Category: music

Justin Davidson writes that Metropolitan Opera’s “An American Tragedy” is a disappointment for all the effort spent on it. “Eight years after the Metropolitan Opera commissioned a new work from Tobias Picker – and five since the company’s last world premiere – comes an opera that should have been half as long and twice as taut.”

“Cover singers are opera’s equivalent of the Broadway understudy, and like replacement artists in most forms of live performance, they are an essential but unseen part of the process. Without them, an incapacitated star can send a production scrambling. Even worse, they can bring it to a grinding halt.”

The embattled Scottish Opera will be branching out, becoming more adventurous, says its chairman. “I would like to see Scottish Opera doing West Side Story. It is a great piece, one of Bernstein’s best and a dead ringer for Glasgow. This is because the Puerto Ricans and New Yorkers in the 1950s mirror the razor gangs in Glasgow of the same period. I am very keen on playing in a stadium. I am very keen on that. I saw Teresa Berganza singing Carmen in the Stade Bercy in Paris in front of about 18,000 people and it was electrifying.”

“A growing number of classical music purveyors are looking to the new digital technology for solutions to some of their most vexing problems. Just as it makes sense for recording companies with declining CD sales to jump aboard the download bandwagon, so too does it make sense for classical groups seeking new audiences to break ground in cyberspace.”

Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy” opens this week at the Metropolitan Opera. The story “struck Mr. Picker as the natural choice for his Met debut: an opera by an American composer, based on a great American novel. More to the point, it was a compelling operatic story of love and murder, with a social undercurrent about the dark side of the pursuit of happiness and wealth – the American dream – that continues to resonate.”

Sean Doran’s quick departure from English National Opera this week is only one indication of the company’s deep problems. “So now what we are left with is more of the same mediocrity, with everyone keeping their backs to the wall and nobody in the mood for tackling the radical underlying problems that ENO faces. What, for example, was the point of spending over £40 million on restoring the Coliseum if the theatre is no more productive or efficient than it was? How can ENO reach out to new audiences and restore the buzz it had in the 1980s?”

The Milwaukee Symphony is still in the red to the tune of $2.61 million for the 2004-05 season, but taken in a larger context, the deficit may actually be good news for the ensemble. The shortfall is actually less than the MSO’s board and management budgeted for the year, and easily met the goal for the first year of the organization’s three-year recapitalization plan. Under that plan, the budget would be back in the black by the end of the 2006-07 season. The MSO has been hurting financially for quite some time, and a new executive director made severe cuts in the organization this past season to get the budget under control. The orchestra’s musicians also accepted a temporary pay cut.

“Under a new interpretation of WorkCover rules, players in the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra can’t be exposed to sound levels higher than 85 decibels averaged over a day. This will have implications for orchestral music generally, but its immediate impact is being felt on, of all things, the Australian Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty. To avoid any one musician being exposed to excessive sound, the orchestra is working with relay teams of extra musicians: four separate horn sections, four of clarinets, four of flutes, and so on. The orchestra that begins a particular performance isn’t necessarily the same one that finishes it.”

The Choir Academy of Chicago, a charter school serving underprivileged minority youth and operating in a model based on the Boys Choir of Harlem Academy, is “perilously close to dissolving its music-based curriculum, if not the whole institution.” The school, which opened in 2001, has had financial problems from the beginning, and relations with the Chicago Childrens’ Choir, which oversees the school, have been strained in recent years. The board collapsed in 2004, and as the school desperately tries to stay open, those in charge now appear willing to scrap the music that has always been at the core of its educational approach.

“A unique manuscript by Ludwig van Beethoven that was lost for more than a century was sold at auction on Thursday for £1.13 million ($1.95 million) to an anonymous buyer. The final price was at the low end of the pre-sale estimates of up to £1.5 million… Discovered in July at the bottom of a dusty filing cabinet at a religious school in Philadelphia, the manuscript sold Thursday is a work in progress for the Grosse Fuge in B flat major — one of Beethoven’s most revolutionary works… Sotheby’s said it was the most important Beethoven manuscript to have come to market in living memory and would prompt a complete reassessment of the German composer’s works.”