Category: music

Staff at the English National Opera have voted unanimously to go on strike. “Union demands for a 5% pay increase and raised pension contributions were met with a pay offer by ENO of 2.77%. Staff at the opera company, based in central London, are unhappy about perceived low pay and unsatisfactory working conditions.”

The Atlanta Symphony is continuing to rack up private contributions towards its planned new concert hall in the city’s downtown district. But the space-age hall, designed by Santiago Calatrava, still faces an uphill battle, because the ASO’s request for $100 million in city and state funding has yet to result in any action. Both Atlanta’s mayor and Georgia’s governor have paid lip service to the project, but the governor won’t reveal whether he is including any funding for the project in his 2006 budget proposal, and the mayor says that the city doesn’t have “even a fraction” of the $50 million the orchestra wants.

The Pittsburgh Symphony is having a busy audition season, and the trend of open positions is expected to continue in the coming year, thanks to a buyout offered to 15 senior musicians in the orchestra. Additionally, the PSO recently tweaked its hiring process when it decided against hiring a single conductor as music director. Whereas, in most major American orchestras, the music director has absolute power to hire whom he wishes (while a committee of musicians serves in an advisory capacity,) the rule at the PSO is now an ultra-democratic system of one man/one vote.

The Nashville Symphony has raised all but $6 million of the private funding it needs to fund construction of its $120 million new concert hall, and the Kresge Foundation is promising $1.5 million more if the orchestra finishes the fundraising process by next September. Meanwhile, construction of the new hall is in full swing, and the new pipe organ (to be installed one year after the hall opens) is being built in San Francisco.

Pamela Rosenberg, who will step down as general director of the San Francisco Opera this month to take a job with the Berlin Philharmonic, was as prominent a figure as an opera company can have at its head. A true music lover, Rosenberg nonetheless found herself battling financial troubles throughout her 5-year tenure in San Francisco. “Beset by a post-Sept.11 free fall in ticket revenues and contributed income, the sobering contraction of a local economy reeling from the dot-com collapse and a dangerously thin endowment fund, Rosenberg was forced to mandate one of the largest cutbacks in the company’s history… Embattled by financial woes and trying labor negotiations, Rosenberg was routinely blamed for problems that were largely beyond her control.”

Why did the English National Opera replace its top leadership last week sithout advertising the jobs? Some are critical, but the company’s chairman defends the decisions. “He wrote that as far as the appointment last week of former executive director Loretta Tomasi as chief executive officer and former programming director John Berry as artistic director was concerned, the board ‘could either enter into an extended period of uncertainty and speculation surrounding these jobs, or confirm in post two individuals with proven artistic and managerial records who were already carrying out many of these responsibilities with full board confidence. It concluded that the latter course was in the best interests of the company’.”

“As jazz heads into its second century as an international language, it’s in Oslo that its conversation is now at its most animated and productive. Thirty years ago, when the saxophonist Jan Garbarek and the guitarist Terje Rypdal became the first Norwegian jazz musicians to make an international impact, no one could have predicted that their country, with its population of 4.5 million, would now be enjoying such pre-eminence.”

“No first night at La Scala is ever without its dramas, demonstrations and exaggerations, even now, when Italian opera is in historic decline. This year is likely to be no exception, since the first night of the 2005-6 season, a performance of Mozart’s Idomeneo, is thought to be the first time an Englishman has had the honour of conducting on this grandest night of the Milanese year.”

The San Francisco Symphony posts a $2.25 million for its 2004-05 fiscal year on an operating budget of $56.1 million. The orchestra had projected a $2.4 million shortfall.