Category: music

It was nearly a year ago that the musicians of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra went to their union chief, Emile Subirana, and asked him to take action against music director Charles Dutoit, who was attempting to remove two tenured musicians from the ensemble. Subirana subsequently wrote an open letter which referred to Dutoit as a ‘tyrant,’ leading directly to the conductor’s abrupt resignation from the orchestra he had led for nearly a quarter century. Months of public and private finger-pointing and bitter argument followed, and this week, the members of the Quebec Musicians Guild voted overwhelmingly to replace Subirana with a reformer who promised a more responsive and responsible union.

The mayor of San Antonio announced this week that he will donate $5000 from his office’s discretionary fund to the struggling San Antonio Symphony, which missed payroll last Friday and is facing more than $500,000 of immediate debt. Mayor Ed Garza also exhorted other city leaders to match his contribution, and called on corporate leaders to broaden the base of support for the ensemble. The symphony’s musicians have agreed to keep playing despite going without their paychecks, at least for the moment.

The entire board of the financially shaky Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra has resigned after learning that its members could be on the hook for more than a million dollars if the organization were to file for bankruptcy. The resignations occurred after the WSO was informed that its liability coverage was being cut back from $2 million to $1 million. The orchestra is operating under a CDN$1.8 million deficit. For now, the WSO is being run by a 6-member management committee, and the provincial culture ministry is promising to help the organization make payroll in the short term.

Members of the Winnipeg Symphony management team, as well as leaders among the musicians, are moving to assure the public and the press that the mass resignation of the orchestra’s board does not mean that the organization is near filing for bankruptcy. But while the ensemble does not appear to be in imminent danger of collapse, “since the extent of its financial troubles became known late last fall, the WSO has lost three of its four professional fundraisers and three chief executive officers.”

“The future of government-sponsored opera in Berlin may be in the balance. In practice, even more is at stake. In a peculiar way over the last three years the opera story has become a gauge of the still volatile relations between the two halves of this long-divided city and even a test of Germany’s willingness to give Berlin the profile of a genuine capital city.”

With the death of the latest Master of the Queen’s Music, maybe it’s time to abolish the position. “There is little evidence that Her Majesty takes much interest in music (Her website finds room for the Master of the Horse but not, alas, of the Music). As with the poet laureate, one’s heart bleeds for anyone given the unenviable task of having to write memorial verse or songs for most royal or state occasions. So the kindest thing might be quietly to declare the job redundant. That would be a shame. There have been many undistinguished composers since the first Master in 1626, but also many distinguished ones – including Bax and Elgar.”

Maybe it’s time to revitalize the idea of a Queen’s Musician. “Of course the whole notion of having a master of the queen’s music is an anachronism, especially with a royal family that shows little obvious interest in the arts, but then so, equally, is the role of the poet laureate, and the present holder of that post, Andrew Motion, at least has shown how a nebulous role can be used effectively. There are plenty of issues that a publicly confident and committed master of the queen’s music could get behind, numerous ways in which he or she could promote new music and expand its audience.”

British culture minister Kim Howells has bowed to objections by musicians and withdrawn a bill that would have required pubs to license live music. “Musicians believe the bill would have a devastating impact on the number of venues where they can perform. Says Howells: “We saw it as a civilising bill, relaxing licensing laws, cutting down on bureaucracy. It was only when it started going through the Lords we realised how it would be interpreted.”

“After years of denial and confusion, belligerence and panic, most of the big record labels have coalesced around a set of prices at which they will make almost all of their music available to an ever-expanding array of legal online services.”

San Francisco Opera, looking to cut its budget, has canceled its annual touring program – Western Opera Theatre. “When I looked at my budget, the most obvious thing to cut was (Opera Theater), because it’s a horrifically expensive thing that we always have lost money on.” The program was designed “to bring opera to remote and underserved locations,” but director Sheri Greenawald said the program had become “a dinosaur. In many ways, (Opera Theater) was no longer serving its initial mission, which was to take opera into the hinterlands – because as far as opera is concerned, there are very few hinterlands left.”