Category: music

The Canadian Opera Company has never before opened its season with a contemporary work, but that changes this week, with the Canadian premiere of Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the darkly horrifying novel by Margaret Atwood. Canadians love seeing art made by other Canadians, of course, but Handmaid, full of violence, rape, and the unceasing degradation of an entire nation of women, is quite a gamble. The production won raves in Copenhagen, but was roundly panned in London. The COC has gone out of its way to insure that Toronto audiences will embrace the show.

“When an opera company produces something by Verdi or Puccini, there isn’t quite the excitement of staging something based on the work of your own most celebrated living novelist. Subscriptions are on the rise, and single tickets are hard to come by. This could mean Atwood is the greatest marketing opportunity Bradshaw and the COC have ever had.” Still, the story, which sees the U.S. replaced by a brutal theocracy, is hard to take in print, let alone on stage, and Atwood has always had reservations about allowing her work to be adapted in any way.

By current classical music standards, the Lyric Opera of Chicago is a wildly successful operation, selling 98% of its seats and projecting a surplus of $700,000 for the current season. The enviable culture of philanthropy in Chicago helps, as does the city’s huge population and the willingness of certain patrons to pony up $12,500 for a ticket to this weekend’s season-opening gala. In an era when serious opera is becoming a luxury unavailable to denizens of most U.S. cities, the Lyric is the shining example of how to build a serious company outside of New York.

Websites are an easy and (usually) cost-effective way of promoting symphony orchestras, which got AJ blogger Drew McManus wondering which American orchestra website was the best. He looked at a lot of them – 70, in fact – and he has declared a winner…

The Atlanta Symphony closed out its fiscal year with some progress: “A balanced $28 million budget. Increased ticket sales. A 23 percent rise in annual-fund contributions. An 18-month wage freeze for musicians and staff.”

The Philadelphia orchestra and its musicians appear to be very far apart in their negotiations for a new contract. Under the orchestra’s latest proposal, “Philadelphia players would not achieve their goal of keeping pace with colleagues in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Philadelphia players are making a minimum of $105,040 in the contract about to end, while the Boston musicians’ minimum salary will reach $108,160 in the season about to start, and $112,840 in 2005-06.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra and its musicians are locked in new contract talks, and of course money is an issue. “But on another level, more enduring than money, these talks and other forces at play seek a change in orchestra culture that would alter how musicians view themselves as employees. For the music-listening public, and the extent to which the orchestra is perceived as a responsible cultural citizen, the results could be profound.”

“It is contract negotiation time at some of the nation’s most important orchestras, when the world’s most exquisitely trained musicians go into hard-hat mode and artistic administrations act like cost-cutting bosses. But this year is unlike any other. In an extraordinary alignment of the stars, four of the so-called Big Five orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, coincidentally have multiyear contracts expiring now, precisely at a moment of serious economic hardship.”

Yuri Temirkanov’s departure from the Baltimore Symphony is only the latest leaving by senior leadership. “When some of the most seasoned and effective employees left, the blithe word from on high was, ‘No one is irreplaceable.’ Management expressed no concern for the drain in institutional memory or community and patron connections that those resignations signified. Losing Temirkanov, whose guidance has generated a higher technical level and remarkably communicative spirit within the orchestra, may likewise be shrugged off as an inevitable, not-to-worry development. But only those who have never truly recognized what this conductor had to offer could be feeling blase today.”

UK youth orchestras have a record number of auditionees. But there’s a big shortage of players for some instruments – the bassoon, oboe, double bass, viola, harp, trombone and tuba. Youth Music have recently called these instruments “endangered species”