Category: music

“Three years after Boston Lyric Opera staged a free production of Carmen that drew a stunning 140,000 people to the Common, the company has reluctantly shelved plans for a follow-up event, concluding that it couldn’t find enough local corporate support to underwrite the show. After wrestling with funding for months, the opera company announced yesterday that it has scrapped a free production of Aida set for September 2006. The abrupt cancellation is a sign that local arts groups are starting to feel the impact of recent corporate mergers and acquisitions, which have diminished the number of companies with home bases — and loyalty — in the region.”

The Edmonton Symphony thought it had $1 million or more coming to it from the estate of philanthropist Stuart Davis, but a dispute over the money has erupted between the orchestra and Davis’s son, who believes that the money is rightfully his. At issue is a handwritten copy of Davis’s will, which includes multiple revisions and crossed-out sections. The pbilanthropist distrusted lawyers to the point that he refused to consult them in preparing his estate for posthumous dispersal, leading to the dispute.

Cleveland-based classical recording company Telarc International has been acquired by the California-based Concord Music Group. In Telarc’s nearly 30 years of existence, it has captured 46 Grammy awards and led the way in making compact discs the new standard for recording in the 1980s. “[Telarc’s] catalog has 1,000 titles, including albums by the Cleveland Orchestra, jazz great Dave Brubeck and the South African vocal ensemble Ladysmith Black Mambazo.” The merger will not mean the end of the Telarc name, and the business will continue to operate from its suburban Cleveland home.

Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra has announced that music director Pinchas Zukerman will take a half-season sabbatical from the ensemble, effective with the start of the new year. He was scheduled to conduct five more concerts in the current season, but the NACO will find guest conductors to cover those dates. The centre says it fully expects Zukerman, whose current contract is up at the end of the 2006-07 season, to return in fall 2006, but news of the sabbatical came as a surprise to the orchestra’s musicians.

The Zukerman announcement had a predictable effect on the orchestra world – speculation is rampant concerning the violinist/conductor’s longterm status with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. But NACO officials are taking pains to make clear that Zukerman’s unexpected “sabbatical” is not a precursor to his leaving the ensemble, and the orchestra’s managing director says that he expects to announce an extension of Zukerman’s current contract soon. “There has been some tension behind the scenes in recent seasons, as musicians have become divided about Zukerman, but [one] musician said ‘there’s been nothing really that unusual that you would think might have provoked this.'”

“The Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra cannot budget for productions because the Federal Government is refusing to reveal the results of a review of its funding and management.” The review is completed, but the government doesn’t want to give away its funding priorities in advance of next May’s budget negotiations in Parliament. Australian Opera has run significant deficits in recent years, and was forced to hire nearly an AUS$100,000 worth of extra musicians last month when new workplace regulations deemed sound levels in the orchestra pit legally unhealthy.

Iran’s new hardline president, who has made waves in recent weeks with his comments questioning the scale of the Holocaust and calling for the destruction of Israel, has banned all Western music from state-owned radio and TV stations. The ban includes everything from American pop to European classical music, and is “an eerie reminder of the 1979 Islamic revolution when popular music was outlawed as ‘un-Islamic’ under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.” The move comes weeks after the conductor of the Tehran Symphony quit his post and left the country in protest of the government’s ill treatment of his musicians.

Sony Classical has offered to record Richard Danielpour’s latest opera, Margaret Garner, which drew positive reviews when it premiered in Michigan and Philadelphia last season with Denyce Graves in the title role. Operatic recordings are becoming increasingly rare, especially in the U.S., due largely to the cost of retaining an orchestra for the project. In this case, Sony has made a proposal to the Pittsburgh Symphony for the project, and press reports say that the musicians of the PSO are considering the offer. That the musicians would need to approve such a project at all suggests that Sony’s offer may require them to accept a pay rate below the national standard enforced by the union, but several orchestras have begun to skirt such requirements in recent years.

Facing slumping ticket sales and rising costs, the Metropolitan Opera is reportedly looking to cut its operating budget by 5% for the current season. “In the late 1990s, the Met often sold more than 90 percent of tickets for each season, but the box office slowed after the 2001 terror attacks,” and has never fully recovered. Projections for the current season were made with an assumption of 80% capacity, but actual ticket sales have been closer to 76%.

If anyone was expecting the music world Andrew Porter has spent his career critiquing to turn its back when the famed critic brought his own production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute to the Canadian Opera Company stage this weekend, such hopes were dashed last summer, when the entire run of the show sold out months in advance. “Porter may well be the most eminent living music critic in the English-speaking world, a man who for 50 years has set the standard for erudition, fairness and grace in the writing of music criticism… [He] has no immediate plans to continue his directorial career, but he has a dream — to direct Beethoven’s Fidelio.”