Category: music

A former president of the board of the Canadian Opera Company has stepped forward with a $5 million gift toward the construction of a new opera house in Toronto. “In the tradition of the melodramatic, [Hal] Jackman waited until the final act to make his move. Toronto’s long-awaited opera house at Queen and University is now within months of completion, with opening gala concerts set for June.” The project still needs to raise another $30 million before all is said and done.

Following in the footsteps of other American orchestras which have begun to embrace online media, the Minnesota Orchestra has announced a partnership with Minnesota Public Radio, under which some of the orchestra’s live weekly broadcasts will be archived on MPR’s web site, where listeners will be able to listen to them, free of charge, for up to a year. MPR has already been offering live streaming audio of the popular Friday night broadcasts for several years, but the orchestra hopes that the free archived streams will increase its profile outside its home region.

The board of the Louisville Orchestra has made a new contract offer to its musicians which it says is less severe than its original plan to move 21 of the orchestra’s musicians from full-time to part-time status. But the plan involves paying $5,000 bonuses to 19 musicians who would subsequently have their salaries cut to part-time levels, and AJ blogger Drew McManus wonders where the board is planning to get $95,000 for bonuses when they claim not to have enough money to continue operating past March 31 of this year.

The just-resigned executive director of the Louisville Orchestra acknowledges that he may have been in over his head in the job, but says that “I gave it my absolutely best shot.” Scott Provancher had only run a small, part-time orchestra in Illinois before taking the Louisville job, but it appears that he may already have another job lined up – the orchestra’s board president says that he was contacted by a headhunter recently about Provancher.

Recording companies are reconsidering their policy of selling singles online for download. “If the industry determines that restricting digital sales pays off with bigger album sales, fans may soon find the instant gratification of snapping up new songs online becoming a little less instant. No one is talking about a wholesale shift away from the now-common practice of selling singles online ahead of new albums.”

“In addition to the previously announced Philip Glass commission, San Francisco Opera director David Gockley has tapped composer Stewart Wallace to work with Bay Area author Amy Tan on an operatic adaptation of her novel “The Bonesetter’s Daughter.”

It’s not often that a critic will mercilessly pan a performance, and then suggest that readers attend anyway. But David Patrick Stearns says that everyone within spitting distance of New York ought to hustle to see a new Metropolitan Opera production that he refers to as “breathtakingly vulgar, amazingly wrongheaded,” and a disaster on the scale of the Exxon Valdez.

Fox TV’s runaway hit, American Idol, is apparently making kids more interested in singing, and some school music teachers are even using Idol-style competitions to add some spice to their otherwise dry curriculum. But are the Idol worshippers really interested in music, or just in bandwagon jumping? And more importantly, are they really learning anything about music by prancing around in a classrom mimicking the godawful singing technique of the average Idol contestant?

The past week saw two major music directors – Boston’s James Levine and the London Phil’s Kurt Masur – fall ill on the eve of a major tour. In both cases, podium replacements were quickly named, and the tours went ahead. But what about those substitute conductors? Were they just sitting around waiting for something to do? Not a chance – Marek Janowski, who stepped in for Levine, was in the middle of a two-week conducting stint in Minneapolis when he was asked to make a one-day, 3000-mile detour to conduct one of the most difficult programs imaginable at Carnegie Hall. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s own hometown conductor, Osmo Vänskä, scrambled to reach Southern California to take over Masur’s duties.

The Baltimore Symphony ran a staggering deficit of $7.3 million in fiscal 2005, and expects to tally another $4.5 million in red ink this season, raising the organization’s accumulated debt total to a whopping $16.2 million. The numbers represent some of the largest deficits of any American orchestra in the last decade, even though Baltimore’s annual budget ($30 million) is considerably smaller than those of orchestras in Cleveland and Chicago, which have faced similar-sized deficits in recent years. Oh, and the musicians’ contract, which already included financial concessions meant to reduce debt, expires this September.