Category: music

“A recently found score of Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony, said to contain the composer’s own handwritten revisions, actually may have been annotated by someone else, a scholar said Tuesday.”

The British Phonographic Industry reports that piracy of music rose 36 percent in the past year. “The music industry watchdog said figures from 2001 showed a massive rise in the number of fake and pirated CDs seized in the UK. The figures are based on the number of seizures in the UK in 2001, and represent £27 million worth of music.”

In a foregone conclusion of events that began months ago, the San Jose Symphony has officially filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and gone out of business. The symphony had been unable to dig its way out of a massive financial hole, even after its struggles became a rallying point for musicians and music-lovers nationwide. But in the wake of the SJS’s demise, a new orchestra has sprung up in the city, allied with the San Jose Ballet.

“Optimism is running so thick at the Canadian Opera Company these days that not even a half-million-dollar deficit can dampen it. The COC announced Monday evening that it spent $476,000 more than it took it in 2002, snapping a five-year string of balanced budgets. Yet, with sod-turning for a Toronto opera house only months away, there was none of the chastened rhetoric usually heard when a company runs deep into the red.”

Charles Michener laments the death of the piano recital. “For some time now, I have remarked on a development that, while less dramatic than the Bolsheviks’ overthrow of the Tsar, represents a considerable loss: the disappearance of the piano recital as a staple of New York’s concert scene. Among the world’s generous supply of first-class pianists, only a handful of the most famous ones are heard with anything like regularity in our major halls, and then generally not more than once a year. Piano competitions continue to turn out the next Horowitzes at an alarming rate, but how these prodigies manage to make careers is a mystery, given that virtually none of them are ever heard hereabouts.”

Whatever brave soul volunteers to replace Gideon Toeplitz as managing director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra will have a massive rebuilding job ahead. What makes the PSO situation particularly tricky is that the city is not in the habit of supporting non-profits that don’t support themselves, and that means that prospects are not good for an orchestra running a $7 million deficit with little in the way of reserves or a long-term plan.

“The Recording Industry Association of America said Monday it is demanding a halt to illegal music sales at gas stations, convenience stores, groceries and some small music stores that the group has identified as offering illegal copies of music recordings.”

Hmmmn… did Baz Luhrmann steal the pizzazz for his Broadway Boheme from his Movie Moulin Rouge? (or is it the other way around?) Stack up both productions side-by-side and “even the same small details (both feature little people and nuns in cameo roles)” are similar. “Shameless copycatting? Or a lesson from the if-it-works-once-try-it-again school? You decide.”

Say what you will about the Three Tenors phenomenon (and critics have said plenty). But for legions of fans, the 3Ts have provided real thrills (how else do you explain tickets costing thousands?). But long after these weary voices ought to have packed it in, they’re still at it, and in Minneapolis this week, even the diehard fans didn’t seem impressed. “The whole feeling of the evening was stiff and uncomfortable. Audience response was relatively subdued until the end, the final medley. The only real ovation came after Pavarotti’s signature ‘Nessun Dorma’ during which he delivered one good solid but very effortful high note, for him the only one of the evening.”

It’s been a great year for the Canadian Opera Company. Artistically the company’s on a high, and it finally got money to build a new home. But then there’s a nasty deficit rearing up. “Ironically, the crisis in operating funding comes as the federal government is showering the arts with millions after ten years of devastating stinginess. Ottawa is contributing $25 million to building the opera house. But that’s for a building. Operating money is something else.”