Category: music

The recently resurrected San Antonio Symphony will be one of the orchestras to send its executives to Washington, D.C. next month for the Kennedy Center’s new program aimed at training better orchestra managers. The arts management program “will allow symphonies to share information and learn new ways to diversify funding sources. They will also consider ways to make the symphonies relevant in the communities they serve.”

Who’s the next Pavarotti? How about Bryn Terfel? “A baritone to succeed Pavarotti? It is not beyond reason. Terfel has more than sold half a million UK copies of his last classi-pop album. Terfel matches Pavarotti in his sincere lack of taste. Like Pavarotti, Terfel runs a summer festival, an August weekend at his Welsh estate, Faenol, where he guilelessly mingles with the likes of Van Morrison and Alison Moyet…”

Opera Ireland is hoping its audiences are as high on its production of La Traviata as customs officials in Dover who seized a shipment of cocaine worth £500,000 in one of three trucks delivering sets and costumes for an Opera Ireland production. “Rehearsals were due to begin in Dublin this week on the co-production with Germany’s Theatre Aachen.”

A Detroit philanthropist is offering to save the Detroit Jazz Festival with a $10 million commitment. “Here’s the rub: Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts, which has produced the jazz festival since 1994, would have to give up control of the event.”

Members of a Cuban choir on tour in Canada have defected. “In all, 11 of the 41-member choir managed to flee the hotel between 6 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, when Digna Guerra, the choir’s manager, discovered the absences. In an emergency meeting, she warned the remaining singers that the Cuban government would retaliate against their family members if they tried to seek asylum here.”

“There are an estimated 45 billion free music downloads happening annually, compared to around 360 million annual paid downloads. How to convert more of the free downloads to paid? Lower the price. How about five cents a song? “It’s certainly better than the system we have right now. If you charge five cents for 45 billion annual downloads, it’s a lot better than nothing.”

The Tampa-based Florida Orchestra this week reported a $323,789 surplus on a budget of just over $9 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30. The orchestra’s ticket sales amounted to 38% of its overall revenue, which is low in comparison to the rest of the industry, but contributed income was robust, to say the least. Also significant is that “the orchestra finished in the black in a year when the board and musicians agreed on a new labor contract that boosted musicians’ pay by about 5 percent over the previous year.”

The Montreal Symphony plays its first concert since ending a strike that started last May. “Montreal’s Salle Wilfred-Pelletier seemed to be bathed in the warmth of a great big homecoming. After a long and bitter feud it was forgiveness and laughter, and even a few teary eyes in the audience, as Montrealers roundly applauded their orchestra even before Kent Nagano had taken the stage.”

“As if the record business doesn’t have enough problems, the coming trend in magazine publishing may be free CDs. While magazine publishers tout the arrival of authentic interactivity and deeper connections with readers by adding free CDs to every issue, the music industry worries that yet another route has been found around buying records to obtain music, even though most of the free magazine CDs are compilations.”

Nothing unusual about releasing an album by an artist after he or she is dead. But here’s a new low – a “duet” by two stars, mixed after they’ve both died. “Both Marley and Notorious BIG were used to pushing the musical envelope while alive, but this effort would still have surprised them. I know I scratched my head wondering why anyone would risk the reputations of two of the industry’s most influential artists for this ghoulish effort. The guilty parties, of course, are the late artists’ estates…”