Category: music

“The BBC yesterday promised to press ahead with plans to transmit the award-winning West End show Jerry Springer – the Opera this Saturday in the face of concerted complaints by outraged Christians led by the Bishop of Manchester.”

Two recent violin speculation scandals (Isaac Stern’s estate and the New Jersey Axelrod sale) have Norman Lebrecht wondering if there might be lessons to be learned. Sure. It’s this: “put not your faith in fiddles. Musical instruments are made for playing, not for speculation. They inflict pain, as much as gain. Handle with care.”

The St. Louis Symphony officially asked its musicians yesterday to return to work under the terms of their old contract while negotiations continue for a new agreement. But due to unusual funding terms of the previous agreement, any “play-and-talk” scenario would have the musicians playing for far less than the weekly pay rate they had been receiving, a plan which the musicians have rejected. Still, the SLSO’s top exec is claiming that the offer of a paid return to work proves that the stoppage is a musician-called strike, not a management-imposed lockout.

The work stoppage at the St. Louis Symphony came at the worst possible time for dozens of hopeful players who had spent the weekend piling into the city for two auditions scheduled to be held this week. The auditions were canceled after the musicians and management could not come to a contract agreement, and the orchestra is reimbursing the auditionees for their travel expenses. The SLSO musicians were willing to allow the auditions to go on as scheduled, but that would have required the audition committee to be paid a small gratuity, which the orchestra’s managers refused to allow.

In the wake of the Florida Philharmonic’s bankruptcy and the demise of Miami’s lone classical radio station, many observers have been wondering aloud whether South Florida really just doesn’t have any use for the form. Now, more evidence for the affirmative: the Palm Beach Chamber Music Society is slashing its current season by a third, and may close up shop completely before fall 2005. Poor ticket sales and sluggish donations are cited as the major reasons for the society’s problems. A lack of local product may also be a factor – the internationally known Miami String Quartet decamped for Ohio last year, and many local performers have left town with the Philharmonic’s shutdown.

“Management called it a strike; the union called it a lockout. But whatever the terminology, for the moment, the music has stopped. Management’s last offer was for around $72,000 this season – less than the $73,900 the players are making now.” At a meeting of musicians “there was no pontification (from the floor); people just got up and said, ‘I’m really sad, but I can’t accept it.’ We need to maintain our position of parity (with comparable orchestras), and we can’t be bankrupt. We need to be able to afford things we’ve invested in, like instruments and houses and education and all of that.”

EMI’s Abbey Road Studio is hosting “a gargantuan, million-dollar recording of Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde,’ put together as a now-or-never enterprise for the tenor Plácido Domingo but also as a last, heroic stand from a classical CD industry so crushed by economic pressures that many consider it in terminal decline.” It may be the last ever recording of the Wagner epic.

Large-scale changes are underway at Interlochen Music School, where faculty dismissals and program changes have riled some fans of the school. The school’s board chairman says that the changes are essential because “declining enrollment, fewer applicants, higher cancellations and fewer returning campers were threatening the camp’s reputation and even survival. At the same time, the student-staff ratio last summer was two to one. ‘That is not a sustainable ratio’.”

A new UK music website promises to “democratize” how music is distributed. “TuneTribe is offering unsigned artists and acts with existing record deals an 80% share of royalties instead of the traditional 15% offered by majors such as Sony and EMI. Bands can set the price for downloading their own music, with the benchmark set at 79p a track by iTunes.”