Category: music

The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra is not generally mentioned in the same breath as the Boston Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic, or the Cleveland Orchestra. But the Newark-based NJSO is now the proud caretaker of 30 of the world’s finest old Italian string instruments, a collection which would be the envy of any of the world’s greatest orchestras. So how do they sound? “Imagine being thirsty and drinking a glass of water – clean, functional, easy to ingest, it satisfies the basic need but little more. Now imagine being offered also a nice, steaming hot cup of the finest Belgian chocolate. Suddenly there is flavor, there is a sequence of sensations… This is something like the difference between the NJSO’s string sound pre-Strads and now.”

The Louisville Orchestra’s board of directors has scheduled a meeting for next Monday, at which it is expected that they will vote to file for bankruptcy, though no one in the organization is specifying whether it would be Chapter 11 or Chapter 7. The orchestra’s management missed its last payroll on May 30, and musicians are still refusing to reopen negotiations on an ongoing contract, insisting that they make too little money to be able to weather any further salary cuts.

Gideon Toeplitz leaves as manager of the Pittsburgh Symphony. “I made two major mistakes in big chunks. One is something everyone else in the world made, not only the orchestral world. Look at the airlines. We thought the good times would last. And nobody thought the downturn would last as long as it has, and some people are saying it will last eight years. Maybe I pushed too hard, first with myself and therefore with others, to get where I wanted to get. I was ambitious for the Pittsburgh Symphony. We did 15 tours. Maybe 12 would have been enough. Some things I pushed artistically would have come two years later, anyway. So what?”

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra may be looking for a temporary home away from home after the 22,000-pound ceiling of the onstage shell that the orchestra uses at its downtown concert hall fell during a routine storage move, and bounced off the stage. No one was hurt in the accident, and tech crews are working to determine whether the stage will be usable for the MSO’s scheduled Beethoven Festival this weekend.

So why is the New York Philharmonic walking away from Lincoln Center? “Because it has spent the last 40 years in a hall widely — but certainly not unanimously — held to be an acoustical failure, one that has undergone more than its share of tweaks and massive renovations. The prospect of fixing up Avery Fisher Hall again, launching yet another capital campaign to fund yet another overhaul with uncertain results, seemed daunting and horribly expensive. What if — after getting and spending enough hundreds of millions of dollars to do the job, after vacating Avery Fisher and scrounging dates at other places for the years of construction, trying to patch together residencies, extended tours and temporary locations — after all that, the new auditorium still appalled?”

“Avery Fisher is a misunderstood treasure. Concert halls — indeed, all places where people gather — should not be measured by their iconic status. They should be measured by the service they perform for their communities. In that regard, Avery Fisher has done a yeoman’s job. Its ultimate shortcoming may be that it’s not Carnegie, but that’s also its saving grace. While the out-of-town orchestras rush to perform at the grand old hall on 57th Street, Avery Fisher plays a different — and sometimes more vibrant — role in the city’s musical life.”

It’s been six years since the Vienna Philharmonic first let a woman play as a member of the orchestra. But women are still scarce in the orchestra, and a long established culture stubbornly resistant to change is difficult to move…

The insular, elitist world of jazz is being rocked in more than one sense of the word. Young musicians, and even some old ones, are thumbing their noses at jazz purists and exploring popular forms of music, from grunge to indie-rock to rap. Flip through your local record store’s jazz bins and you’ll find pianist Jason Moran covering the rap classic ‘Planet Rock’ and the veteran organ player Dr. Lonnie Smith tackling an entire album of Beck songs. Some jazz artists are even borrowing a page from hip-hop, packing their discs with guest appearances by rappers.”

European TV’s Eurovision Song Contest is “quite possibly the world’s most garish musical spectacle. Each year, contestants kitted out in everything from Viking helmets to bondage outfits perform original compositions to taped backing music. Viewers across Europe (some 150 million in total) vote by telephone for their favorite, excluding their own nation’s song. The most famous winner was ‘Waterloo’ in 1974 by ABBA, who went on to become to pop-music kitsch what Jesus is to Christianity.”

News of the impending merger of the New York Philharmonic with Carnegie Hall has some observers of the classical scene in Pittsburgh thinking that the embattled Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra could take a page from the Phil’s book. “Given the national significance of the Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall, the unexpected consolidation raises the possibility that a stronger collaboration between the Symphony and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust could be viewed more favorably as a way to stabilize the Symphony’s finances. The Trust, an arts presenting organization that owns four theaters in the Downtown Cultural District, has for five years successfully brought the PSO and Downtown arts groups together in its ‘shared services’ initiative.”