Category: music

The short, sad story of the Mountain Laurel Center is a lesson in the risks of overreaching in the service of a great idea, writes Dan Majors. The project was underfunded from the start, and last summer, construction was still ongoing when the Pittsburgh Symphony showed up for the gala opening concert. Now, with Mountain Laurel officials looking for a state bailout only seven months after that gala, one has to wonder why no one addressed the financial precariousness of the project earlier.

“Northwestern University on Monday officially ended the school’s storied organ and church music degree programs, citing the lack of enrollment and need to focus music department resources elsewhere.” But students in the program, who are protesting the decision, have some powerful allies – members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra who are on faculty at the university are speaking out against the cutbacks, and letters of support have come from CSO music director Daniel Barenboim and Chicago Lyric Opera director Andrew Davis. Northwestern’s organ program has been a cornerstone of the school’s music department since the 1890s.

For mid-sized orchestras, finding and holding onto quality executives can be a difficult task. If an executive succeeds in creating a sustainable orchestra model at a top regional orchestra, s/he will likely be snapped up in short order by a more high-profile ensemble. Such was the case in Portland this past year, where Oregon Symphony president Tony Woodcock was snatched away by the Minnesota Orchestra, leaving Oregon scrambling to find a replacement who could match Woodcock’s skills. Today, the symphony will announce William A. Ryberg, a tenor-turned-banker who has lately been running a small orchestra in Michigan, as its new president, and all involved will cross their fingers in the hope that they’ve found another quality administrator, and that this one might stay.

“Composers today, both professionals and amateurs, can write and produce music in home recording studios using versatile recording software and powerful computers. They can combine multiple tracks, mix in various instruments and even buy the rights to recordings by well-known artists to augment their music. The final product is digital music, and the sound is very, very close to studio quality.”

Anthony Tommasini is “flabbergasted by the decision of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in London to drop the soprano Deborah Voigt from a new production of Strauss’s ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’ in June because she was deemed too heavy for a slinky black dress that is central to the director’s concept of the role. The company’s move is so appalling that you have to wonder whether there is more to the story.”

Composer Peter Maxwell Davies is the ideal choice as the new master of the Queen’s music. “He and Harrison Birtwistle are unquestionably the pre-eminent composers of their generation. Both have wide international recognition and both feel passionately about musical education. Max, in particular, is a wonderful animateur who loves working with children and non-professional musicians – a man of the community and one who galvanises people into action. It is brave of the Palace to go for that kind of distinction even if it risks having to deal with some outspoken comment.”

Covent Garden’s sacking of Deborah Voigt once again brings up the issue of ample girth in opera. “It has become a cliche to say that we live in an era of ‘director’s opera’, and that it is the producer rather than the singer who now reigns supreme. This is only partly true. Although there is a growing demand for theatrical veracity in opera, any operatic performance that is poorly sung is simply a non-starter. But there was a time when none of this even mattered. Jokes about the disparity between voice and appearance have always abounded, even among opera’s most ardent admirers and practitioners.”

In one of the more bizarre stories to come out of the UK’s Royal Opera House in recent years, acclaimed soprano Deborah Voigt has apparently been fired from an upcoming production of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos for being too large to fit into the dress the costumer had designed for the role. There’s no denying that Voigt is a large woman, but she is also quite a well-known woman who has made Ariadne her signature role over the course of a very distinguished career. But the casting director at the Royal Opera insists that the producer’s vision for the production simply precluded Ms. Voigt’s participation, and further added that, in his opinion, many singers use their profession as “an excuse to eat too much.”

Mariss Jansons’s tenure as music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra has been an unqualified success by artistic standards, and as the maestro prepares for his final concerts in the Steel City, he still speaks of his musicians with great affection, praising their humility and work ethic as well as their talent and skill. But if Jansons has any regrets about his time at the PSO, the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of America’s political and cultural disinterest in great art. “What I can’t understand is having this orchestra in the city and not supporting it, or making it a treasure. This I don’t understand as politics. I lived in Soviet Union, the officials didn’t like classical music, but how they supported art and sport, you can’t imagine.”

“Thanks to fan blogs, artist Web sites and legal (and not so legal) downloadable music that’s often peer-reviewed, a music fan can get instant information – and opinion – about an artist without ever turning to the pages of Rolling Stone. Or a fan’s daily newspaper, for that matter… With so many new outlets for music fans to connect with artists and vice versa, and with the days of hanging with the band on the tour bus for a week more often than not replaced with a 15-minute phone interview of say-nothing sound bites, has the pop music critic become as outdated as an eight-track tape?”