Category: music

Opera once coveted the realism of film. Nowadays, film is looking to opera for its ability to create fantasy. “Opera once recruited film directors because it envied the truth vouchsafed by the frank eye of the camera. Nowadays, opera delights in illusion, which is why it can offer characters in film an escape from their grim, grounded lives: hence Cher’s trip to the Met’s Bohème in Moonstruck, or Tom Hanks’s duets with Callas in Philadelphia.”

Members of the Berlin Symphonic Orchestra bid farewell to their fans with a last concert on Sunday after orchestra officials failed to secure 80,000 euros ($103,000) in emergency funding for the bankrupt organization.

Does England have only one “world-class” orchestra? So says the departing chief executive of the London Symphony, and guess what – he believes the LSO is the only orchestra that counts. And guess what – managers of two of London’s other orchestras take issue with the claim. And critics are now pouncing on the LSO for some of its decisions in recent years.

For all those years that Texaco sponsored weekly broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, the broadcasts were run free of interrupting commercials. But the Met can no longer afford to compensate commercial stations for the commercial time. “With the reduction of fees to commercial stations, the cost of the broadcasts will be $5.6 million instead of the usual $7 million. To help the stations make up the lost subsidies, the Met will create 7 to 10 places for advertisements during intermissions , depending on the length of the opera.”

An acoustical fix for Denver’s Boettcher Hall is going to cost more than $40 million. Last year the director of Denver’s Division of Theatres and Arenas, estimated the project’s price tag at $25 million to $40 million. But he now says he believes that “when the firm completes the second half of its study later this spring, it will recommend gutting Boettcher and essentially building a new, reconfigured concert hall within its existing walls.”

The era of globalization has done wonders for jazz, broadening its language and bringing new ideas to a genre that had become the province, mainly, of academic-minded American practitioners with very narrow musical values. “One of the new paradigms comes from a circle of mostly black London-based musicians… So what do these new players have? The first answer is a British Afro-Caribbean identity. The second is a movement. They have come together around several guiding ideas: swing, blues feeling, the historical relationship of reggae and jazz, and a commitment to improving stereotypes of Afro-Caribbeans and black Britain in general. The third answer is summed up in a term that’s become fairly widespread among these musicians, as well as the English press: black British jazz.”

Cincinnati Opera is looking for a new artistic director, and that person should reflect the progress the company has made in the past decade. “I think vision is imperative. Someone who comes here has to be able to look at what we’ve developed and say, ‘This company can go to the next level.’ I’m not sure that 10 years ago you could have said that. We want this to be their primary job.”

Kent Nagano won’t officially become music director of l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal until fall 2006, but the unusually soft-spoken maestro is already making his presence felt. Compared with the imperious Charles Dutoit, whose 23-year tenure at the Montreal helm ended in bitter fashion two years ago, Nagano is a decidedly new kind of director for the OSM, promoting a studious and humble approach to music-making, even as he speaks of the importance of building trust with audiences and begins to reshape the sound of the orchestra itself.

“Just days after his one-year anniversary on the job, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra president and CEO Simon Woods announced he will leave, effective July 1, to become chief executive of the 113-year-old Royal Scottish National Orchestra, based in Glasgow, Scotland… The news is devastating for NJSO, which is groaning under a $19.5 million debt, in part due to subscription sales that have declined 41 percent in four years. NJSO also is struggling to regain public credibility following the 2003 purchase of 30 rare Italian string instruments from New Jersey philanthropist Herbert Axelrod, who was sentenced in March to 18 months in federal prison for an unrelated tax fraud scheme.”