Category: music

Will Seiji Ozawa’s presence in Vienna help add more women to the orchestra’s ranks? “The Vienna Philharmonic will doubtless fall back on the assertion that change can only come gradually: It can’t be expected to alter the male-to-female ratio overnight. So let’s look at the employment numbers for six years from 1997, when the orchestra proclaimed a new, enlightened policy of hiring women, until 2003. It’s men, 21; women, 3. How’s that for even-handed progress?”

The Saskatoon Symphony is asking the city for a loan of $20,000. “The symphony has been steadily dipping into the red since the 1990s and this season is carrying an accumulated debt of more than $180,000. Because of its debt, the symphony cannot borrow money from a bank. Without the loan, the symphony may have to close.”

The entire board of the Kitchener-Waterloo Sympny resigned Monday before a meeting of the orchestra’s 2,400 members could vote on whether to remove the board. “The resignation of the 14 board members is just the latest instalment in a series of crises flowing from the board’s decision Nov. 27 to fire the KWSO’s principal conductor, Berlin-based Martin Fischer-Dieskau.”

Sam Bergman on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra: “We’re more or less at the midway point of the tour now, and fatigue is starting to become the rule rather than the exception. Today, we’ll fly from Berlin to Cologne, hop a bus to Düsseldorf, play a concert, and head back to the hotel in Cologne. It’s one of the most exhausting days of the trip, and we’re changing up repertoire as well, including the addition of a piece which we have barely rehearsed, and which involves some brutally intricate string playing. Keeping a cool head will be paramount, and if things don’t go well, a sense of perspective will be necessary as well.”

When conductor Franz Welser-Most led the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the early-90s, he was not liked by his musicians, who dubbed him ‘Frankly Worse than Most.” He was soon run out of the job. A decade later he is the much-loved leader of the Cleveland Orchestra. So how did musicians and critics get Welser-Most wrong the first time around?

The $200,000 Grawemeyer Prize is one of the top awards for composers. “The 2004 winner is the Korean composer Unsuk Chin – the third woman to take the Grawemeyer. Like the rest of us, composers come in all shapes and sizes, but Chin isn’t quite what you’d expect a modern composer to look like: she’s petite, delicate, almost weightlessly graceful, with the kind of sultry, heavy-lidded eyes that you see on James Bond’s sexier villains.”

Breaking from a trend in the rest of the orchestra industry, the Toronto Symphony has given its musicians an 11 percent pay raise. “Andrew Shaw, TSO president and chief executive officer, described the increase as “moderate and prudent,” citing a surge in sales that is expected to swell annual attendance by at least 50,000 seats over the level reached two years ago.”

“Last week, the Canadian Recording Industry Association went to court to force Internet service providers to surrender the names and phone numbers of 29 people suspected of uploading music for illegal digital dissemination.”

Sam Bergman on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra in Frankfurt: “When our principal, Tom Turner, had a family emergency and had to miss the first week of the trip, I was vaulted up to third chair in order to fill in the gap. This was fine with me, since you can hear nearly the whole orchestra from the third chair, but when Tom returned to us last night in Frankfurt, I was sent back to the fifth stand, which is something like being moved from first base to left field and then being asked to call the balls and strikes.”

Alex Ross ponders the attractions and liabilities of encounters with classical music. “The strange thing about the music in America today is that large numbers of people seem aware of it, curious about it, even mildly knowledgeable about it, but they do not go to concerts. The people who try to market orchestras have a name for these annoying phantoms: they are ‘culturally aware non-attenders,’ to quote a recent article in the magazine Symphony. I know the type; most of my friends are case studies.”