Category: music

Rocker Elvis Costello is writing his first opera – The Secret Arias – and it’s been chosen for a debut in the new Copenhagen Opera House. “The opera is based on famed adventure author Hans Christian Andersen’s romance with the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. It will be performed on the opera’s experimental stage during the 2006–2007 season.”

After about 10 months of on-again, off-again negotiations, musicians of the Florida Orchestra ratified a labor contract Friday. Terms of their three-year agreement with the board of trustees include a base salary that rises from $25,120 in the current season to $30,090 in the 2006-07 season.

“Black and Latino musicians account for about 3 percent of the musicians in American orchestras nationwide but about 30 percent of the Chicago Sinfonietta. Most orchestras have practically all-white boards of directors and audiences, but about a third of the Sinfonietta’s board is non-white and about 40 percent of its audience is minority. Most orchestras rarely play music by minority composers, but the Sinfonietta integrates these works throughout its entire season.”

Placido Domingo is singing in the Barcelona opera house he considers home. “The 64-year-old tenor will take the stage as Wagner’s Parsifal in the Liceu Theatre in Barcelona on Friday, his first operatic role for 15 years in the theatre he considers home.” Does this sound like the beginning of a farewell tour?

Seventeen-year-old violinist Nicola Benedetti is about to become a household name and one of the highest-paid performers of her generation after agreeing a £1 million-plus, six-album record deal with Universal. Last May she became the first Scot to win the BBC Young Musician of the Year award. “Between modelling, advertising and other personal appearances, she has been booked for a series of UK and US performances this year.”

“The Bush administration has severed the fertile connection between Cuban and American musicians—and audiences—by reversing American policy. The security crunch following 9/11 has given immigration authorities the excuse they’ve long sought to exclude many foreign musicians from the United States. But against Cubans, the resistance runs far deeper. This is a Cuban music crisis—a development that has more to do with the Cold War than the War on Terror.”

It’s only eight years since the Vienna Philharmonic admitted its first woman player. Now more women occasionally end up in the orchestra, but last week, a woman conducted the orchestra as it played for a production of “Così Fan Tutte.”

Beverly Sills, 75, is stepping down as chairman of the Metropolitan Opera, citing family reasons. “She said that her tenure would indeed be the last act of a 60-year career in the arts world that wended its way through the roles of soprano star, opera manager, Lincoln Center overseer, fund-raiser and, finally, Met chairwoman in 2002 – a volunteer job for which she had left a previous retirement. ‘I am stepping down for good. I had already decided that I was not really serving any of the masters well’.”

It’s been 13 months since Andrew Litton said he was stepping down as music director of the Dallas Symphony. Is the orchestra close to naming a new leader? “We look for someone who’s steeped in the European tradition and American music, who’s beautiful and a great fund-raiser and can cure cancer at the same time. Nobody can do all that.”

James DePriest has been named music director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. “DePreist, who for 23 years was music director of the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, currently serves as principal artistic advisor of the Phoenix Symphony and is director of conducting and orchestral studies at the Juilliard School. After leaving the music director post at the OSO in 2003, he became the orchestra’s laureate music director.”