Category: music

The Calgary Philharmonic has a new music diretor. Roberto Minczuk, the recently appointed music director of the Orquestra Sinfonica Brasileira in Rio de Janeiro, has signed a three-year contract with the orchestra. “Minczuk, who until last May was principal guest conductor of the Sao Paulo State Symphony, recently completed a nine-year tenure as co-artistic director with the same orchestra as well as a two-year term as associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic.”

Some Australian orchestras are earning a nice side income hiring themselves out. “Want an ensemble for your next corporate do, musicians for a film soundtrack, a backing band for a pop diva? Your state orchestra will be happy to oblige – and no wonder. Despite union claims that it’s been stripped of more than $2.2 million in government funding in real terms over the past five years, the Sydney Symphony has notched up a surplus every year since being corporatised in 1996. Driving this is the money that has been coming in from hiring out the orchestra for commercial events. Last year was the fourth consecutive year that income from this sector has grown.”

It’s a shrinking world for classical music critics and the artform they cover, writes Norman Lebrecht in AJ’s weeklong music critics’ blog: “I work with some outstanding music critics, brilliantly perceptive, dedicated to their craft. Just don’t ask most of them to think outside the box. Music critics, like the art they review, have turned timorously inwards, unable to fight their shrinking corner effectively because they have such little understanding of the pressures facing the editors who employ them.”

“In an era when women commonly run everything from universities to Fortune 500 companies to entire countries, why has it taken so long for a single leading orchestra to take the step? The fact is, classical music has been extraordinarily hidebound when it comes to gender issues. American orchestras have been far ahead of many of their European counterparts on this front, with women making up a third or more of the membership of several leading ensembles and regularly dominating the string section. But things have been just as hard for female conductors in the United States as they are across the Atlantic.”

Musicians of the Baltimore Symphony have strongly objected to the orchestra’s search committee choice of Marin Alsop as the next music director. “The turmoil at the Baltimore Symphony is part of a long history of orchestra players’ seeking a greater say in the choice of the man or woman who stands before them day after day, leading rehearsals, conducting concerts and strongly affecting their musical and even personal lives.”

Hong Kong Philharmonic music director Edo de Waart, in his first season in the post, has fired concertmaster Dennis Kim for “auditioning for a place in an American orchestra while purportedly on sick leave. Kim learned earlier this year that his contract would not be renewed for the 2006-07 season for reasons, according to a source, that include criticizing his colleagues and bargaining for extra performance fees.”

Ticket sales for the Chicago Symphony’s summer season at Ravinia have been down for the better part of a decade now, and while the numbers certainly don’t indicate a crisis, they might point to a general malaise. “The apparent defection of a segment of Ravinia’s core audience over the last 15 years strikes at the artistic heart of America’s oldest music festival even as it tests the goodwill and durability that have marked the Chicago Symphony’s long relationship with Ravinia. Business partners during the summer who lead largely independent lives during the rest of the year, Ravinia and the CSO now find themselves in circumstances that call for something they haven’t much done before, cooperative problem-solving.”

Pop quiz: what member of a symphony orchestra typically knows the most about every piece of music on every program, and knows it before most of the orchestra is even aware of what they’ll be playing? Answer: the librarian. “Each year the symphony music librarians prepare approximately 80 different programs for the orchestra to perform — about 600 compositions totaling 35,000 parts for as many as 250 artists in a given performance. Those parts are rarely only a single page and often run to dozens of pages — all of which must be checked… The sheer volume of work in the library can be daunting.”

Marin Alsop, the most prominent female conductor in the world, finally has a major American orchestra to call her own. According to sources, the board of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will vote next week to approve Alsop as its next music director, replacing Yuri Temirkanov. Alsop has long been rumored to be in line for a major American directorship, and is already one of Britain’s better-known conductors.

News of Marin Alsop’s appointment is not sitting well with the musicians of the Baltimore Symphony, who took the unusual step of issuing a public statement decrying the board’s decision to end its music director search. All seven musicians serving on the search committee favored continuing the search, and at least one prominent board member is publicly siding with them, but the orchestra’s president says that the musicians will have the chance to share their views before the board votes to confirm Alsop. Nonetheless, the musicians have apparently been barred from speaking to board members in advance of the Tuesday confirmation meeting.