Category: music

Despite a great season that included its first trip to Carnegie Hall in 16 years, the Buffalo Philharmonic posted an operating deficit of $1.1 million. “Management said weakness in fund-raising and ticket sales, higher costs for performances and health care and a onetime real estate write-off from the sale of the Birge Mansion contributed to the loss.” And prospects could be worse for the next season…

La Scala makes its traditional opening Tuesday. “The opening performance – always on December 7, the feast day of Milan’s patron saint, St Ambrose – is an opportunity for the rich and powerful to network, and an excuse for others to protest. It is customarily too the pretext for a shock and awe display of furs, jewels and cleavage. But not since 1946, when Toscanini lifted his baton to reopen the theatre after it was damaged by allied bombs in the second world war, has there been quite such a sense of occasion as this year. Almost everyone who is anyone in Italy will be there.”

So La Scala is reopening. Many will talk about the restored building and the state of its acoustics. But there is one topic they don’t bring up: “There is no getting away from the fact that, like every other aspect of the Italian operatic pyramid which it commands, La Scala is in decline. No Italian opera of importance has been written since the death of Puccini 80 years ago. There is no obvious successor to Muti. And the standards of Italian singing are declining by the year.”

“More and more top-tier classical soloists who are not new-music specialists seem to be playing the work of living composers. ‘There is something magic about having in your hands this whole piece that nobody has heard. It’s challenging when you have never played a piece by a composer to learn how it fits under your fingers. I think it would be the same if we suddenly had a new Beethoven sonata because we would not be used to it’.”

“All of Paris had turned out to see the debut offering of the Paris Opera’s new director, Gérard Mortier, and their curiosity was not entirely friendly. Operagoers are a conservative bunch, and the Belgian-born Mortier, who was appointed just a few months before, is widely regarded as a high-modernist provocateur. In an astonishingly short time, he had assembled his own repertory.”

Thanks to the large sums the Canadian Opera Company has been raising for its new home, the company has managed to balance its budget. “In general, the COC had a highly successful year, taking in significantly more money from private and public fundraising (including a 41-per-cent increase from the Ontario Arts Council), and 13 per cent more at the box office. Average attendance rose to 95 per cent, from 86 per cent the previous year.”

The New York Philharmonic is obsessed with its own history, to the extent that it keeps a running count of all the concerts it has ever performed in its program book. The continual focus on the ensemble’s venerable status has a purpose, though: in a city as culturally rich as the Big Apple, it takes a lot to impress the populace, and the Phil counts on its status as an American original to bolster its modern reputation as one of the country’s top orchestras.

When Min Jong Shon’s $46,000 viola was stolen from her practice room at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, she didn’t sit back and wait for the police to recover it. Instead, she banded together with some friends, and used a network of phones and e-mail communications to try to prevent the thief from fencing the instrument. Shon tracked the thief’s movements to various instrument dealers, and eventually recovered the instrument and fingered the culprit on her own. Police were stunned and thrilled, and expect to have the suspect in custody shortly.

Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito and Anna Viebrock are not household names, even among opera fanatics. But inside the European industry, they are known as “the trinity,” a team of directors driven by a passion for the operatic form and a willingness to collaborate to achieve greater results. “Together, the three have made a trademark of obsessively researched direction in rigorously conceived modern translations. Their symbiosis extends to a kind of collective innocence, an intense, shared excitement about the task in hand.”

The bad news for the Minnesota Orchestra is that it ran a $1.5 million deficit for the 2003-04 season. The good news is that the orchestra shaved a million dollars off the previous year’s deficit, increased ticket sales, reached agreement on a cost-saving contract with its musicians, and launched a major new organizational strategic plan designed to eliminate the red ink within three years, all without looting the endowment. The orchestra’s leadership says that this year’s deficit could have been eliminated completely through extra endowment draws and accounting tricks, but they are trying to send a signal to potential donors that they intend to operate completely above board in turning their organization around.