Category: music

19th-century violin virtuoso Nicolo Paganini had quite a life story, full of gambling, carousing, and concertizing, but the life of his instrument is nearly as fascinating on its own. The 260-year-old Guarneri, which is kept under heavy guard in Genoa and overseen by a committee, has been played by only a few select musicians since the death of Paganini, and when jazz fiddler Regina Carter was invited to try it out two years ago, purists threw a fit. Carter recorded an album on the famous violin, and this weekend, she’ll get a chance to perform on it live in New York. But only for 45 minutes. Because the commitee says so.

Sarah Bryan-Miller is not a popular individual with some St. Louis Symphony Orchestra musicians at the moment, due to her decision to break a little-known taboo in her reviews of the ensemble. Bryan-Miller is not known for overly caustic reviews, and doles out far more regular praise than some of her predecessors in the city, but last year, she made a decision to use her platform to address one of the problems that nearly every orchestra faces, but no one ever talks about. “There are several players [in the SLSO] who sometimes appear in the spotlight but are simply not up to the challenge. A couple of them are downright bad. And there’s no apparent end to the problem: In the absence of a music director, no one can fire an inadequate player. What to do? Last season, I reluctantly began naming names.”

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is reporting a deficit for the just-concluded fiscal year of nearly $800,000, its first in a decade. The announcement comes on the heels of the signing of the SPCO’s new contract with its musicians, which trimmed six weeks from the orchestra’s season and slashed salaries by nearly 20%. The SPCO also laid off a third of its administrative staff last spring in a cost-cutting move, and has significantly scaled back or replaced some of the larger productions it had scheduled for this season.

The Brooklyn Philharmonic is set to receive a $330,000 grant from the federal Department of Education to study whether children in inner-city schools benefit from music classes. Trouble is, everyone already knows that children benefit from music classes, don’t they? Anti-tax organizations and government watchdog groups are up in arms over the grants, which opponents say could have been spent on “about 400 drum sets, 800 saxophones or 900 trumpets – or to pay the salaries of several music teachers.”

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which has been seen as a textbook case of the financial chaos enveloping American symphony orchestras, has somehow managed to balance its budget. “The PSO had projected a $2.5 million to $3 million structural deficit for the 2003-04 season, but expects to avoid it through increased endowment performance, augmented annual fund contributions, reduced musicians’ salaries, increases in ticket revenue and enhancement of shared services… Other positive fiscal factors include fund raising that is $250,000 ahead of this time last year, a new musicians’ contract that includes a 7.8 percent wage cut for the first two years, and a 30 percent increase in new classical subscription sales from last year to date, totaling 1,550 new subscribers.”

The musicians of the San Antonio Symphony have a new contract. The good news is that the embattled ensemble will apparently survive, and will mount 26 weeks of concerts in 2004-05. The bad news is that there will be no concerts this season, and musicians will have no salaries, no health insurance, and few local prospects for full-time musical employment in the interim. The contract calls for the musicians to receive a raise in weekly wages in 2004, but because of the short season, they will actually make far less in salary and benefits than they did prior to the orchestra’s bankruptcy filing last spring.

So how do the musicians of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra feel about the appointment of Neeme Järvi as their next music director? ‘Ecstatic’ may not be a strong enough word. Järvi first conducted the NJSO last season, and the orchestra’s principal flute says that “after that concert, I heard the most unbelievable gushing from every section of the orchestra. The veterans loved him, the newbies loved him. Everybody fell for him.” Musicians are also praising the orchestra’s board for making them an integral part of the search process, rather than an afterthought.

While the appointment of Neeme Järvi in New Jersey may have come as a shock to the orchestra industry, the new partnership is already looking like a natural match. After all, Newark is not so terribly different a city from Detroit, where Järvi has spent the last 14 seasons. And the NJSO couldn’t ask for a more down-to-earth musician to match its down-to-earth base of operations: by all accounts, Järvi’s strength is in his ability to take music seriously without ever forgetting that he and his musicians are entertainers first. “Do you know what is the difference between God and a conductor?” he asks. “God doesn’t think he’s a conductor!”

A British impresario has announced that he will shortly launch a new opera company in London designed specifically to be accessible to a wider and more diverse audience than the city’s other, larger companies. “The Savoy Opera company, based at London’s Savoy Theatre, will stage popular operas such as Carmen and the Marriage of Figaro, beginning in April. The aim is to not to compete with the capital’s two big opera companies, but to offer a cheaper alternative. Top ticket prices will be £50, compared to £170 at the Royal Opera House.”

Charles Michener is impressed with his first encounter with Disney Hall. “If the flamboyant façade doesn’t attain quite the iconic power of the Sydney Opera House as a city-defining monument (there’s no dramatic vantage point from which to view it whole), its interior radically redefines the experience of concertgoing. People in the concert business tell me that it takes about three years for an orchestra and a new hall to settle down acoustically. What I heard at Disney Hall suggests a marriage that is off to a roaring start.”