Category: music

Who will be the next general director of the Metropolitan Opera? Insiders say Placido Domingo is on the short list. “Mr. Domingo is quietly pursuing the position, meeting individually with several Met board members, the officials said. In addition, he spent time with members of the board’s search committee on Oct. 6.”

Lincoln Center opens its new theatre complex devoted to jazz. Ben Ratlif says that while it’s too soon to pass judgment on the complex’s finer points, “already these rooms impressively translate into bricks-and-mortar reality how the planners of Jazz at Lincoln Center have raised the stakes for jazz to become visible and powerful in the city.”

Starbuck’s has unveiled its new music business, which lets customers select and burn CDs while they sip their brew. “Coffeehouse customers use computer tablets to select from 150,000 tracks, which include reggae, world music, jazz and religious songs. The tablets transmit the selections to the CD-burning machine, which can burn two discs at a time.”

The London production of La Forza del Destino that was thrown into chaos three weeks ago when La Scala chief conductor Riccardo Muti quit in a huff has opened on schedule, and Andrew Clark says that the Brits are very lucky. “When Muti withdrew [because of] changes made unilaterally to his scenery, [Royal Opera conductor] Antonio Pappano did a very noble thing. He dropped all his engagements, quickly learned the score and threw himself into rehearsals. The Royal Opera can count itself lucky to have a music director who not only leads by example, but is a born Verdian.”

Andrew Clements declares the new La Forza a consummate disaster. Muti, whose departure may have been about more than scenery, was the only reason the Royal Opera House wanted the production in the first place, and when he cut out, “the company was left with the part of the package it never wanted: a staging of monumental awfulness. The music director, Antonio Pappano, gamely took over in the pit, but the Royal Opera deserves little sympathy for the mess, since it had been happy to compromise artistic standards in the first place by importing the show just to pander to an overrated conductor.”

The Detroit Symphony is taking its time in the search for a new music director to replace Neeme Jarvi – in fact, the orchestra may play two or three full seasons without an official leader after Jarvi departs next summer. So why the delay? Part of the problem is the lack of great conductors in the world, but “a more subtle issue has been management’s inability, dating back at least a decade, to lasso enough A-list guest conductors and nurture relationships that might blossom into a music directorship.”

Don’t lump the San Diego Symphony in with all those North American orchestras struggling to make ends meet. The ensemble, which recently received an unprecedented $120 million gift from a local couple, is flush with cash, and the financial security is starting to translate into measurable artistic gains as well. The average musician’s salary will jump $14,600 this season, and the marketing budget has tripled. A $3 million office renovation has been completed, and the SDSO ended the 2003 fiscal year with a $600,000 surplus. So what’s next? More fundraising, of course.

Opera North, the regional company based in Leeds, England, has reported a 25% jump in ticket sales, and a demographic breakdown shows that the company has succeeded in attracting an audience that goes well outside the wealthy elite crowd normally associated with the form. At a time when many UK opera companies are struggling to attract audience as well as funding, Opera North’s success story is a major surprise, and other companies may begin to take a look at its programming strategies, which have included some unorthodox productions in recent years.

Composers are almost always happiest when they know for whom they are writing, and when they can tailor their latest work to a specific musician’s talents, especially in the realm of vocal music, where the subtle discrepancies between voices of can make a world of difference in performance. In an effort to promote such collaborations, a new workshop has been launched by the composer John Harbison and the soprano Dawn Upshaw, bringing together young singers and composers who have never met, but who will be expected to make music together by the end of the session.

When James Levine debuts as music director of the Boston Symphony next weekend, he will do so as arguably the most scrutinized conductor to take over a major American orchestra in the last thirty years. A master of networking and publicity, Levine is also credited with transforming the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra from a glorified pit band to one of the country’s top instrumental ensembles. Questions about his health notwithstanding, the BSO is expecting nothing less than a rebirth on the coattails of its new leader.