Category: music

A new opera company debuts in Sydney. It’s called the Pinchgut Opera, named after the old convicts’ name for Fort Denison in Port Jackson. With a startup budget of $500,000 and ambitions to produce chamber opera, the name was chosen “partly as a reminder of the company’s humble beginnings.”

From the Bay Area to Boston, America’s opera companies orchestras and classical music presenters are facing a downturn that has many worried for their survival. Here’s a scorecard of who’s at risk…

The Los Angeles Opera is canceling a major production for the second time this season, but this time, its the fault of a virus, rather than the economy. “Italian composer Luciano Berio’s new orchestration of Monteverdi’s ‘The Coronation of Poppea’ — slated for Jan. 11-19 with L.A. Opera artistic director Plácido Domingo and Frederica von Stade performing — is off the schedule because the composer is ill and the new version of the opera has not been completed.” The new Poppea was highly anticipated, and LA Opera plans to present it at some later date.

Something short of a massive, wailing public outcry greeted September’s news that the Calgary Philharmonic was suspending operations, and efforts since the shutdown to revive the troubled orchestra have achieved mixed results. Now, the CPO is being forced to cancel four of its five holiday concerts, traditionally some of the ensemble’s biggest money-makers of the year. On the plus side, officials expect to unveil a full scale restructuring plan tomorrow.

Few would deny that the popularity of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s music in the US is predicated largely on the approximately 18,763,594 stagings of The Nutcracker which occur around the country every December. But even leaving Drosselmayer’s brood aside, the Russian master can be counted as possibly the most listened to composer in America, even if many Americans probably couldn’t tell you who he was. So what is it about Tchaikovsky that attracts the American ear?

The St. Lawrence String Quartet may be Canada’s best-known international chamber music ensemble. Certainly no other group has done as much to promote Canadian composers as the Stanford-based foursome. But when the group’s cellist decided to step aside last year, the St. Lawrence faced the decision that every string quartet dreads most – how to replace a musician, a partner, and a friend. First decision for the remaining members: should Canadian citizenship continue to be a requirement for admission?

Police bust a New York-area pirate CD operation which turned out 10,000 bootlegged CD’s a week. The operation was run out of a strip mall, and the family, (with mob ties) “sold rows of the CD’s at the store and also delivered about $50,000 of pirated goods each month to various sites in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, making about $2.5 million a year in profits.

Chicago Lyric Opera isn’t in a financial emergency like some of America’s other big opera companies. But it doesn’t want to get their either. So the company has dropped two expensive productions for next season. “With tickets harder to sell, donations more difficult to find and solid institutions like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra reporting sizable deficits, Lyric officials decided they had little choice about changing their plans for 2003-04.”

The Boston Opera House, fallen into disrepair since closing in the early-90s, is getting a $31 million makeover. “It’s a pet project of Mayor Thomas Menino, who has been pushing for the renovation since 1996 as part of his effort to revitalize the old theater district along Washington Street in the heart of downtown Boston, just a few blocks north from what used to be the ‘Combat Zone,’a once sleazy collection of sex-oriented shops, bars and porno movie houses.”