Category: music

The Cleveland Orchestra has been struggling with its budget. Could extended residencies in Miami’s new performing arts center help to balance the books? “The orchestra sees the residency, which will include subscription concerts, educational programs and collaborations with Miami musical institutions, as a critical means of enhancing not only its reputation but also its bottom line.”

The San Francisco Symphony is locked in contract negotiations with its musicians. “At issue is the combination of base salary and extra payments that musicians earn after a certain period with the orchestra. Under the most recent contract terms, a player with at least 25 years with the orchestra earns a minimum of $110,760 annually. According to the musicians, the latest management offer would bump that to $114,140 in the first year, which would rank the Symphony last among the nation’s top seven orchestras; they’re asking for $117,104, which would put them squarely in the middle.”

The Columbus Symphony Orchestra wraps up a three-year search by naming Junichi Hirokami as its new music director…

“Who was this guy, and how did he do what he did? How is it possible that a mere human being could have created music of such unearthly beauty and emotional profundity, and apparently (though this point may be overstated) done it with such effortless facility? Mozart’s life helps a little, but not much.”

Composer Osvaldo Golijov is “being hailed as classical music’s Messiah,” writes Andrew Clark. “The human fire of creativity today is not necessarily where people think it is. I don’t think it lies in the classical conservatoire system. Maybe Björk will produce the next masterpiece rather than someone from classical tradition. It’s a question of relevance to the world.”

It’s been a year since Lincoln Center’s new jazz venue opened. “Fans of the three new stages applaud the acoustics and aesthetics and say the new building – with its can’t-miss-it marquee and snazzy marketing – has raised the profile of jazz as an art form nationwide. But the very qualities that make some people consider the new Jazz at Lincoln Center a raging success are those that others say amount to a disappointment.”

“Does Mozart still speak to us? The fact that we are celebrating his 250th birthday this month suggests so, and for some fraction of the elite culture, he surely does. Judging by concert halls, it’s an old and shrinking fraction, but there are still a fair number of teenagers learning the “Turkish Rondo,” so who knows?”

Musicians of the Louisville Orchestra say they’ll continue to play for the city’s opera and ballet companies through the rest of this season even if the orchestra itself goes out of business. The musicians are locked in a contract dispute with management.

Jerry Springer, The Opera is about to begin a UK national tour, but theatres are bracing for protests. “Pressure group Christian Voice, which orchestrated 55,000 complaints when the BBC screened the musical a year ago, is planning a string of demonstrations.”

Seattle is seeing the birth of a new movement of new opera outside traditional channels. “These productions bracket an extraordinary and sudden flowering—a dozen or so examples in as many months— of what might be called ‘homemade opera.’ Singers and composers are taking the impresario reins, presenting small-scale productions both of new operas and of neglected works by established names, making their own opportunities to perform and be heard outside a mainstream operatic culture in which young singers face stiff competition and composers are all but ignored.”