Category: music

Brits buy more music than anyone else, according to new sales figures. “The UK music industry recorded an overall 3% increase in volume sales, mostly due to its robust albums market. However, world music sales declined by 1.3% to $33.6 billion (£17.7 billion). The UK CD albums market grew by 4.5% in 2004 with a record 174.6 million units sold. On average every Briton buys 3.2 CDs per person per year.”

Five years ago, expectations for Seattle’s Experience Music Project were high. But “as the museum’s fifth anniversary approaches, things aren’t going as planned: All rotating exhibits have been canceled or frozen, and of the roughly 250 people employed by EMP, 14 percent are temps who fear their contracts won’t be renewed because attendance is half of what was expected. There’s nothing to indicate that Seattle’s interest in EMP is growing — between 2001 and 2003, admission revenues were down 46 percent.”

Seattle’s Experience Music Project is one of the most secretive (some might say paranoid) arts organizations around. Employees aren’t allowed to talk to reporters, and even the director has to be accompanied by a handler…

Damian Thompson has abandoned digital music for the real vinyl experience. “After nearly 20 years of exclusive loyalty to compact discs, I have bought a record player – partly out of nostalgia, partly to test the theory that they produce a better sound than CD players, and partly out of irritation at the cult of the iPod. The experience has been ridiculously exciting.”

Austin’s SXSW Festival attracts 1,300 bands and 10,000 music industry people. “The conference makes clear that the music business is not just the recording business, and the recording business is not just the major labels. As the large music conglomerates bemoan a world of digital downloading, decreased sales and tight radio playlists, independent bands and labels have simply gone about making music. For musicians who don’t expect their careers to rise and fall by radio hits and blockbuster albums, major labels have less and less to offer.”

A musicologist has receated the instrumental parts for a lost cantata by JS Bach. “The 1728 composition, called Wedding Cantata BWV 216, was found among the papers of Japanese pianist Chieko Hara, who died in Japan in 2001 aged 86. The work, written for the wedding of a daughter of a German customs official, was missing for 80 years.”

Director Bernd Eichinger’s new production of Parsifal was booed at Berlin’s Staatsoper this weekend. “Eichinger’s version, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, is set in a landscape of buildings collapsing from fires and explosions and relies heavily on video. Mr Eichinger is an acclaimed German film-maker. He wrote and produced Downfall, about Hitler’s final days, which was nominated for an Oscar this year.”

A mediator is trying to resolve the out-of-control labor situation at La Scala. “While La Scala’s governors seek to emphasise that Muti is staying, it is difficult to foresee how the musical director can continue under the present circumstances. Several contenders have been touted as potential successors including Covent Garden’s Antonio Pappano.”

Finding someone with the skills to replace Beverly Sills as chair of the Metropolitan Opera will be a challenge, but a surmountable one. Finding someone to replace her as “the public face of opera and the performing arts” for a country increasingly saturated by pop culture and uninterested in more intellectual pursuits may well be impossible.

The musicians and management of the beleagured Utah Symphony & Opera have reached tentative agreement on a new contract, after spending the better part of the season in “play-and-talk” mode. The new contract is unlikely, however, to quiet the controversy surrounding the organization’s business model, which has been under fire since the results of an independent study questioning the wisdom of merging Salt Lake City’s symphony and opera company were made public a few weeks ago.