Category: music

It’s been three months since the musicians of the Cleveland Orchestra agreed to a new two-year contract, averting a strike and seemingly marking a truce between the players and their management. But a letter sent by the orchestra’s president to key donors late in the negotiating process has the musicians still fuming over its assertion that they were making “financially unrealistic and institutionally ruinous demands.” The musicians have now sent a letter of their own to many of the original memo’s recipients in an attempt to repair what they view as their wrongfully damaged image.

A lot of eyebrows were raised in the orchestra world when Christoph Eschenbach, an enthusiastic promoter of new music, was hired to be the music director in Philadelphia, a city known for its ultra-traditional musical tastes. A look at the orchestra’s just-released 2005-06 season calendar indicates that some compromise between the two philosophies may be in the offing: the Philadelphians will focus heavily on Beethoven next year, but there will be several world premieres hidden amongst the warhorses.

By the standards of the orchestra industry, Minnesota Orchestra president Tony Woodcock did not have a smooth first few weeks on the job in 2003, as a bitter behind-the-scenes battle over his appointment spilled into the press. But in a little over a year on the job, he has “led a financial turnaround at the venerable institution and now plans to further strengthen it with a $50 million fund-raising campaign.” On top of the financial success, Woodcock’s employees say that he has begun to heal the deep wounds left by previous managements, and to reassert the orchestra as one of the Twin Cities’ most valued cultural mainstays.

Copenhagen’s much-anticipated new opera house opens this weekend with near-unprecedented fanfare, but a lot of people aren’t at all happy with the finished product. First on the list of malcontents: the architect, who claims that his vision was forcibly altered by the project’s lead donor.

The Music Center at Strathmore, in suburban Washington, D.C. is very nearly ready for its close-up, and if successful in its mission, it will change the face of the arts in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. “The state-of-the-art building is unique in the way it embraces art from its tiniest beginnings to its loftiest expressions. Five-year-olds learn how to hold a violin correctly; 3-year-olds can take tap dance with their mothers or fathers. When the concert hall opens next month, cellist Yo-Yo Ma will be center stage; later, Sauvion Glover will bring his thrilling kind of tap to the hall.”

It was a major coup when the New Jersey Symphony announced that Neeme Jarvi would become its next music director. But what will the legendary Jarvi need to accomplish to put the NJSO on the map? “The [major] task will be to make the woodwind and brass players perform with the polish, subtlety, warmth and cohesiveness of the string players, newly empowered by the orchestra’s acquisition of a cache of valuable string instruments… [Jarvi,] with his obvious taste for Nordic music and with a readily available stable of maestros to extend the Nordic range… seems to be ideally placed to develop a specialty with this orchestra much the way Charles Dutoit did in French music with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.”

The work stoppage at the St. Louis Symphony has been remarkably civil thus far, but tempers are beginning to flare over the issue of health insurance, which was cut off to the musicians when they rejected management’s final contract offer. The SLSO had prepaid the musicians’ premium, and received a rebate from the cancellation. Meanwhile, the 2-year-old son of an orchestra cellist had a seizure last week, and his mother found herself stuck with a major hospital bill when her insurance was found to have been terminated. The musicians claim that their health insurance was never affected during previous work stoppages.

A third week of concerts has fallen to the St. Louis Symphony’s work stoppage. This time, the scheduled soloist and conductor was Itzhak Perlman, and the SLSO chose to cancel several days sooner than usual, due to the unusually large number of tickets sold, and the possibility of patrons coming great distances to see the famous fiddler.

The San Antonio Symphony was supposed to be dead and buried by now, the victim of endless deficits, questionable management, and meager community support. Instead, SAS officials are in a jubilant mood after meeting the requirements of a major challenge grant, and are preparing to launch a major PR initiative designed to increase ticket sales and make the orchestra more attractive to high-rolling donors.

A staid, refined art form like classical music just can’t compete in a dumbed-down NFL/MTV world, right? Actually, maybe it can. “In an upset of Joe Namath proportions, orchestral music has been thriving in the realm of the football fan, rabid and otherwise. For 40 years, the highly regarded highlights of NFL games airing on such TV programs as ‘Game of the Week,’ ‘This Is the NFL’ and channels such as ESPN Classic and the NFL Network have been accompanied by an orchestra. Based in Mount Laurel, N.J., NFL Films currently has an unheard of two composers on staff — Tom Hedden and David Robidoux.”