Category: music

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra has balanced its $23 million budget for the second year in a row, bringing in $8.48 million for its annual fund drive and boosting its endowment to $100 million.

It’s an exciting time for the Glasgow-based BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, which has just extended the contract of its popular music director, Ilan Volkov, and will shortly move into its new permanent home in the heart of the city’s entertainment district. “By any yardstick, then, there is everything to play for in the orchestra whose technical ability and reputation has utterly transformed in the past decade and a half.” So why is the orchestra’s longtime general director choosing this moment to walk away?

Ever stuck trying to name a song you heard? Now the computer will do it for you. “You call a toll-free number on your cell phone and play the music you’re trying to identify for 15 seconds. The program then contacts you via text message, whether it can make the ID or not. Sorry, but humming a tune won’t work. But the service can distinguish between different performers’ versions of the same tune to match audio “fingerprints” from its database of more than 2.5 million popular recordings. The database doesn’t include classical music or jazz.”

A long-forgotten American opera based on Blackfeet Indian legend has an unlikely revival in a struggling agricultural town in northern Montana. “We have to overcome this stereotype that people have developed over what we’re calling this show. It’s an opera, but I don’t ever say the O-word. I refer to it as the legend of Scarface told through acting and singing and lighting.”

Florida Grand Opera has had its best couple of seasons ever at the box office. A great deal of the credit has to go to the company’s new marketing campaign. “So much of the advertising over the years had become . . . focused on the people who are going to be in the audience anyway. So we really launched a campaign . . . of having real-life opera singers who are young and sexy and look like people you’d like to approach at a party.”

When the founder of the Queensland Pops Orchestra in Australia died last year, the orchestra was put up for sale. Barrie Gott bought it. “What Mr Gott gets for his money includes a substantial library of scores, about 650 titles, access to the core of professional musicians who come together for each Pops concert, and the mailing list of avid listeners known as Friends of the Pops.”

Mozart’s “Magic Flute” cut down and performed in English at the Met? “Is the cut-down, 90-minute version a first step at commercializing the Met? Some opera purists may think so. But the plan has merit. That even the brightest children have limited attention spans is a given. A family version of “The Magic Flute” at the Met would have to be done right, though. Will the run be presented at family times (matinees and early evenings), and, more important, at family prices? In principle, this is a good idea.”

A debate rages at the English National Opera about whether using supertitles is necessary for operas sung in English. Anthony Tommasini appreciates the arguments on both side: “In my passions and my ideals, I side with the purists about the threat titles represent to opera in English. Having this crutch is bound to undermine the heritage slowly but steadily: audiences will look to the screens rather than pay attention to the singers; singers, knowing that audiences are relying on the projected texts, will cut corners on diction so that they can linger on a luscious sustained tone. Yet the pragmatist in me understands the frustrations of sitting through an opera in English when you cannot make out the words. Nothing induces passivity, even hostility, to opera more than that.”

Where does the classic “American” sound come from? Aaron Copland “was one of a group of composers who, starting in the 1930s, cultivated a new nationalist – or at least populist modernist – style. And most of them were gay, including Virgil Thomson, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, David Diamond, Lou Harrison, Paul Bowles, Marc Blitzstein and Ned Rorem. By contrast, most of the pricklier modernists, including Charles Ives, Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions, were straight.”

James Levine starts his first summer leading the Tanglewood Festival. “Everyone expects Tanglewood to be transformed in the Levine era, but no one knows yet what direction the changes will take. Levine has been at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home, festival, and school only twice before, as an audience member in 1956, when he was 13, and as a guest conductor in 1972. He’s been careful to say that he needs to experience the way Tanglewood does things before thinking about making changes. Change is one of the things Tanglewood is supposed to be about.”