Category: music

The Los Angeles Philharmonic won’t officially open its new Frank Gehry-designed digs until the fall, but a special open rehearsal/performance by the Phil this week allowed musicians and critics their first shot at assessing the acoustics of the much-anticipated space. The hall will have to be “tuned,” of course, a process which will last months if not years, but Mark Swed was encouraged by the “plentiful bass, crystalline clarity and forceful immediacy” of the orchestra’s new home.

“Gary Hanson, who was responsible for the restoration of Severance Hall as associate executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra, will become executive director when Thomas Morris retires from the position on March 1… Hanson’s biggest project – and triumph – was the $36.7 million Severance Hall restoration, which both improved existing areas of the orchestra’s home in University Circle and added needed administrative and public spaces. Hanson managed the $17 million renovation of Blossom, which opens Saturday with a gala concert conducted by Music Director Franz Welser-Möst.”

Apparently, the “1812 Overture” is just too much music for CBS’s tastes. The network, which is supposed to be televising the Boston Pops’ annual 4th of July concert, has decided that it only wants the big, loud part of the Tchaikovsky overture – y’know, the part everyone can sing along to – and so it will ‘cut in’ to the performance near the end of the work, just in time for the cannons and the fireworks. The 1812 is approximately 20 minutes long when played without cuts, roughly 15 minutes longer than television executives believe that Americans are capable of paying attention to anything.

“Spoleto USA says the just-ended 2003 festival was the highest-grossing ever, with ticket sales surpassing those of the previous record year, 2001. The Charleston, South Carolina-based festival, which ran from 23 May to 8 June, says in a press release that it sold $2.5 million worth of tickets and half of its performances sold out.”

Why do some cities attract regular visits from touring orchestras, while others almost never see anyone but the hometown band? The answer is largely about money and resources, and it explains why many medium and large cities across America missed out on, say the Philadelphia Orchestra’s recent tour, while small college towns like Lincoln, Nebraska, packed a hall to enjoy the Fabulous Philadelphians. The fact is that, if your city has a decent-sized concert hall that’s going unused a lot of the time, and some spare funds to pay the orchestra’s costs, you have a better chance of landing a touring orchestra than a big city with a thriving music scene where the performance spaces are already booked.

Yuri Temirkanov, the well-regarded music director of the Baltimore Symphony and the St. Petersburg (Russia) Philharmonic, has walked out on a production of Tchaikovsky’s opera, Queen of Spades, which he was to have conducted at the Opera National de Lyon in France. Temirkanov isn’t talking about his departure, but his translator says that he was infuriated by what he considered to be distracting and unnecessary staging, and changes to the original Pushkin storyline. Temirkanov issued a statement after his departure, saying that the Lyon production “does not correspond in any way to my own cultural heritage, nor my love and my understanding of the work of Tchaikovsky and Pushkin.”

Who would have thought that a 20-cent price cut could make such a difference? In the month since the (legal) digital music service Listen.com cut the price of its downloads from 99 cents to 79 cents, it has nearly doubled the number of songs it sold. The price cut was initially a response to the much-ballyhooed new download service offered by Apple, but Listen.com (which is owned by RealNetworks) wound up with 11 million songs downloaded from its servers in the month of June.

As the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra moves closer to hiring a new executive director, its list of candidates to replace Mariss Jansons as music director is slowly narrowing. No one expects a decision before next spring, but some intriguing names have emerged as serious candidates, while others have fallen by the wayside. Reported to be at the top of the PSO’s list of potential MDs are David Zinman (formerly of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra,) Sir Andrew Davis (who led Toronto in the 1990s,) and James Conlon, whose reputation is firmly established in Europe, but has yet to take on the top job at a North American orchestra.

Even when recording a classical artist seems to make economic sense, it’s not happening anymore at the big recording labels, writes Norman Lebrecht. And of course there’s no tolerance for developing new talent or helping to make careers. So what’s a talented young violinist to do?

Just as England has been wondering about the health of its pop music business, there are those who wonder if Irish music has also taken a dive. But, writes Neil McCormick, “reports of Ireland’s musical demise have been greatly exaggerated. Ireland is a musical country, something that shows no sign of abating. There is intense activity on every level…”