Category: music

Does opera really belong on Broadway? “Opera lovers needn’t fear. Luhrmann hasn’t gone too far. A young, handsome cast sings the opera in Italian as written. The amplification is far subtler than the miserable Broadway norm and almost pleasurable. To compensate for singing that is not of a particularly high standard – though, for the most part, OK — there is a sense of intimacy and detailed bits of characterization that are hard to equal in a large opera house.”

Opera companies producing Broadway musicals. Broadway taking on opera classics. What’s going on? “There are two main reasons for this sudden fusion, neither of which originate in artistic concerns.”

So what difference does the discovery last month of a new manuscript of Mahler’s First Symphony make? “It changes not the substance of the symphony but its sound: its orchestration and how, by means of stress and rhythmic detail, its ideas are articulated — how, in a word, it speaks.”

Er, yes…but if you’re a Latin music artist and want to get airplay on the radio, you’ve got to pay. “Because payola adds so much to the cost of promoting a recording – between 20 percent and 30 percent, according to former major-label employees – it cuts out most smaller, independent labels, typical sources for new genres and artists.”

In recent years concert ticket prices have spiraled up. But in the past six months the concert industry has discovered consumer resistance to the high cost, and finally, prices are staring to decline. One promoter predicts ticket prices will be down 15 percent from last year.

For the first time in 224 years, La Scala opened its season outside of its own theatre. “The newly built, 2,400-seat Arcimboldi, in a former industrial area, will host La Scala’s full program of operas, ballets and concerts through December 2004 while La Scala Theater, the company’s venerable temple of bel canto, undergoes a $56 million renovation.”

Last week the Chicago Tribune published a damning series of criticisms about the acoustics in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. This week, the orchestra’s president responds to music critic John von Rhein’s complaints. “What confused us was not so much that Mr. von Rhein reversed the opinion that he had stated at the opening of the refurbished Orchestra Hall in 1997 – that the renovation brought “marked improvement” in the area of sound – but that he reversed views that he has been expressing consistently since.

The damage is being toted up after the sprinklers went off during a Philadelphia Orchestra rehearsall. “A second Steinway grand piano was damaged in Tuesday morning’s deluge at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, some warping has begun to appear in the floor of Verizon Hall, and 11 orchestra musicians are reporting damaged instruments.”

A singer is suing San Francisco Opera over the company’s use of stage fog. “The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, is the latest twist in a fight between the city’s opera and several singers who claim the fake fog is damaging their health.”

The increased violence and tension in the Middle East may now have killed off a beloved local institution: the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra has announced that it will shut down this weekend as a result of nonpayment of promised funds from the city and the Israel Broadcast Authority. JSO officials also accuse the IBA and municipal authorities of wanting to turn the orchestra into a political pawn.