Category: music

Plácido Domingo, the superstar tenor who helped found Los Angeles Opera and has led it as general director since 2003, has renewed his contract with the company for an additional five years, through 2011. At the same time, the company announced Tuesday, artistic director Edgar Baitzel has been promoted to chief operating officer, and two new executives are coming on board… Although Domingo’s re-upping is no surprise, it underscores his pivotal role at Los Angeles Opera.”

Washington National Opera will announce next week that they, too, have inked General Director Placido Domingo to a five-year contract extension, running through the 2010-11 season. The company had promised execs at LA Opera that they wouldn’t trample on the California story with a simultaneous announcement of their own, but leaks are apparently a whole different story.

After weeks of recriminations and threats through the press, the Louisville Orchestra has agreed to mediation in its ongoing contract negotiations with its musicians. The orchestra’s management team had initially rejected mediation, and has said that without major cuts to the size of the orchestra and the compensation package paid to the musicians, the organization would declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy and liquidate before the end of the current season.

Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo has announced that he will step aside as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the end of the 2007-08 season, after ten years at the helm. The CBSO won’t be completely bidding farewell to Oramo, however: in a rather unusual move, he will be granted the title of principal guest conductor beginning with the 2008-09 season.

Charles Dutoit turned the Montreal Symphony into an exceptional instrument. But he made an abrupt departure four years ago. “Since Dutoit’s abrupt exit, the OSM has endured a series of setbacks: The organization has struggled with persistent deficits and a crippling players’ strike that lasted for five months. There have been no new discs in the last four years, and the orchestra won’t be making its annual pilgrimage to Carnegie Hall next season. Dutoit, on the other hand, hasn’t missed a beat.”

The Detroit Symphony is looking for a new music director. What kind of person should that be? “Every music director brings his own agenda, his own interests. They are all conductors first. Thirty years ago, that was enough. Now we expect them to be ambassadors as well, and in many different ways, raising money, speaking before concerts, meeting the public after performances. We have to realize that a conductor is a human being with his own strengths and weaknesses.”

Lord Laidlaw, one of Scotland’s richest men, is helping to bail out English National opera, with a £2 million donation. Laidlaw, “who has almost single-handedly kept the Scottish Conservatives afloat since 1997, is to help to finance a number of productions over at least two seasons at the Coliseum in London’s West End. His intervention will be a huge relief to the opera company, which has been beset by a wave of financial and managerial problems.”

“One sign that the selection out there is maturing is that you’ve now got two choices when you go to buy music downloads: You can rent them by the month, or buy them and keep them forever. Some services offer both options.”

“The English National Opera has just staggered through a firestorm of conflict and upheaval, including the apparent dismissal of its artistic and executive director, the bitter resignation of that chairman and the departure of a new music director before he had even started. It was all played out in public, and in excruciating detail. Grinning and bearing it has, of necessity, become the house style.”

“After the eviction at the beginning of February, it has moved into the Metropolitan United Methodist Church on 126th Street in East Harlem. The choir was $5 million US in debt, and founder Howard Turnbull admits he mismanaged relations with the public school two blocks away that was The Choir Academy of Harlem for more than a decade.”