Category: music

Denver’s $86 million Ellie Caulkins Opera House is in the final stages of construction, and the architects, acousticians, and civic boosters involved in its rise are not setting their sights low. In fact, some are suggesting that the venue could rank among the top ten opera houses in the world when it opens in September. “The facility will become the first permanent home for Opera Colorado, and it will be the principal venue for Ballet Colorado.”

“Singing, like most social activities in France, is driven by the whims of fashion. Suddenly, it has become le dernier cri de tout Paris. There is talk of young execs switching their gym cards for lunchtime choir practice. Parents are reported to be moving children to schools with better sol-fa teaching. The French Institute of Choral Art, with some 280,000 choir members, has been swamped with new applications. Choir practice is becoming to bourgeois Paris what the book group is in suburban London. The cause of the singing craze is a low-budget local film which, to industry astonishment, out-grossed Harry Potter, Spiderman and Shrek 2 across France, selling nine million tickets and 1.2 million soundtrack CDs.”

Downloading may be killing the rock star, but it’s doing great things for world music in the US. “Before the digital revolution, the cross-border import of indigenous music was inefficient, cost-prohibitive and logistically challenging. The market for some content was too small for major labels to justify importing it through the usual channels, so the music generally could be found only in specialty stores — which are not always opposed to selling pirated material. But legitimate online music services are beginning to feature larger selections of world music.”

As the Chicago Symphony prepares to bid farewell to Daniel Barenboim after next season, a lot of questions about the future remain unanswered. The first unknown, of course, is the identity of Barenboim’s successor, and as usual, the CSO is keeping a tight lid on speculation. But almost as important is the orchestra’s overall model for future success: “with attendance flat at 82 percent and an accumulated deficit of $19.4 million gnawing on the bottom line, the CSO, with its 2005-06 season, will introduce two new series in an effort to make its concerts more inviting to a larger audience.”

The striking musicians of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra overwhelmingly agreed not to even take a vote on their management’s latest contract offer this weekend, sending their negotiating team back to the table with a renewed shot of resolve. But the orchestra’s president was flabbergasted by the flat rejection of what he thought was more or less a done deal.

As with any orchestra embroiled in a long work stoppage, the St. Louis Symphony is facing the spectre of eventually returning to work with severely depleted ranks, as musicians begin to audition for other jobs. “The basic issue is one of money: The players took a major cut in salary during the orchestra’s financial crisis and now want to get closer to the pay scales of their peers. But just as significant is the issue of quality: the sense of ensemble and esprit that has set the Symphony apart in the excellence of their music-making, making them the artistic equals of better-paid orchestras in larger cities.”

Orchestral work stoppages tend to run on similar themes, and the St. Louis clash is no exception, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the Houston Symphony’s 4-week strike of two years ago. Both conflicts revolved around a clash of business values and artistic quality, and focused on “ongoing deficit spending, the question of a relatively low endowment fund – although St. Louis’ was a lot worse than Houston’s – and the question of summer work.” In the end, Houston settled its strike, but lost 14 of its best musicians to more stable orchestras.

If space for writing about classical music in newspapers is shrinking, it’s growing online. “Suddenly, a whole new world of writing about classical music has cropped up. Not everyone agrees, but some plotters of this revolution predict the blog- osphere will create an entry point for new listeners, because blog writing often is informal, energetic, underground-ish — without the deadening preachiness that infects much classical music writing, driving people away. Seasoned journalists and critics blog, but so do musicologists, composers, performers, arts administrators, amateur writers and everyday concertgoers.”

One doesn’t often think of serialist music as overtly sexual – overly cerebral is more like it. But a new scholarly take on Alban Berg’s landmark Chamber Concerto suggests that it is explicitly based on the various infidelities of Mathilde Schoenberg, wife of Berg’s fellow serialist Arnold Schoenberg.

So the Cleveland Orchestra will be the new Miami Performing Arts Center’s resident orchestra? Outsourcing comes to the orchestra world. “Much as American companies enlist overseas workers at considerably cheaper wages, so too the lack of a full-time professional symphony orchestra in South Florida has given way to paying outside ensembles such as the Cleveland Orchestra to provide Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky to the region’s seasonal audience members. On the surface, it seems like a win-win situation…”