Category: music

Sam Bergman on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra: The orchestra wound up its three-week European tour with a concert in Finland Thursday night. Friday, the orchestra flies home to Minneapolis, and Sam expects to blog this weekend on his thoughts about the tour

There’s no end of doom and gloom about the music business these days. But that’s just the business. “There’s never been a better time to be in the music industry? Try telling that to the thousands of music workers who have been laid off over the past couple of years. Universal slashed its workforce by 11% last year. Tower Records filed for bankruptcy in the US two weeks ago. But with album sales rising and the phenomenal growth of ringtones and legal downloads, plus record-breaking years for merchandising and publishing rights, it seems the death of the music industry has been greatly exaggerated.”

London’s Royal Festival Hall has a big problem. “The main problem is the hall’s acoustics. They’re awful. Simon Rattle once said that playing there ‘saps the will to live’. Even the RFH’s resident orchestras, who have historically been defensive about their home, now openly admit it ‘leaves a lot to be desired’.” But doing anything about the sound is more problematic than a mere acoustical upgrade…

The Montreal newspaper Le Devoir reports that Kent Nagano will be named as the Montreal Symphony’s new music director, succeeding Charles Dutoit. The orchestra won’t comment and says it will anounce the choice in March.

Conductor Kent Nagano celebrates 25 years as director of the Berkeley Symphony. “He transformed it from a group that shunned tuxedoes and played in street clothes at unusual locations such as art museums into a sophisticated symphony known for performing challenging modern music. The fare has stretched from the works of Frank Zappa to an improvisational jazz trumpet concerto by Jeff Beal.”

An idea to solve the music downloading problem? How about music fans paying ‘a small monthly fee – perhaps $5 – to share files with impunity, using whatever software they like. The money could be collected by a central organization and then distributed among those who own the rights to the songs, based on popularity. The idea has worked before. Broadcast radio stations paid a similar flat fee…” But the music industry has rejected the idea out of hand.

“Parisian jazz clubs have had historical and sentimental—and temporary—relevance since Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Bud Powell and the others played in those dank, smoky Left Bank caves not because it was romantic but because it was their only option. They deserved to be playing in Salle Pleyel. It’s much better for the deserving in the jazz business now, so it is ironic that more musicians with the clout to play prestigious halls are choosing to go back to multiple performances in smaller, more intimate clubs instead.”

Sam Bergman on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra: The orchestra swings into its last two stops, beginning with Glasgow. “Musicians, particularly orchestra musicians, tend to be competitive by nature. The process by which we audition for our jobs is far too harsh an difficult for anyone without at least a trace of competitive fire to make it through. Even after we have our jobs secured, we tend to constantly look over our shoulders, wondering how other bands are doing, and how we stack up against them. Playing in the home of another orchestra, with the conductor a familiar commodity, we have a lot on the line, and the desire to measure up to expectations is ridiculously high.”

The US Congress has marked the changing of the name of the Washington Opera to the “National Opera.” Congress decided in June 2000 that the 48-year-old company whould be renamed. “According to Placido Domingo, the company’s general director, the new name is a reflection of “the fact that it is in the nation’s capital and therefore touches a wide national audience.”