Category: music

Why did Raymond Gubbay’s new Savoy Opera fail to make it? “The product was simply not good enough. For opera regulars the performing standards were very ordinary; coach parties would have found the stagings skimpy and unambitious, while general theatregoers, used to the zip and glitz of musicals with production budgets many times larger than the Savoy’s, would have regarded the shows as village hall efforts. There was no razzmatazz, nothing striking enough to make an instant convert out of an opera sceptic, nothing you cannot see regularly at a decent music college production. Musically and dramatically, standards have simply not been high enough.”

“Since Moby’s Play parlayed the blanket licensing of its track listing to innumerable TV ads into several million in record sales five years ago, it has become almost de rigueur for artists slightly outside the mainstream to let their songs sell Volkswagens and iPods. The stigma against “selling out” has faded considerably as artists from the Dandy Warhols to the Flaming Lips to Bob Dylan have conceded that a paycheque and the extra traffic at the record shop that comes with having your song drilled into people’s heads 14 times a night are preferable to not selling at all.”

Video game music is finding its way onto the concert stage. “A decade ago it would have been difficult to imagine that the beeping and whirring that accompanied most video games would have been worthy of the concert hall. But with the introduction of high-powered video-game consoles like Sony’s PlayStation2 and Microsoft’s Xbox, games could finally play on cue large audio files containing recordings of acoustic instruments instead of cheesy synthesized sounds. And as the game industry grew into an annual business of more than $7 billion, having high-quality music provided a competitive edge.”

Christophe Eschenbach has been music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra for a year. So how’s it going? “The orchestra’s board and members are thrilled with Eschenbach’s energetic community profile, his fund-raising success, his congenial personality. But a cloud of doubt hangs over the music-making. Eschenbach’s relationship with the players, some inside and outside the orchestra have said, has been slow to jell.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra just hired a new music director, writes Peter Dobrin. But it’s not too soon to be looking for his successor. “All the major orchestras have experienced change at the helm in the last decade; orchestras everywhere seem to be in a perpetual state of search. Chicago is looking for a new music director, and no sooner will it announce a choice than New York will reveal that it is in the market. Such is the pace of a peripatetic profession. Ideally, Philadelphia would be developing relationships with conductors now, so that when it finds itself looking for new leadership, an actual leader will already be in the pipeline.”

“The Cleveland Orchestra is facing an annual deficit of $4 million this season that will raise the accumulated deficit to a disquieting $7.5 million.” The numbers are forcing a hard look at some of the orchestra’s operations.

There’s a debate in Scotland over the fate of Scottish Opera. The company has been a big critical success, but it’s broke and in dancer of going out of business or being scaled back considerably. “Scottish Opera is, for those outside Scotland, one of the great cultural achievements of Scotland, and one of the great ambassadors for Scotland’s commitment to high culture. The Scottish Parliament is now the custodian of one of the great cultural institutions of the United Kingdom and people will be looking from all round the world to see how Scottish Opera now fares under this new autonomous government.”

“Accusations of hard-knuckled dealing continue to circulate among titans of the keyboard as Bösendorfer and other manufacturers mount renewed challenges to Steinway’s overwhelming dominance of the high-end piano market. Bösendorfer — a 175-year-old Austrian firm whose instruments were played by Liszt, Brahms, Dvorak and Bernstein — has now opened its first New York showroom and begun pushing to get its pianos more widely heard, and seen, on American concert stages. Bechstein — a venerable German maker whose 150th anniversary just coincided with Steinway’s — introduced a newly designed concert grand in January. A relative newcomer, Fazioli, is attracting a following among performers, some of whom are running afoul of Steinway in the process.”

The New York Philharmonic is testing a a new handheld device that concert-goers could hold at performances and get real-time narration of the music. “The device will provide a play-by-play analysis of the music as the concertgoer listens. No pictures (so far), only words: the text changes every 15 to 20 seconds. Think sports patter, only highbrow, musical and blessedly mute.”

Critics are taking notice of the Minnesota Orchestra as it completes an impressive first season with new music director Osmo Vanska. So what’s the secret to the orchestra’s regeneration? “I found the morale (of the players) especially good here. The harder I made them work, the broader the smiles. They are an orchestra that knows they can do better than they have been asked and they want to show what they can do.”