Category: music

Chicago may be struggling, St. Louis and Toronto may have had near-death experiences, and Houston may be on the verge of an all-out labor war, but things are just dandy at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As the BSO prepares to kick off its holiday pops season, it is pulling in the kind of ticket revenue which would be enough to fund some orchestras for a year without a single dollar donated. Never an organization to underestimate its own importance, the BSO’s managing director brags, “There are (smaller) orchestras that for the entire 52-week year will have not even $10 million of sales, We do almost half of that in basically three weeks. We are the biggest orchestra operation in the world by a big margin.”

The musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra have taken an unprecedented step in an effort to help the organization stay fiscally solvent, offering up $100,000 of matching money to be applied against donations from orchestra subscribers. The musicians originally had planned to donate the money to the PSO outright, but agreed with management that a challenge grant would offer greater opportunity to involve the public.

If anyone can make a 19th-century opera relevant to young 21st-century audiences, you can bet it’s Baz Luhrmann. The Australian director behind Moulin Rouge, is using many of the same pyrotechnics and storytelling techniques of that movie in his new Broadway production of Puccini’s La Boheme. But Luhrmann insists that, despite the updated look of the show, he is against modernizing a classic operatic plot just to “be groovy.”

The Melbourne Orchestra has had something of an indifferent past, attended to by a series of guest conductors and maestros who never seemed to stay for long. The absence of a continuous guiding hand made for years of rough and unsteady concerts. All the same, this turnover of visitors kept audience numbers high, and supplemented a sense of cultural inferiority.” Now the orchestra has appointed a new chief conductor. “Oleg Caetani will take over the chief conductor’s position in 2005 and should make a significant impact on the city’s musical life.”

When the Voyager space probes shot past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune on their 25-year journey into deep space, machines in the probe captured the whistles and chirrups the probes encountered, and transmitted them back to earth. Now composer Terry Riley has written a piece incorporating the sounds into a piece for the Kronos String Quartet and a 60-voice choir. “The string quartet was NASA’s idea, the product of an arts programme that, over the past 30 years, has commissioned work from artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.”

The hot new trend for recording buyers this Holiday season? “Music marketers are using new technology to remaster albums to their original form after selling us sonically sweetened versions for ages. With the success of historical and theme compilations, they’ve figured out these carefully made reproductions – with a few add-ons – will entice us anew.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra was rehearsing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring with incoming music director Christoph Eschenbach yesterday in its beautiful new concert hall, when strobe lights began to flash and dust started to drift down from above. Then, the downpour began. A high-powered sprinkler system, set off by construction work elsewhere in the building, engaged, and showered the musicians, their instruments (many valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars,) and the new stage with enough water to fill the $75,000 Steinway grand that sat on the stage. The extent of the damage is not yet known, but most musicians managed to shield their instruments from severe damage.

It simply is not possible to be further apart in negotiating stands than the musicians and management of the Houston Symphony are at the moment. Musicians want a five-year-deal, a salary jump to the level of the nation’s major orchestras, and more benefits, while management wants to cut 6 or 7 weeks off the season in order to bring costs under control. The scene is familiar to orchestras across the country, but unlike most symphonic negotiations, which take place under closely guarded secrecy, this conflict has exploded into the open.

Britons are big music consumers, says a new poll of more than 10,000 people by the digital music channel Music Choice. The average respondant in the poll spends “three hours 11 minutes and 55 seconds a day – or 48 days a year – listening to our music collections.” The poll also indicates sizeable investments in music. “The average Briton owns 100 CDs, 51 records, 50 cassettes, 28 MP3 files and eight minidiscs worth more than £3,000.”