3G network 3 account for more than half the total sales with the rest coming from Vodafone and Orange.”

The Royal Shakespeare Company is staging the complete works of Shakespeare. So why don’t the operas based on the Bard get performed more often? There are “more than 400 operatic adaptations of the plays – 40 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream alone. The archive of Shakespeare in opera is also rich in aborted projects. Mendelssohn, Schumann, Glinka, Bizet and Prokofiev all dreamed of setting Hamlet.”

For the first time, a song sold through downloads has reached No. 1 on the UK pop charts. “Until this month, download sales could only count towards a chart position if it was also available to buy in stores. But a change in the rules has enabled download sales to be considered – as long as physical copies of the single go on sale the following week.”