Category: music

Minnesota Orchestra music director Osmo Vänskä has been named Conductor of the Year by Musical America, which annually honors those in the classical music industry. Other winners this year include Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, composer Arvo Pärt, contemporary percussion ensemble Bang On A Can, Juilliard president Joseph Polisi, and violinist Christian Tetzlaff.

“[Argentina’s] Teatro Colón is grand opera all by itself… Despite a crushing international debt, economic near-chaos and an ugly political history, this city is a place of staggering energy, from the traffic that races up and down some of the widest boulevards in the world to the successive managements of this opera house since 1908, whose attention to Latin American composers and embrace of the new and exciting from the rest of the world have made it something we in New York might envy.” The house is currently putting on a production of Britten’s “Death in Venice,” and while Teatro Colón may not have the budget of extravagant companies in the U.S. and Europe, it is every inch a major company, both musically and theatrically.

Remarkably, La Scala is reopening this week on time and within budget. It looks good, and the good acoustics have survived. “Continuity is the leitmotif of Tuesday’s gala. The work chosen to reopen the theater is Antonio Salieri’s “Europa Riconosciuta,” the opera that inaugurated La Scala, in the presence of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, on Aug. 3, 1778. Clearly, the intended message is that La Scala is both modern and eternal. But now that the dust has settled, it’s worth asking if the closure and the reconstruction were actually necessary.”

Is a Big Idea likely to dominate classical music in the next few years? Nope, says Kenneth LeFave. There are plenty of reasons why. “Styles tend to only separate men, because they have their own doctrines and then the doctrine became the gospel truth that you cannot change. But if you do not have a style, you just say: Well, here I am as a human being, how can I express myself totally and completely?”

The Milwaukee Symphony had another bad financial year. The orchestra reports an “operating deficit of $2.9 million and a $169,000 decline in ticket revenue for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31. The accumulated debt now stands at $9.8 million. It could have been worse. The orchestra was projecting a $3.5 million operating deficit last January,” but office staff was reduced by 17 positions, about 30%, to save the bulk of the $600,000 difference.

The New World Symphony experiments with Internet2, uniting musicians thousands of miles apart. “On Wednesday night, the New World Symphony had experimented with a violin class by a New World fellow via Internet2 with a student in Beijing 8,075 miles away. Then Thursday morning, New World upped the ante with the rehearsal of Turnage’s piece, conducted by Stefan Asbury in Miami Beach. Internet2, which allows high-definition images and CD-quality sound, put composer and musicians in the same virtual space. With satellite technology, the delay is between 30 seconds and a minute. With Internet2, the delay is 100 milliseconds.”

James Levine has been using Boston Symphony dress rehearsals to actually rehearse. It will take some re-education though, for the auidences that ettend the rehearsals. “After the grand climax at the very end of the work, the audience burst into applause, which Levine acknowledged, asking the orchestra to rise. But then most in the audience began to leave, quite noisily and rudely, although the music director and orchestra were still onstage with work to do. Ultimately Levine had to whistle for silence, and cried out in mock-agony the dying words of the villainous police chief Scarpia in Puccini’s “Tosca” after he has been stabbed. “Aiuto, soccorso!” (“Help me! Come to my aid.”) More freely translated: “Give me a break.”

Next week La Scala reopens in its refurbished home. “At first glance, little has changed in 226 years — not the terraced neoclassical facade designed by architect Giuseppe Piermarini, nor the intimate, semicircular theater. Yet hovering discreetly behind the 18th-century exterior today are a tubular structure and a multistoried fly tower, both very 21st century. They were designed by Mario Botta, architect of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to update and expand the opera’s backstage area in a 60.5 million euro ($80.6 million) revamp that opera professionals say was long overdue.”

A British consumer watchdog group has taken Apple before the European Union, complaining that Brits are being charged more for iTunes than elsewhere in Europe. “Whereas iTunes customers in the UK have to pay 79p to download a song, those in Germany and France are only charged 99 cents or 68p. Back in September Apple defended the price differential, saying that the underlying economic model in each country has an impact on how we price our track downloads.”

A hundred classical music critics gathered in October to talk about their chosen profession. “Conductor James Conlon sounded a recurring theme when he said U.S. classical music institutions were in crisis and needed the help of critics “not just to admonish and correct our bad tempi or poor choice of repertoire . . . but to raise the consciousness of the entire nation” about the value of the arts.”