Category: music

“After 16 troubled years and a seemingly endless series of setbacks and reverses, the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, which many predict will be one of the world’s greatest concert halls, is at last on target for its twice-postponed dedication, now scheduled for October 23. The gloriously dramatic, undulating expanse of shimmering stainless steel is finally almost completed, gleaming on a 3.6-acre city block at the corner of Grand and First Streets in the centre of Los Angeles. It is expected to become a landmark which will bring new life and vitality to the area as well as providing a striking addition to the city’s cultural and architectural landscape and a new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.”

Glyndebourne is the UK’s most exclusive festival. So why is it advertising? This year “for the first time, Glyndebourne promoted its festival season. Indeed, it actually placed – shudder at the vulgarity – discreet advertisements. Why place the ad now? Well, last year Glyndebourne underperformed at the box office. This seems odd, since tickets are famously hard to come by. Traditionally, most are snapped up by festival society members, who have priority booking. However, when a faintly unconventional season such as last year’s (which featured two rarely performed works and a much-seen revival) was not leapt upon by the Glyndebourne faithful, the public didn’t even know about it.”

Britain’s Halle Orchestra had hoped to find a new concert costume for its players – something not so stiff and formal. “But for the 2003-04 season, details of which were announced yesterday, the Hallé’s men will continue to wear the white ties and tails that males have worn for 150 years. ‘We have talked about this a lot. But we got stuck. We could not really find a practical alternative’.”

What made 41-year-old Jonathan Phillips remortgage his house, buy a Steinway – and decide he wanted to play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3? With an orchestra. In public.

How do you test out a new opera? (they’re too big and expensive to take many chances on lesser-known composers). New York City Opera staged a showcase of operas in progress, presenting scenes from operas in progress with the hope of generating interest in them. “These were only workshop tryouts, of course, and not ready for full critical assessments. Still, several of the works (I heard 6 out of 10) left strong initial impressions, good and not so good.”

Plenty of blame to go around in the collapse of the Florida Philharmonic. There are many questions about the size of the orchestra’s money woes, the way the orchestra revealed its problems, and its strategy for dealing with them. Then there’s the way the orchestra alienated people with money who had offered to help over the years…

Munich is spending big to sign up stars to direct its music institutions. The city is vying to be a cultural capital. “But music is not one of those spectator sports whose results can be rigged by wealth. It is a mind-game, often a minefield, in which sprightly left-wingers run rings around the sorry hulks of expensive defensive walls, and dinky British orchestras have a gratifying habit of outmanoeuvring the mighty spenders. Munich’s mistake was to play by a set of rules that has been rendered obsolescent by the collapse of classical recording. Today, when hardly any maestros get past studio security, orchestras are trapped between picking a fossilised relic of distant recorded memory or risking an unknown prospect.”

The FBI investigated composer Aaron Copland for 20 years. Yes he was political, but he has also, for decades, been considered one of America’s most recognizeable musical voices. “The extent of Copland’s political engagement is neither a secret nor a surprise. Copland never hid his essential political sympathies. But what these documents tell about the US treatment of Copland is as much the story of the harassment of 20th-century composers as anything that happened to Dmitri Shostakovich in the Soviet Union or to Kurt Weill or Ernst Krenek in Nazi Germany. “

Members of the Russian parliament are protesting a planned concert by Paul McCartney in Red Square next week. “More than 100 have signed a petition protesting at the place where the Soviet leaders Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev, and the pioneer cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, lie buried in Moscow being used for a rock concert which carries, they say, ‘a covert political meaning’.”

The Columbus (Ohio) Symphony Orchestra is the latest regional ensemble to announce a substantial deficit for the current season. The CSO is reportedly seeking ways to alleviate a $300,000 shortfall, but is in no imminent danger of shutdown. The Columbus deficit is significant because the orchestra has been a model of fiscal reponsibility in recent years, even while paying its musicians relatively well and keeping a high artistic standard as its top priority. CSO officials are blaming the down economy and a slump in program advertising and corporate giving as the main reasons for the shortfall.