Category: music

“You could say that classical music has sex on the brain, which, as D H Lawrence said, is a very bad place to have it. Bad or not, it makes for something jarringly out of tune with current notions of sexiness. How on earth can you combine the sublimated, secret yearnings of Brahms’s chamber music with the up-front sexiness of, say, Bond? The short answer is, you can’t. They belong to different worlds. It would be like adding lip gloss to the Mona Lisa.”

Paul Daniel is leaving as music director of the English National Opera. “It has been eight years of musical and theatrical striving, and the results have ranged from epoch-making highs to disappointing lows. He bows out of ENO conducting the final opera of Wagner’s Ring, a gesture that should be climactically valedictory, but instead seems oddly flat, having been, on the whole, a critical flop.”

The Metropolitan Opera has been struggling. “As the 2004-5 season enters the homestretch, the Met’s box office has been running at roughly 10 per cent lower than it did before 9/11, when more than 90 percent of the hall’s 3,800 seats were regularly filled. Although nothing short of Armageddon would keep local opera fans away, many out-of-towners for whom a visit to New York used to be unthinkable without a pilgrimage to Broadway and 65th Street have apparently found that they can lead a perfectly happy life by spending the same amount of money on, say, a beach in the Caribbean. Even at a time when the dollar is down, going to the Met remains an expensive habit; once broken, it’s easily kicked.” But there’s reason for hope…

The San Francisco Conservatory is moving into a beautiful new building and hopes to raise its national profile and become recognized as one of the world’s top training ground for classical musicians. But it’s difficult to escape the elephant in the room: with classical music widely viewed to be on the decline, what sort of professional world will exist for today’s conservatory students after graduation?

The Utah Symphony & Opera is in trouble; on this point, everyone agrees. But what’s wrong with the organization? Bad leadership? Subpar marketing? Poor programming choices? Eric Snider thinks it might be something far more simple: no one really cares. “When you’re trying to convince someone that a particular city is nice, it’s always the artsy things you mention. ‘My heavens, Salt Lake City is a fine city!’ you’d say. ‘It has some great museums, and a world-class symphony!’ And it’s true, we have those things, but do you ever go to them? No. (Neither do I, but we’re talking about you here, not me.) Instead, those things languish on the outskirts of profitability, kept alive by generous donations and by the few people who actually patronize them.”

Opera companies have been taking great pains in recent years to play up their commitment to new works, with world premieres given the type of publicity usually reserved for pop stars. But increasingly, it seems to Norman Lebrecht that the new operas to be performed at many top houses are chosen not based on quality, but on the drawing power of the composer, or even the performers who want to sing a certain part. “This is no way to run an artistic institution which depends on public goodwill and corporate support. But such is the chaos enveloping new operas that the commissioning process has fallen prey to external pressures.”

The British recording industry has lost hundreds of millions to illegal downloading in the past two years. “The British Phonographic Industry said record labels lost £376m last year – up nearly £100m on the £278m they lost the year before – in the music business’s first attempt to quantify the financial cost of illegal downloads. A two-year study by research group TNS showed that music fans would have spent £1.5bn on recorded music between 2002-2004, but because of downloads spent only £858m.”

The Royal Opera House is putting low-cost tickets on sale for students to “tackle the common complaint of high ticket prices. The Covent Garden venue has signed a deal with currency firm Travelex to offer tickets online to students, at least 24 hours prior to each show. “

It’s a heck of a way to leave town: the departing principal conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra made waves this week wen he suggested that the RSNO should move from Glasgow to Edinburgh, so as to take advantage of what he called “the best venue in Scotland.” As a national orchestra, the RSNO performs regularly in both cities, but has always been officially based in Glasgow. Orchestra management says it has no plans to move.

A documentary showing the notoriously fractured Philadelphia Orchestra from the inside ought to be one of the most exciting and controversial entries in the city’s film festival. But the documentary you want to get made isn’t always the one that gets made, and Music From The Inside Out, which purports to be such an insider’s look at one of the country’s great orchestras, is in fact nothing more than a big wet sloppy public relations kiss. “This is the Philadelphia Orchestra’s polished but not slick valentine to itself. Not that what’s on screen is false – it’s just a very narrow view of the personalities concerned. And for close observers of the orchestra, that specificity is painful to watch, because you want reality to be entirely this way.”