A September fire at the Maryinsky Theatre’s warehouse in St. Petersburg, Russia was said to have caused only $225,000 damage. But the cost is evidently much higher. Some 30 productions were affected by the fire, and it will take about $15 million to replace what was damaged. The company’s 2003-04 season are imperiled as well as tours to Germany, Japan and the United States.
Category: music
Iraq Symphony In DC
The Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra arrives in Washington DC to perform at the Kennedy Center. “Our objective is not (just) to come here and play music, but to play music through our point of view and the way we understand it.”
Steve Jobs: Recording Companies Need To Be Educated
How did Apple get recording companies to buy in to the iTunes download store? “We told them the music subscription services they were pushing were going to fail. MusicNet was gonna fail, Pressplay was gonna fail. Here’s why: People don’t want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45s, then they bought LPs, they bought cassettes, they bought 8-tracks, then they bought CDs. They’re going to want to buy downloads. They didn’t see it that way. There were people running around — business-development people — who kept pointing to AOL as the great model for this and saying, ‘No, we want that — we want a subscription business’.”
Of Thee I Sing (Won’t Anybody Listen?)
Why is choral music such an outsider in the larger music world? Indeed, choral music has almost as much trouble gaining acceptance as new music. “Could it be that the choral world has too strong a hold on its citizenship? Are the immigration policies too stringent to allow “non-choral composers” inside, and likewise, to allow “choral composers” opportunities to sell their wares to the outside world? Certainly composers such as Arvo Pärt are becoming known in the choral world almost to the point of being appropriated into that ‘community,’ albeit willingly. On the other hand, many composers find it difficult to break into, but not for lack of desire.”
SF Opera Posts $3.8 Million Deficit
“The San Francisco Opera will close the books on the 2003 fiscal year with an operating deficit of $3.8 million, General Director Pamela Rosenberg said Friday. That deficit on an operating budget of approximately $60 million is a sizable amount, but far less than the previous year’s loss of $7.6 million — not to mention the $9.2 million shortfall that company officials had originally predicted.”
Former NYPhil Trustee Jumps To Lincoln Center
A major trustee of the New York Philharmonic, who left the board last month after opposing the orchestra’s proposed merger with Carnegie Hall, has joined the board of Lincoln Center. “While Rita Hauser has made donations to Lincoln Center and has served on its board as a representative of the Philharmonic, most of her financial support — millions of dollars — has gone to the orchestra during her 25 years on its board. She said yesterday that she might continue to support the Philharmonic but ‘not at the same level’.”
Interpret Away…(or not)
“Unlike sculpture, music is inevitably different in every manifestation,” writes David Patrick Stearns. “Whether huge or minute, those differences can be charted, albeit simplistically, on a continuum between two poles: objective to subjective in some parlance, classical to romantic in another. Is the conductor a conduit of the composer? Or a prism? Not everybody falls squarely into one of these camps, and when someone does, it’s not an everyday thing. Sometimes, the most freewheeling musician turns out to be anything but.”
Fenice Rises Again In Venice
“Like its namesake, the phoenix, La Fenice has finally risen from the ashes. The whole saga has resembled one of those long, tumultuous operas in which everything turns out more or less all right in the final act. Next Sunday, in the presence of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the Italian president, La Fenice reborn will open its doors. Yet even now, this is a reopening without opera.” There will be an opening week of concerts, and then the doors will “close again until Nov. 12, 2004, when Lorin Maazel will conduct a new production of “La Traviata.”
National Music Museum Planned For DC
A National Music Museum in Washington DC has been talked about for 11 years. Now, the group working on the project pledges to open it in five years. “The group has already helped raise $5 million and is now committed to raising $100 million to fund the $200 million project.”
In Dallas – The Litton Years
Critic Scott Cantrell assesses Andrew Litton’s tenure as director of the Dallas Symphony, and ponders what the orchestra might look for in his successor: “Mr. Litton certainly energized the DSO and raised its profile in the community. He took the orchestra on three European tours and conducted it in four concerts at New York’s Carnegie Hall. In an era when union contracts largely priced American orchestras out of the recording market, he and the DSO turned out an amazing 23 CDs. As time wore on, musicians, local cognoscenti and critics grumbled about a lack of depth.”