Category: music

The San Francisco-based Women’s Philharmonic, which had promoted the role of women in the classical music industry for nearly a quarter-century, officially closed its doors on Sunday, nearly three years after having to suspend its regular concerts due to a lack of funding. Some of the WP’s programs will be folded into the American Symphony Orchestra League, and much of the work in which the organization had been involved will continue in other forums, but the demise of such an important organization is still sad to see, says Joshua Kosman.

Imagine you’re at a club, or in a concert hall, completely engrossed in a performance. As a music consumer, you are at your most susceptible in situations like these, but promoters and musicians have rarely been able to take advantage of your concertgoing euphoria, because they have no way of selling you a piece of the live music experience to take home. But a bar in New Jersey is becoming one of several testing grounds for a new digital kiosk which allows audience members to plug in and download a digital recording of the show they just saw, almost immediately after it ends. It’s “the next step in instant audio gratification,” and the possibilities for its use seem to be limitless.

Illinois’s Ravinia Festival is celebrating its 100th birthday this summer, and organizers have created a season designed to call everyone’s attention to that fact. “The nation’s oldest music festival will surround the resident Chicago Symphony Orchestra with programs and activities — 100 nights in all — that look back to Ravinia’s origins in 1904 as a ‘high-class amusement park,’ its early reign as the summer opera capital of the world, and its subsequent history as a major international center of music, dance and theater.”

The founder of Naxos records says that classical music isn’t dying at all. In fact, Klaus Heymann thinks that the only part of the industry that will fall by the wayside in the future is the part made up of musicians, managers, and union bosses who can’t see past the end of their own noses enough to notice that the old formulas for such essentials as recording no longer work. Heymann envisions a future in which the concert experience is more informal, the musicians of a major symphony orchestra are contractually bound to work in area schools and play at local weddings, and recordings are made cheaply and quickly.

Following a meeting between the musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the CSO’s executive director and board chairman, the musicians have voted not to hold a referendum on whether to ask outgoing music director Daniel Barenboim to reconsider his resignation. The referendum, which would have amounted to a vote of confidence in Barenboim, and an indirect vote of no confidence in board members who were reportedly dissatisfied with him, was pushed by a handful of musicians loyal to Barenboim, but there were fears that it could have driven a wedge between different factions of the CSO organization.

The musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are considering a vote of confidence in the leadership of music director Daniel Barenboim, who announced last month that he would step down from his Chicago post in 2006. If passed, the resolution would be a symbolic but powerful statement from the musicians that they disagree with members of the CSO’s management and board who have long been frustrated with Barenboim’s leadership and personal style. The idea for a musicians’ vote appears to have been born out of a conversation in which several musicians asked Barenboim to reconsider his decision to step aside, and Barenboim’s reply that he would reconsider only if a majority of the orchestra wished him to.

So Kent Nagano is officially taking over the reins in Montreal. But his contract with the orchestra doesn’t begin until the fall of 2006, and he’ll conduct only two weeks of the 2004-05 season, due to Nagano’s prior commitment to Berlin’s Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester. Furthermore, Nagano is already speaking out on the necessity of a new concert hall for the MSO, a project which has consistently gone nowhere with the provincial government of Quebec. And how much does a top-flight conductor make these days, anyway? No one at the MSO is saying, but it’s a good bet that the orchestra’s annual budget (currently CAN$18-$19 million) will have to rise to meet Nagano’s salary.

“For clues to what Nagano brings the Montreal music community – beyond his world reputation as a nervy tightrope walker in stimulating musical climates – you have to examine his [25-year] relationship with the ragtag [Berkeley Symphony Orchestra.] For the youthful orchestra, comprising mainly part-timers, epitomizes his belief in total engagement with the music. Community means everything to him, specifically his beloved Bay Area, but also branching out into strong personal connections to ‘adopted’ cities where he tackles high-stakes environments with implacable cool.”

In Austin, the home of the South By Southwest(SXSW) music festival, anyone with a wireless internet connection suddenly has 600 new songs in his/her online iTunes database, absolutely free of charge. SXSW organizers are providing the songs to the shared database as a promotional tool for this year’s festival, which runs March 17-21 and features some 1,200 acts. SXSW has been allowing listeners free access to its music for several years, and many see the wireless project as final proof that file-sharing is, in fact, useful beyond simply allowing consumers to steal music.

The Philadelphia Orchestra recently cut its music director’s salary, asked soloists to reduce their fees, asked employees to take a week’s unpaid vacation, and fired seven employees in a cost-cutting move. All this while approving a $10,000-per-year raise for its president.