Category: music

The San Antonio Symphony has named local beverage industry executive David Green as its next president and CEO, continuing a long-demonstrated preference for executives plucked from the corporate world with little to no experience in the orchestral sphere. “Green has held several executive positions, including chief financial officer and vice president for operations, at San Antonio’s Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of the Southwest. [He also] founded Logicor LLC, a company that makes productivity-enhancing equipment for soft-drink dispensers… Green becomes the symphony’s seventh interim or permanent top administrator in less than seven years, and the fourth to have no prior experience in orchestra management.”

For the first time since her appointment as music director designate of the Baltimore Symphony and the subsequent controversy that erupted when the BSO’s musicians complained that they had been shut out of the appointment process, Marin Alsop has taken the stage to conduct what will become her orchestra in 2007. Since those difficult days, Alsop and the musicians have been taking pains to demonstrate that there are no hard feelings, and “last night, the orchestra continued signaling its intention to work with Alsop, this time in the best possible way – giving her a strong, attentive performance of a program that very much reflected the kind of tastes she is going to bring to the organization.”

Following a week of bad publicity and press revelations about his behavior as music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Pinchas Zukerman has as much as admitted that it wasn’t physical exhaustion that caused him to take a last-minute leave of absence from the ensemble for the remainder of the current season. Zukerman has been quoted saying that the NACO has some “rotten apples” who have created a divisive atmosphere within the organization that “has to be eradicated.” Representatives of the NACO’s musicians have shot back that Zukerman’s single-mindedness and unwillingness to hear dissent is the real problem, and the orchestra’s manager is backpedaling in an attempt to ratchet the rhetoric down a few notches.

Chicago Lyrica Opera used to sell out most performances. Now it sells 90 percent of its seats. Still good. But. “To help stop any further erosion and, at the same time, reward its longtime subscribers, the Lyric is coupling its announcement of repertory and casts for its 2006-07 season with the news that it also is freezing subscription prices next season. That’s the good news. The bad news, for single-ticket buyers, is that the company (which has an operating budget of $58.2 million) is raising single ticket prices by about 3 percent.”

Tenor Ian Bostridge loves Mozart, yes he does. “But there is a problem with Mozart, one I readdress every time I sing in one of his operas. It has been said – often – that Mozart tenor roles are boring. This is an opinion that I am anxious, for obvious reasons, to rebut. However, the evidence to support it is easy to find.”

“While classical recordings dwindle, or self-feed on repackaged reissues, the flood of video operas continues unabated and, for the most part, rewarding. I can remember when experiencing just the sounds of Wagner’s Ring at home meant piecing together several albums of excerpts with varied casts and agonizing omissions. Now my shelves bend under the weight of five complete videos of the cycle.”

Prague is staging major celebrations of the 250th Mozart anniversary this year. Is the city competing with Austria as Mozart-Central? “With more than 150 events costing more than 100-million koruna (around $4-million U.S.), Prague aims to highlight its special significance as the place where the composer met his greatest success.”

Why did Pinchas Zukerman abandon his National Arts Center Orchestra in the middle of the season? Officially the orchestra says the conductor is taking sick leave. But “his freelance schedule between now and the end of the season includes dozens of concerts on three continents, including a European tour with the National Orchestra of Belgium. That doesn’t look like the agenda of a man dragging his feet with fatigue. Nor does it seem much in keeping with Zukerman’s formal obligation, in the contract he signed with the NACO in 1998, ‘to ensure that his role and responsibility to NACO are a top priority of his career’.”

“A digital version of Mozart’s musical diary is being put online by the British Library to help celebrate 250 years since the composer’s birth. The digitised diary lets people click on and hear music from the opening bars of many of the works it mentions.”

In the midst of auditions for a new music director, the San Diago Chamber Orchestra suddenly canceled the rest of them and hired conductor Jung-Ho Pak, the San Diego Symphony’s former artistic director.