Category: music

“Lawrence Tamburri, president and CEO of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, has emerged as the leading candidate for the managing director position at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.” Pittsburgh CEO Gideon Toeplitz left his post in May, and there have been multiple rumors about who might replace him. For a time, it seemed that Douglas Gerhart, of the San Diego Symphony, was a shoo-in, and Gerhart even resigned from his San Diego position in order to focus on his candidacy, but the match never panned out. Pittsburgh is facing significant financial challenges, and is nearing a September 21 deadline to reach a new labor agreement with its musicians.

“Just three weeks before the grand opening of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s new Max M. Fisher Center, the symphony has received $8.7 million more in gifts from philanthropist Fisher and several other donors. Fisher kicked in another $5 million, bringing his contribution toward the refurbished and expanded Woodward Avenue concert venue and entertainment complex, which will now bear his name, to $10 million.”

A federal court is challenging the recording industry’s assertion that consumers who have copyrighted material available to others on their home computers are guilty of illegal distribution. Judge John Roberts is asking the industry to clarify how such practices are any different from an open library door. But the judge also has some tough questions for the telecommunications companies who have been subpoenaed by the RIAA, telling the lawyer for Verizon Communications, “You make a lot of money off piracy.”

Senator Sam Brownback has had about enough of the recording industry’s legal crusade against illegal file-swapping, and, since he makes laws for a living, he’s making a law intended to make it tougher for the industry to keep up its pursuit. Among other things, “the legislation would require owners of digital media to file a John Doe lawsuit to obtain the identifying information of an Internet user, rather than simply requesting a subpoena.”

Plans for Toronto’s long-awaited opera house are unveiled. It’s a $150 million 2000-seat theatre. “Our ambition is to position this opera house among the top two or three in the world. If you look at what has worked for 400 years, you have a reasonable chance of success. Once you go over 2,000 seats (Roy Thomson Hall originally sat more than 2,800 people), you have made an unacceptable compromise.”

Organizers are trying to raise money for a $220 million museum of music. The National Music Center and Museum Foundation would be built in Washington DC. “At the convention center site, the planners are envisioning a facility on two acres with three theaters and a museum. The 3,200-seat performance hall could accommodate Broadway roadshows and musical acts. A second theater would have 750 seats, more than any of the Smithsonian’s current theaters and lecture halls. The third would be a 250-seat black-box venue for dance and experimental theater. The museum would have 50,000 square feet of space for both temporary and permanent exhibitions.”

So impressario Raymond Gubbay is planning to stage operas in London in competition the the Royal Opera and English National companies. But the plan is to present in a small theatre, and the numbers don’t work out. Gubbay can’t make it work out financially. So what’s the point?

A fight is brewing between La Scala director Riccardo Muti and the company’s general manager. “Mr Muti did not attend the official launch of the 2003-4 season, and on tour in Japan this week he was quoted as saying that La Scala was ‘at risk of decline’. The danger is that, unless Mr Muti gets what he wants, the great conductor will go elsewhere. Though still unspoken, it has been enough to sow alarm among the loggionisti, La Scala’s devotees, who sometimes queue all night for the cheap seats in the loggione, the equivalent of ‘the gods’.” Some see the flap as a power play with Italy’s volatile prime minister.

It looks like a bugle. Sounds like a bugle. But “it is a bugle discreetly fitted with a battery-operated conical insert that plays the 24 notes of taps at the flick of a switch. It is all digital, with no human talent or breath required. All you do is hold it up, turn it on and try to look like a bugler.”

“The $500 electronic bugle is a necessity, the Pentagon insists. There are about 500 active-duty buglers, but more than 1,500 veterans die every day. Even the countless buglers at VFW and American Legion halls across the country can’t make up the difference.”