Category: music

A new documentary by the maker of From Mao To Mozart details the making of an opulent production of “Turandot” in China. “The project was an extravagant collaboration created at the Florence Opera and taken to Beijing a year later in 1997, with a budget of $18-23 million for the Chinese leg alone.”

The recording industry says it will only prosecute “light” users of music file-trading services. But what does that mean? “Because the RIAA has refused to quantify what constitutes a ‘substantial’ amount of file sharing, file sharers are left to wonder whether they are vulnerable to litigation.”

A couple from the big city moves up to Maine, buy a dilapidated old opera house and set about restoring it. “While residents here are typically skeptical of newcomers, this village has welcomed the restoration. Last year contributions and revenues totaled more than $200,000, nearly double the income in the first year. Almost all the performances have been sellouts this summer.”

The recording industry tells a US Congressional committee that it isn’t pursuing small-time music downloaders to prosecute them. “RIAA is gathering evidence and preparing lawsuits only against individual computer users who are illegally distributing a substantial amount of copyrighted music.”

Daniel Barenboim is bringing his orchestra made up of Jewish and Arab musicians to Morocco – the orchestra’s first performance in an Arab country. “Barenboim will conduct the 80-strong group in the city’s Mohamed V Theatre as they perform Beethoven’s Third Symphony and Mozart’s Concerto for Three Pianos.”

Opera Australia’s new director in Melbourne is comitted to new opera. But the commissions he’s interested in won’t be “experimental”… “We can’t afford trial and error. It is very expensive and often nothing comes of it.”

Scottish Opera is getting admiring reviews for its new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle this summer. But the company is in financial difficulty again. “The company is understood to have already spent its public funds for 2003-2004, despite an additional grant of £750,000 from the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Fund (SACLF) which made its Ring Cycle possible. Twice in the last four years, Scottish Opera has gone to government and left with extraordinary grants of £2.1 million in 1999 and £1.9 million in 2001 to bail it out. However, if the company faces a difficult future, its fate also presents a defining issue for the Scottish Executive’s cultural policy.”

“The British symphony is dead, its life support system switched off some years ago by concert managements and public indifference. No active British composer has achieved 12 symphonies. The few who have struggled over decades to maintain the heritage – chiefly Sir Malcolm Arnold and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies – have been cruelly sidelined by administrators who prefer minimalisms and classipops to daunting works of real substance.”

Developers of the proposed World Trade Center project are trying to decide which arts company ought to anchor its performing arts center. “The developers would be wise to court a major institution with a strong identity, one that would bring credibility and potentially a devoted audience base to the new complex. That institution is the New York City Opera, dubbed the ‘people’s opera’ by Fiorello La Guardia, one of its founders.”

The Carnegie Hall/New York Philharmonic merger deal is encountering some expensive resistance from Lincoln Center. “The Philharmonic’s lease at Avery Fisher Hall runs through 2011 and provides Lincoln Center with $2.5 million to $3 million a year. To cover potential losses from the orchestra’s planned departure in 2006, Lincoln Center is seeking damages on several fronts. Most controversially perhaps, said the official involved in the discussions, Lincoln Center now maintains that the Philharmonic must help cover the expense of creating a new orchestra, which could cost more than $100 million. Lincoln Center executives deny this, however.”