Category: music

America’s opera companies got together last week to talk about business. The news isn’t good. “To keep the most expensive of the performing arts alive in a slumping economy, opera companies are cutting services, staff and productions, dipping into cash reserves and adjusting their budgets for lean years ahead. Administrators from two of the three midsize opera companies at a breakout session said they were dropping works from next season’s schedule. The wolf’s at the door, and opera folks have no place to hide.”

An oratorio written by Andrew and Julian Lloyd Webber’s father William in 1948, gets its world premiere. “If sincerity alone were the key to a work’s success, St Francis of Assisi would be a winner, but unfortunately the score falls down on so many crucial issues of drama, variety, pacing and characterisation that it emerged in this belated premiere, given by the Joyful Company of Singers, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and a team of fine soloists conducted by Peter Broadbent, as more of a curiosity than a real find.”

Scott Joplin’s only opera – which he never saw performed in his lifetime – is getting a rare production. “The only large-scale work to survive from the pen of the greatest of the ragtime composers, ‘Treemonisha’ is still a comparative rarity in performance for reasons that have as much to do with history – the piece was never performed during Joplin’s lifetime, and his original orchestrations have been lost – as with the opera’s intrinsic merits.”

“Bang on a Can is a loose association of self-consciously edgy composers and performers whose stated aim is to write music “too funky for the academy and too structured for the club scene.” They speak of their formative years this way: “We had the simplicity, energy and drive of pop music in our ears-we’d heard it from the cradle. But we also had the idea from our classical music training that composing was exalted.” This too-neat division of labor-funky fun on one side, serious structure on the other-threatens to repeat the mistake of Paris in the twenties. It undersells both the wildness of composition and the wiliness of pop. Try telling James Brown that his music isn’t structured.”

Beethoven and his music have been seized upon as a symbol for all manner of righteous and wrong causes. “Politically, he has had more incarnations than Vishnu. Almost every European political movement, conservative or revolutionary, has made him a posthumous party member. Depending on who you might have talked to over the past two centuries, Beethoven was a Marxist, a Nazi, a parliamentary democrat and a monarchist. He celebrated kings, gave hope to the proletariat, and vigorously supported all sides during the Second World War. No other composer – probably no other artist of any kind – has reflected so many conflicting views. You might say, echoing Jean-Paul Sartre, that because there was a Beethoven, we have to go on reinventing him.”

“Looking back over the history of music, it is clear that the church has inspired some of the greatest achievements of western culture. But in the 20th century, church music became increasingly isolated from the advances of musical language and the pens of the world’s most gifted composers. Today, to hear good new music in church is relatively rare. Why haven’t the likes of Berio and Ligeti written sacred music?”

“It sometimes seems as if it has become a proof of virility for some American opera houses that they should have at least one premiere in every season. But it is the quantity that apparently matters far more than quality, governed by the overriding principle that whatever the chosen composers produce must never challenge the house’s core audience too seriously. Just as it is no accident that the leading American opera directors of today – Robert Wilson, Peter Sellars, David and Christopher Alden – now work far more regularly in Europe than at home, while houses like the New York Met continue to favour the lavish, reactionary naturalism of Franco Zeffirelli, so the American opera composers who thrive are those who are content to serve up blandness, preferably with a story taken from a well known novel or play.”

The classical music world is so tightly guarded, so underreported on, and so frustratingly predictable that surprises are rare. Yet, in the past month, Anthony Tommassini has found himself stunned by no fewer than three announcements from some of the world’s top classical figures. The New York Philharmonic’s surprise move to Carnegie Hall is, of course, at the top. Second on the list: the Cleveland Orchestra’s decision to extend the contract of its young and (some say) unproven music director through 2012 after only one year on the job. And last, but not even remotely least, there is the stunning news that Luciano Pavarotti has scheduled a farewell performance at the Met. Again. And he promises to show up this time.

Good news is hard to come by in the world of professional orchestras these days, but a huge sigh of relief could be heard coming from Louisville this weekend, as the Louisville Orchestra not only reversed its earlier position that bankruptcy was its only option, but approved a new three-year contract with its musicians. The contract is hardly a windfall for the players – it includes short-term wage cuts on already miniscule salaries, and trims weeks from the orchestra’s season – but with other troubled orchestras folding right and left, everyone seems to be at least satisfied with the result. As a direct result of reaching agreement on the contract, the orchestra will receive a much-needed $465,000 gift from a local developer who had been backing the musicians.