Category: music

The musicians of the Phoenix Symphony have a new contract which will go a long way towards restoring much of what they lost the last time around the negotiating cycle. Back in 2002, the Phoenix players took a 14% pay cut in order to help stabilize the organization’s finances. The new 6-year deal calls for raises of 4%, 4%, and 5%, spread over the length of the contract. “In stark contrast to past negotiations characterized by walkout threats and busted deadlines, most details of the new contract were agreed upon before formal negotiations with the union began in April.”

The well-known firm Artec has been chosen by the Quebec government to manage the acoustical design of the proposed new concert hall for l’Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, and is already proposing that the hall be half again as big as originally planned. “The concert hall would be a public-private partnership, meaning a private consortium would build and operate the structure and Quebec would pay the tab over time.” The OSM has been seeking a new home for years, and despte being mired in an ongoing musicians’ strike, the organization has been enthusiastically partnering with the provincial government in drawing up the plans. Artec has won praise for its designs of concert halls in Dallas, Birmingham, England and Lucerne, Switzerland.

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, tired of sharing a concert hall, are exploring the possibility of building their own hall. “The concert hall idea faces tremendous financial hurdles and long odds. The orchestra would be trying to raise money from arts benefactors whose philanthropy budgets already are stretched thin. Asking taxpayers for help would be sure to spur fervent debate.”

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra has closed out its 2004 books with a $582,000 surplus. “Also last year, Gianluigi Gelmetti replaced Edo de Waart as the SSO’s artistic director. The change had almost instant success – the concert that launched Gelmetti’s tenure, a gala performance of Verdi’s Requiem, won a Helpmann award for Best Classical Concert Presentation of 2004.”

Orchestras need to change their image, says Henry Fogel, head of the American Symphony Orchestra League: “It’s for the fur coat crowd. It’s stuffy. It’s too formal. I don’t know enough about music. It’s intellectual, not emotional. I might applaud at the wrong time. I’m, sorry to say that – particularly in the first half to two-thirds of the 20th century – orchestras kind of cultivated that image. Now it’s biting them in the behind.”

Well into her career, Marin Alsop looks around and sees few female conductors as colleagues. “I assumed 20 years ago when I got into the profession and looked around that there would be an influx of women on to the podium. It never happened.”

A new opera about Libyan dictator Moammar Gadafi, a co-production between English National Opera and Asian Dub Foundation, has been delayed. It will now open ENO’s 2006/07 season. “The most important thing is to absolutely get this right the first time it goes out. If we continued with the current timetable, we could make the deadlines, but we’ve given ourselves no space to step back and revisit sections.”

“It’s a fact that today opera is increasingly emphasizing theatrical values rather than musical ones. This may or may not be a good thing, but it’s the way it is. And until conductors begin mentoring singers again, until opera houses work harder to understand voice types rather than mounting productions like “Turandot” and “Norma,” according to what the audience wants to see, directors will continue to play a significant role in the art form.”

For the first time, a cell phone ring tone is set to top the British music charts. “Crazy Frog Axel F,” a ring tone based on the sound of a revving Swedish mo-ped, is the first tune being used on mobile phones to cross into mainstream music charts.”