Category: music

Riccardo Muti was back at La Scala this past weekend, but don’t get excited. The deposed Milan maestro returned as a guest conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. “As fans threw long-stemmed white roses onto the stage amid thunderous applause and a chorus of bravos, Mr. Muti – looking solemn but moved – acknowledged the cheers with a nod, placed a single rose on the podium and exited, stage right.”

Opera may be hot again, but precious few American cities can boast of having a truly world-class opera company. One of the lucky few is Houston, where the Grand Opera marked its 50th birthday last weekend, and Joshua Kosman says that you don’t have to look very hard to see how the company has achieved its success. “To speak of the Houston Grand Opera is to speak of David Gockley, the visionary general director who has led the company since 1972 and made it what it is today.” Gockley will shortly be leaving Houston to take up the reins of the San Francisco Opera, and Kosman says that the Bay Area can realistically hope for a newly reinvigorated company under his leadership.

It’s been a while since the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra got any good news about its ticket sales, but this week, the orchestra announced that single ticket sales have jumped 20% in the current season, and credited the MSO’s newly customer-driven marketing focus for the gain. The orchestra has also been playing a new series of “scaled-down performances of that weekend’s concert programming combined with a video presentation designed to introduce the music and composers to a new audience,” which have attracted large numbers of new ticket-buyers.

Opera has enjoyed a distinct resurgence in the past decade, and for the first time in American musical history, operatic casting has begun to reflect the racial diversity of the country. But despite the visible strides in casting, “opera company executives say there is still plenty of room for improvement in diversifying casts. And, they add, there is even more room for improvement, when it comes to opera audiences, which are an average of 4 percent minority nationwide, though 31 percent of Americans are of an ethnic minority.”

In an effort to draw in new audiences, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra recently started running a tongue-in-cheek series of radio ads with the tagline “You’d be surprised who goes to the TSO.” Each ad featured a humorous description of a supposed subscriber with decidedly offbeat personal habits meant to demonstrate that orchestra concerts are “not only for stuffy old rich people.” As it turns out, though, the stuffy old rich people who listen to the city’s classical music station were unamused, and the ads have been pulled from the air.

ArtsJournal blogger Drew McManus has declared May to be Take A Friend To the Orchestra Month, and in case that sounds like a dubious proposition in a culture where orchestral music sometimes calls to mind stuffy surroundings and elitist snobbery, Drew has enlisted the help of more than a dozen critics, bloggers, musicians, and administrators to explain how to sell your friends on the concept. Up first is former Chicago Symphony executive director Henry Fogel, who once personally convinced a sixty-year-old Texas pilot to come hear a performance of Mahler 5, while simultaneously rescuing the CSO’s instruments from an overturned truck on a remote highway.

La Scala has canceled a planned tour of the UK after being unable to secure the services of conductor Mstislav Rostropovich. The tour was originally to have been led by Riccardo Muti, who resigned as La Scala’s musical director last month, leaving Milan’s famed opera house scrambling to find replacements. However, there is evidence that the labor strife which has engulfed La Scala for much of the last year may be ebbing, as union leaders rescinded their call for an ongoing series of opening-night strikes.

Two years ago, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra was plunged into crisis and delivered into the hands of the provincial government in a desperate attempt to prevent a complete collapse. To say things have improved is an understatement. “As the WSO’s current season closes this evening at Centennial Concert Hall, the 65-player orchestra is enjoying rising attendance, a balanced budget, and guarded optimism about the future. Since a new board took over the WSO last year, fundraising has revived, and a deficit of nearly $3-million has been cut in half. The city and provincial governments have forgiven about $400,000 in loans, and the federal government has tossed in a transition grant of $250,000.”

Is a new Royal Opera House production a “vanity” project? “Lorin Maazel, the conductor-composer whose new opera of George Orwell’s 1984 opens tomorrow at the Royal Opera House, has put more than £400,000 of his own money into the production, the Guardian has learned, leading to accusations that Covent Garden is staging a vanity project.”