Category: music

The Sydney Opera House celebrated its 30th anniversary this weekend. Initially plagued by construction delays and cost overruns, the sleek, swooping building has become an icon for the entire continent, and the first image many foreigners imagine when they think of Australia.

Rumors are swirling that the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, which was left headless following the abrupt resignation of Charles Dutoit in 2002, has already chosen a new music director, and is simply waiting for the right time to announce. “Security is high. No one with authority has let a name slip… Still, there are some suspects worth re-examining.” Any serious conductor who is fluent in French could be a candidate, but the names Eliahu Inbal, Emmanuel Villaume, and Yan Pascal Tortelier are among those who are frequently spoken of as serious contenders.

“Spoleto Festival USA’s board of directors has learned that the 27th season of the arts festival ended up $10,007 in the black. The unaudited results for the fiscal year ending Aug. 31 showed that the festival’s $6.3 million budget got a strong boost from a record $2.5 million in ticket sales, according to a statement released by the festival Friday following a board meeting in New York. Not only was this year’s festival the highest-grossing ticket sales season in its history, but about half of its performances also were sold out.”

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra could very well have chosen to spend the last few years hiding under a pile of the Motor City’s ever-present downtown rubble, and hoping that the financial roof wouldn’t fall in. After all, orchestras are in terible shape just about everywhere, and Detroit is hardly a model for the type of forward-looking urban development that orchestras must embrace to make strides in an increasingly diverse entertainment universe. Instead, the DSO took a big, beautiful chance, and invested millions in a newly revitalized concert hall in one of the city’s most blighted neighborhoods. No one yet knows if the plan will succeed, but thank God someone is still trying, says William Littler.

Classical music, and opera in particular, is often held up as a beacon of transcendant, other-worldly beauty, in a culture obsessed with speed and reduced to communicating through sound bites. But that perception doesn’t often square with reality, says Anne Midgette, and the fact that listeners aren’t being transported to a higher realm on an average night at the Met doesn’t mean that the music has failed, simply that our expectations are misplaced. “Opera deals in human emotions, not divine and ethereal ones. When singing is sublime, it’s partly because it amplifies those emotions with a kind of inner purity.”

As part of the massive expansion of the Detroit Symphony’s Max M. Fisher Music Center, a new 450-seat chamber music hall was built, and the DSO is hoping that it will be the key to drawing new audiences to classical music in the city. The new hall looks great, but how does it sound? “Judging acoustics based on only one night in the hall is a bit like tasting Bordeaux from the barrel, but with that caveat in mind, the sound-bite summary is this: The hall is not perfect, but the acoustics Wednesday were promising enough that it’s safe to call the Music Box the best hall for chamber music in metro Detroit.”

At some point in the 1980s, the pop music genre known as R&B went crushingly, horrifyingly commercial, and became less traditional “soul” music than overproduced pap designed to be as inoffensive as possible to as wide a range of consumers as could be snookered into buying it. Then, in the mid-’90s, a new breed of talented young singers – the “neo-soul” movement, they were dubbed – began to revitalize the genre with original albums that picked up where artists like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye had left off back in the ’70s. But the movement has stalled out, the neo-soul musicians are flying well under the pop culture radar, and slick commercial R&B is again dominating the charts. Still, there may yet be hope for serious soul musicians.

The Honolulu Symphony Orchestra has become the latest American orchestra to make drastic cuts to its infrastructure in order to avoid fiscal insolvency. The musicians of the HSO this week accepted a stunning 20% salary cut, reduced pension benefits, and a 4-week reduction in their season. Prior to the new agreement, HSO musicians earned $30,345 for a 34-week season. The cuts are all the more ominous because the HSO’s musicians were in the middle of a 5-year contract when the orchestra’s management informed them that they would not be able to honor its terms.

In 1970, Miles Davis was “clean and healthy and at the height of his powers.” He made a set of recordings in which he tested out music. But the recordings were never meant to be released, and now that they are, some Davis fans are angry. “The set offers unprecedented insights into the musical intelligence that went into the album’s creation. But with mistakes and doodles included in the mix, are these private explorations really for public consumption decades later?”

LA’s Disney Hall opens next week. “For all the energy and playfulness of this $274 million piece of civic sculpture, Disney Hall also bears a heavy burden as an instrument of this city’s heady ambition. Sixteen years in the making, it represents Los Angeles’ determination to shake off its perpetual No. 2 status, to be recognized, along with New York, as an international cultural heavyweight, yet on its own highly theatrical terms.”