Category: music

And what will be the legacy of Pamela Rosenberg’s three-year reign at San Francisco Opera? “Rosenbergism — the complex blend of unusual repertoire, edgy musical values and concept-driven, psychologically fine-tuned dramaturgy that has defined her tenure so far — hasn’t been a complete success, but it hasn’t been tried and found wanting, either. The truth is that it was never completely tried at all.”

A US Senate committee has asked the New Jersey Symphony to turn over all records concerning a sale of 30 rare instruments for $17 million. The seller – Herb Axelrod – has been arrested for tax fraud, and the Senate is investigating abuse of charitable deductions. Meanwhile Axelrod’s lawyer is denying any wrongdoing. “Herb Axelrod didn’t cheat anybody. The fact is, he hasn’t taken a dime in charitable deductions with respect to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. All the good he has done with respect to these violins has been denigrated unfairly.”

Keith Bernstein set out to write an opera about torture at Guantánamo, but he had no idea the images he imagined for his plot would hit so close to home. “The whole scenario of the opera has flooded the world since it was written to a degree that we could not have predicted. Or perhaps we all knew subconsciously that Abu Ghraib was inevitable, and it just took a librettist of sufficient prescience to imagine it.”

Lollapalooza isn’t the only summer pop music tour that has had difficulty generating ticket sales. Other big-name tours are selling poorly. “The summer concert business is going to be lackluster. A lot of high-profile tours are doing poorly.”

Blue Note Records, owned by another big company, EMI, is a legend in jazz recording. But though jazz isn’t a big seller, Blue Note is consistently profitable. “That financial stability gives CEO Bruce Lundvall and the label’s musicians the freedom to follow their vision and to take risks. It also means Blue Note is a force for enriching and continuing the genre. Last week, it picked up another award for Best Jazz Label from the Jazz Journalists Association – an indication that even with the addition of a broader range of artists, it hasn’t lost its roots.”

English National Opera has commissioned a new work from the Asian Dub Foundation, an experimental group “best known for their blend of breakbeats, rap and politics.” No one seems quite sure what the opera, which will premiere in 2006, will consist of, but just in case anyone was worried that the ADF would take its usual act down a notch for the sake of high art, they have announced that the protagonists will be Libyan dictator Colonel Moammar Gadafi and his “revolutionary nuns.”

With the quick demise of Savoy Opera, the attempted murder of Scottish Opera, and the seemingly endless melodrama at English National Opera, Norman Lebrecht is wondering whether the UK’s opera world realizes the trouble it is in. “A view is forming, not unreasonably, that opera has reached saturation point in Britain, and most congestively in London where Covent Garden and English National Opera compete year round with visiting troupes at Sadlers Wells, the South Bank, the Barbican and the Proms, not to mention an incursion of festivals.”

The Lollapalooza concert tour, long one of the big events of the summer mega-concert season in the U.S., has been canceled due to poor ticket sales. It’s only the latest blow for promoters in a summer which has seen slow sales for many large touring shows, and comes only days after pop’s reigning mega-princess, Britney Spears, had to pull out of her nationwide tour following a knee injury.

Scottish composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has blasted the Scottish Executive for its treatment of Scottish Opera, calling the politicians responsible “a disgrace,” and accusing them of deliberately “wrecking the country’s artistic heritage… Scotland is not philistine, but it is being rendered philistine through the lack of vision of those in charge.”

Australia’s Adelaide Symphony Orchestra isn’t exactly a luxurious place to work. Its highest-paid musician is paid less than the lowest-paid member of the Sydney Symphony, and an organizational restructuring this year has cut costs and staff to the bone. And yet despite significant gains in ticket sales and private contributions, the ASO is still struggling with the deficits that have plagued Australia’s orchestras since they were privatized in 1997. Part of the problem may be that government assumptions concerning orchestras consistently expect that productivity can increase. But as one union leader points out, “it takes the same number of musicians the same amount of time to rehearse and perform as it did 200 years ago.”