Category: music

Chicago’s five-year-old new music festival, MusicNOW, has become a bona fide hit, attracting large audiences of all ages and backgrounds to its performances of the type of avant garde music which is supposed to send everyone streaming for the exits. The key seems to be taking an open and inviting approach to difficult music, and insuring that listeners feel welcomed, not overwhelmed.

The Louisville Orchestra, plagued in recent years by budget deficits and labor strife, has announced the formation of a special fund designed to allow the organization to balance its budget for the current season. The orchestra has been keeping its head above water with a special “bridge fund” from the city of Louisville and several private contributors, but that money runs out later this year. In addition to generating new revenue, the orchestra is attempting to dispel what it calls several myths in the community about its business practices and long-term sustainability.

After 14 hours of negotiations Thursday, the St. Louis Symphony and its musicians emerged with a proposed contract. Musicians will vote on the contract today, but a union representative isn’t hopeful it will pass…

It’s been a year since Daniel Barenboim announced he would leave the music directorship of the Chicago Symphony. So where is the orchestra with its search for a successor?

“All the evidence is that millions of people listen to classical music, on Classic FM or downloaded from the internet. Quite a few listen to CDs too. But classical concerts are clearly a turn-off, especially for the young. This is worrying when so many other forms of live entertainment – comedy, theatre, pop – are doing so well. In just a few generations, the spectacle of a classical concert seems to have lost all its appeal. There are many reasons for this.”

Is there hope for the UK’s Jazz FM? “Given the rude health of the jazz scene, many of us thought that one day someone would take a cool look at Jazz FM and transform the station into the real thing. Instead, it was announced last Monday that the London radio station (owned by the Guardian Media Group) is to be ‘rebranded’ later this year as Smooth FM. What a blow.”

Oleg Caetani, 47, has been named music director of the English National Opera. He conducts three months a year in Melbourne, and has only conducted ENO once. “A source close to the selection process said the appointment of Caetani over his nearest rival, the American conductor Andrew Litton, came down to a choice between something safe and homely against someone who in performance really excited people – you can’t run an arts organisation with something safe and homely.”

“In the latest round of real estate brush fires to hit the [New York] rock scene, several clubs in the East Village and on the Lower East Side are facing their demise, including CBGB, the Bowery dungeon that was the birthplace of punk in the 1970’s. Besides CBGB, the clubs in danger include the Luna Lounge, Fez and Tonic… Owners of endangered clubs complain that rents and insurance charges have skyrocketed and that city officials show little interest in helping them survive.”

Arizona Opera has met a $500,000 fundraising goal and qualified for $250,000 in matching funds from the city of Phoenix, offsetting a budget shortfall created when the company was forced to temporarily move to a new home while its existing venue is renovated.

A few years back, the Edinburgh International Festival sought to recapture some of the crowds and attention which had been diverted to the hugely popular Edinburgh Fringe by creating a new late-night concert series featuring some of the world’s finest classical musicians, with all tickets priced at a rock-bottom £5. The idea was to try to draw new audiences who ordinarily wouldn’t have come near the concert hall. Instead, while the Festival’s existing audience found the £5 admission attractive, no one else seemed to much care. So this year, the Festival is pulling the series altogether, claiming that it had the opposite effect on ticket revenue from what was intended.