Category: music

The Adelaide Ring is beginning its second weeklong run of Wagner’s four massive operas, and by all accounts, this is a Ring for the ages, both musically and visually. So how can it be possible that no audiovisual record is being made of its existence? Yes, a complete CD set is planned, but opera (particularly Wagner) is more than just notes, and needs the impact of its staging to be fully appreciated. The sad truth seems to be that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s director of television has no use for opera, and has declined all offers to broadcast or even record it.

A New Jersey school district has banned schools from performing religious music. “The district has banned students from performing music related to any religious holiday — defeating the purpose of the schools’ traditional ‘holiday concerts’.”

The New Zealand Symphony says it needs an extra $1.5 million a year from the government to stay healthy. The orchestra already gets $10 million/year in government subsidy. Last year it predicted it would earn a small surplus. It has recorded a $140,000 deficit and fears losses could increase to $1.3 million by 2006-07.

Boosey & Hawkes, the world’s largest classical music publisher has signed a deal to license classical music to mobile phone networks and ringtone retailers. “Several hundred classical hits will be available as ringtones, including Stravinsky’s Petrushka and, at the more popular endof the classical spectrum, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite or Danny Boy. Ringtone sales account for about 10% of the $32bn (£17bn) global record market and are forecast to grow to $5.2bn by 2006.”

With ratification of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s new contract with its musicians, four of America’s top orchestras have signed new deals. So who won and who lost? “Negotiations this time around were generally more bitter than in the recent past. Attendance and endowments were down, and costs and deficits were up. Strikes loomed, angry rhetoric flew and mediators were called in.”

Five years after London’s Royal Opera House reopened after an expensive makeover, it’s a very different institution, writes Norman Lebrecht. And that’s a very good thing…

By all accounts, James Levine is thrilled to be working at his new job in Boston, writes Alex Ross. “Levine is preëminent among American conductors, yet he remains a curiously contested figure.”

Recording company EMI says that the decline in the music recording business has been halted. “The world’s third-largest music company said the global music market declined 1.3% over the six months to the end of September, compared with a 10% drop in the same period last year. EMI said a return to growth in the US, Japan and south-east Asia offset a flat performance in Britain and a continued decline in Germany.”

Angels in America was a hit play and an acclaimed TV event. But “what possessed Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos to make an opera out of this already operatic play? ‘The dream scenes, the hallucinations, ghosts, heaven … these are fantastic for music. It’s much harder to make an opera out of real life. And the situation with Aids creates great drama – the characters are touched by the knowledge that their life might be cut short at any moment’.”

Surprisingly, there is still much Vivaldi waiting to be rediscovered. But “Vivaldian detective work these days is done not just by mainstream scholars but also by mavericks, on the fringes of the academic world. And against all odds, it’s mavericks who have made the most noise recently in two definitely curious finds.”