Category: music

The Utah Symphony & Opera’s financial problems stem in part from a busted marketing apparatus, according to concertgoers in Salt Lake City. Many in town still voice strong support for the quality of US&O performances, but have been put off by flippant marketing campaigns, nonsensical schedule changes, and other rankling inconveniences.

It is foolish, of course, to try to judge a music director’s tenure with an orchestra after only six months, but the immediate effects of a new arrival on both ensemble and audience can have a significant impact on the evolution of the relationship between maestro and musicians. In Boston, where James Levine is now firmly ensconced as music director, observers have begun to notice a distinct shift in how the orchestra is perceived. More young people have been showing up at concerts, and a number of musical heavyweights who couldn’t be bothered with the waning years of the Ozawa era are back in the fold as well. “Clearly, Levine’s programs are sparking all this interest. They are long; they are challenging. He is striving to create concerts that are at once provocative to the musically trained, yet not off-putting to the more casual concertgoer.”

Australia’s musicians’ union is joining forces with politicians and members of the public to lobby the country’s arts ministry to reject the proposal laid out in a new study which recommends downsizing the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra to a chamber ensemble. Union representatives accuse Australia’s conservative ruling party of trying to “wreck” the orchestra more than once, and calls any plan which would redistribute funds from one ensemble to another unacceptable.

Philadelphia Orchestra music director Christoph Eschenbach, who has a passion for 20th-century music and is legendary for his fiery performances of Shostakovich, could not be much more different from the man he replaced, Wolfgang Sawallisch, a low-key European conductor of the old school, whose tastes ran more to German romantics. “So you have to wonder why [Eschenbach] has spent so much time in his first year and a half as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra plowing through repertoire that was the specialty of his immediate predecessor. Comparisons are inevitable, and Eschenbach is not coming out on top.”

You don’t build an orchestra by playing contemporary music. Or do you? Michigan’s Plymouth Symphony is “an orchestra on the make with a growing budget, expanding menu of concerts and education programs, bulging attendance and, significantly, the most progressive programming of any orchestra in southeastern Michigan, including the Detroit Symphony. No one locally does more to promote living composers, present thematic programs laced with intellectual pop and unusual repertoire and create a sense of adventure when the lights go down.”

Auckland’s City Council has approved an emergency $200,000 “top-up” for the budget of the Auckland Philaharmonia. “The Government arts funding agency approved a six-month operational deficit budget until June 30, 2005, “on the basis that the philharmonia’s structure would be reformed and other funding sources were secured, especially from territorial local authorities.” The orchestra recently declared it would be unable to operate past June without help, and negotiations with local governments have ensued.

Artist/musician Christopher Marclay went around Berlin posting music staff paper and inviting people to write on it. “My aim was to create a collective score made by the people of Berlin,” he says. “Did many people actually write music? “Yes, surprisingly, perhaps because Berliners are so cultured musically. Of the 800 photographs of these posters I made a selection of 150, which make up the ‘score’.” Since then the score has been interpreted in vastly different ways, which is natural enough, given that the mixture of squiggles, images, notes and words is hardly precise.”

London’s Wigmore Hall is “launching its own record label. In what is clearly becoming a significant industry trend it joins the likes of ensembles such as the London Symphony Orchestra and the Hallé, and artists as diverse as Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Michael Nyman, in taking recording work in-house. Uniquely, though, it is probably the first venue to take the step.”

“This week, the culture commission of the Italian Senate in Rome began taking testimony from those involved in a long-brewing management crisis that led to the ousting last month of La Scala’s general manager, Carlo Fontana, who had a strained relationship with the theater’s music director and conductor, Riccardo Muti.” Muti is accused of banning other prominent conductors from La Scala’s podium, and he and other managers are reported to have kept their employees in the dark about important backstage changes. The controversy has grown so large that it threatens to eclipse the company’s season.

A soon-to-be-released Australian government report on orchestras is said to call for a sharp reduction in the number of players in the Adelaide Symphony. The report “recommends slashing the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra from 74 to 56 full-time players – in what has been described as an “act of vandalism”.”