Category: music

Opera Company of Philadelphia announced its new season with something less than the usual fanfare this week. Citing financial constraints, OCP is cutting one of its five annual productions, and has adjusted its planned repertoire to add more crowd-pleasers and eliminate an expensive Tchaikovsky production. The company, which has historically operated in the black, ran a small deficit last season, and could lose as much as $200,000 this year. “Subscribers have declined from 11,568 last season to 9,233 this season, with a drop in total ticket revenue from $4.46 million to a projected $3.9 million.” Donations have been flat as well.

Ever since the Detroit Opera House opened eight years ago, Michigan Opera Theatre has faced serious questions about the long-term financial sustainability of the venue. But now, with MOT in the final phase of a $20 million fund drive, and a major expansion of the opera house about to get underway, founder and director David DiChiera is firmly in the driver’s seat, and no one is doubting his dream-big style anymore.

“Rock veterans Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno are launching a provocative new musicians’ alliance that would cut against the industry grain by letting artists sell their music online instead of only through record labels.” The point is to encourage musicians to break free of traditional recording agreements enforced by profit-driven corporations and tradition-bound unions, and to see for themselves wich aspects of new technology are useful, and which are not.

The Bottom Line, the legendary New York venue which showcased acts from Joan Baez to The Police, officially shut down last week after losing a financial battle with its landlord, New York University. “For a music lover the place always seemed too good to last. The Bottom Line was a grand anomaly among clubs: a place where the music came first. In the end, it seemed, its owners weren’t greedy enough.”

The Louisville Orchestra is changing the way it does business, it says, but it’s difficult to tell exactly what that means, or how it will improve the fortunes of the financially distressed ensemble. Louisville fired its music director largely because of poor ticket sales, and is loudly declaring to anyone who will listen that it is going to give its audience whatever it asks for. That sort of marketing strategy is bound to backfire, says Andrew Adler. “The orchestra is so afraid of anything that smacks of elitism that it’s hurtling headlong in the opposite aesthetic direction: celebrating small-d cultural democratization to the exclusion of more challenging repertoire.”

Neeme Järvi’s last season with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is unveiled, and it plays like nothing so much as a summing up of the 15 years of artistic growth which the Motor City has enjoyed under the Estonian maestro. There are crowd-pleasers (Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana,) and critic-pleasers (Ned Rorem’s Third Symphony,) but mostly, there is the enthusiastic personality of Järvi himself, capped off in the final three weeks of the 2004-05 season, when Järvi the father will be joined, on stage, by his three children: flautist Maarika, and conductors Paavo (of the Cincinnati Symphony,) and Kristjan.

Handicapping a music director race is always a dicey proposition, since symphony orchestras tend to treat such matters with the secrecy normally reserved for international war plans, but one of the best ways to distinguish the front-runners from the also-rans is to note carefully which conductors keep popping up unexpectedly during the time that the search is ongoing. In Detroit, current conventional wisdom says that 39-year-old Mark Wigglesworth, a talented Briton who has been making the rounds in North America for the last several years, may be high on the DSO’s list to replace Neeme Järvi.

From the first time the Three Tenors stepped up to a microphone and began belting Broadway tunes, discriminating listeners have known that there is a serious disconnect between the vocal styles of classical musicians and, well, everyone else. In fact, the real failure of the “crossover” genre is not that it has dumbed down the classical market, but that the singers almost always sound like fish out of water, says Richard Dyer. “Too many opera singers have had the wrong tonal quality, the wrong diction, the wrong rhythm — and the wrong arrangements. There is a kind of arrangement that knows no period; Las Vegas lies in a land beyond time and place, and that’s where the hearts of too many arrangers lie.”

Casey Stratton is a talented singer-songwriter from Michigan, who recently got himself a record deal. But the record company he signed with is Sony Classical, which has never marketed a pop singer before, and observers have been left wondering exactly what Stratton and Sony think they’re doing. The truth is, of course, that classical labels are willing to try anything to stay afloat these days, and if that means trying to balance the books on the back of a talented non-classical performer who would never have been given a chance by the increasingly risk-averse pop labels, then so be it.

If classical music is really dying, or at least becoming a culturally irrelevant fringe entertainment, we have no one to blame but ourselves, writes Bernard Holland. “An implicit contract has been signed but is not necessarily being honored. It states that if I understand a piece of music, I’m likely to like it, too. This is not true. No amount of experience and analysis can by itself induce the stab of communication between art and its beholder… The consumer, it would seem, bears the fault. The product is rarely held accountable.”