Category: music

“Writing a full-length opera for a major company is like running for president: Blow it and you’ll never get a second chance.” As a result, many composers are understandably cautious about even approaching the form, and many opera companies that want to put on new works can’t find anyone willing to write them. But a program at Toronto’s Tapestry New Opera Works has been churning out new material for a decade, although admittedly in five to ten-minute chunks. The composer-librettist labs, in which participants must create a new short operatic work every day, are designed “to discover as quickly and cheaply as possible who is cut out to make operas and who isn’t.”

The Houston Symphony is trimming expenses, cutting concerts, and delaying auditions for two key positions in an effort to exceed budget goals for the current season. With ticket sales soft, the orchestra decided to cancel planned performances of Beethoven opera set for next March, and is also postponing a recording of a Beethoven symphony. Three other recordings will go ahead as scheduled.

The musicians of the Montreal Symphony have authorized their negotiating committee to call a strike at any time if a new contract is not agreed to soon. The MSO players have been working without a deal for more than a year, and their pay scale is currently 34th among North American orchestras, despite being recognized as one of the world’s elite orchestras. In response to the strike authorization, the MSO management issued a statement blasting the musicians for their rigidity and refusal to accept fiscal realities.

Conductor Riccardo Muti has withdrawn from a touring La Scala production of La Forza del Destino set for London’s Royal Opera House, in a dispute over, of all things, scenery. The argument centers on several small chunks of wall used in the Milan production, which the ROH had deemed too large for its stage. After several weeks of argument, Muti had had enough, and abruptly quit the project.

Actor Stephen Fry was never much good with a musical instrument in his youth. “At school, one of my greatest regrets was my inability to produce any two notes, in order, that could be said to resemble a tune. One note? Fine, I could produce one note with the best of them, possibly not a very nice note, admittedly, but nevertheless, a note all the same. It was only when I had to produce two or more notes, in succession, in tune, that I had any problems.” Still, Fry’s inability to play music never inhibited his love of the classical form, and his new book on the subject of listening to the stuff is a true labor of love.

“It was just over a decade ago at the Edinburgh Festival that the Canadian Opera Company mounted a radically new production of ‘Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung’ that has since emblemized the next life of the COC. And as the $181-million Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts continues to rise as Canada’s first purpose-built opera house at that prime (Toronto) corner, some part of its foundation can be said to have been laid by the international breakthrough the company achieved overseas.”

“Kent Nagano has announced that he will step down as Los Angeles Opera music director in June 2006, when his current contract expires, and the same year in which he will assume music directorships of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and of the Montreal Symphony.”

“Charges of anti-Semitism have rocked Prague’s cultural elite following allegations that the head of the philharmonic choir has pursued a vendetta against a tenor with Jewish roots. But it is far from clear whether the nature of the conflict between the choir director, Petr Danek, and the tenor, Michal Forst, is based more on personal animosity than on actual anti-Semitic slurs and behavior.”

On Saturday, when Finnish soprano Karita Mattila was too ill to sing the role of Donna Anna in the Lyric Opera’s “Don Giovanni,” her 28-year-old understudy, Erin Wall, gave a performance opposite Bryn Terfel that has vaulted her into an elite circle of young opera singers.

The orchestra world is obsessed with wondering whether musicians in some of the top U.S. orchestras will be forced to accept wage reductions this fall. But times are tough throughout the industry, and Drew McManus wonders why no one seems to care about the musicians who really can’t afford the cuts. “It’s those [smaller] ensembles that employ the majority of professional orchestra musicians and bring classical music to that largest segment of the population. If those musicians begin to slip below the waterline of financial sustenance, they’ll need to find a life preserver of non-performance income just to keep from drowning. And if we see that come to pass then it’s a sure sign that the industry is devouring itself from the inside out.”