Category: music

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra ran a deficit of $2.3 million on a budget of nearly $58 million in its 2003-04 season. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that the red ink is about $1.7 million less than the CSO had anticipated, and significantly less than the $7 million deficit of a few years ago. Still, the orchestra was forced to withdraw more than $9 million from its endowment in the past year to cover operating costs. The CSO’s management team has pledged a return to balanced budgets by the 2006-07 season.

The entire upper management team of Australia’s Adelaide Symphony Orchestra has resigned just a few weeks before the ensemble launches its much-anticipated Ring cycle. Tempers had reportedly flared at Adelaide in recent weeks over the management’s plan to combat persistent deficits by replacing full-time players with part-time freelancers. The orchestra’s outgoing chairman took a shot at the federal government for what he calls the “persistent underfunding” of the ASO.

“In a controversial operation, scientists have exhumed several skeletons from Mozart’s family vault in Salzburg, where the composer spent most of his life. On Monday they appear to have discovered the remains of the composer’s 16-year-old niece Jeanette, whose bones could unlock the mystery of whether the skull, currently kept by Salzburg’s Mozarteum Foundation, really is Mozart’s.”

SuperAgent Herbert Breslin sits down with Norman Lebrecht: “Breslin in his prime would play the media and the music business like a fairground accordionist, simultaneously squeezing and stroking to pump out hullabaloo. He could be tiresomely obscene or irresistibly comic – Puck to Pavarotti’s Bottom – but there never any doubt of his driving passion. He might have made a bigger career in showbiz, but Breslin was devoted heart and soul to vocal beauty, and to Pavarotti as its supreme exponent.”

“Just 2,000 copies are enough to crack the Top 40. The figure is less than a third of what it would have taken to make it into the chart as recently as six years ago, and is a clear sign of the decline of the singles industry. The number one, long viewed as the ultimate prize in the music business, reached a new low last week when Swedish DJ Eric Prydz had the worst sales ever recorded for a chart-topper.”

Lost for 100 years, the manuscript of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony surfaces. “The first four pages of music have at some stage become detached and are missing, as is a title page – hence, perhaps, the fact that it has remained unidentified for so long. Most of the final page, on which there might have been a date and signature, has also gone astray. But the handwriting, the paper and the manner in which Rachmaninov made corrections – all are as they should be.”

“The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra finished its 2003-04 fiscal year with a $463,000 surplus, a far cry from the $1.73 million shortfall the year before.” Foundation, individual and corporate giving was up, and operating expenses were down by $2 million, largely due to pay cuts of 7.8 percent for musicians and 10 percent for staffers.

James Levine may indeed be what the doctor ordered for the Boston Symphony. But his first concerts indicate that the relationship needs consderable maturing, writes Justin Davidson. “The classical music world is hoping for a golden age in Boston, and the inscrutably genial Levine isn’t lowering any expectations. This concert was not the apotheosis of that relationship, but the prelude. Let the work of subtlety begin.”

The Belfast Opera House – the city’s most prominent theatre – has been granted approval for a makeover that will update the building to accomodate modern productions and audiences…

Cell phone ring tones have become a big source of revenue for recording companies. Now Billboard Magazine says it will start publishing a weekly top ringtones chart. “The new chart, known as the Billboard Hot Ringtones Chart, will reflect the “Top 20″ polyphonic ringtone sales for each week, including song title, artist, previous week’s position and number of weeks on the chart.”