Category: music

The Los Angeles Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony will trade music directors for a program each next season. SFS’s Michael Tilson Thomas hasn’t led the LA Phil since 1985, when he was the orchestra’s principal guest conductor. The LA Phil’s Essa-Pekka Salonen will be making his SFS debut. “The conductor exchange is a rare event among American orchestras, whose music directors seldom guest-conduct other orchestras in this country.”

Music giant Universal Music Group, the world’s “largest music company and a unit of French-based Vivendi Universal,” says it will make 43,000 songs it owns available for downloading over the internet. Individual songs will be “available for downloading and recording to a CD for US99 cents, and albums for $US9.99. The company said it was the first major label ‘to offer music fans such a broad catalogue of music tracks for preview and purchase’.”

Daniel Barenboim’s Berlin Staatsoper, the group that has supported the controversial conductor through his recent forays into Middle East politics, is facing a firestorm of its own in the wake of a bizarre and over-the-top production of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose. “In an obvious bid to be daring and provocative, the nose was represented as a phallus, a main character was a transvestite… the orchestra was togged out in gold jumpsuits and helmets like massed C-3POdrones from Star Wars… and half the chorus were depicted as Islamic terrorists led by a high-heeled, gun-toting Bin Laden.” Critics and audiences alike were unamused.

Christoph von Dohnanyi, the recently departed music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, was in Boston this week to conduct that city’s orchestra for the first time since he walked out on them in 1989. As it turns out, Dohnanyi has a lot to say about the music business: he insists the walkout was no big deal; says he enjoys “some” rap music greatly; and believes that classical music will revive in the U.S. when orchestras start hiring American music directors.

Singer Joni Mitchell insists that her new album, Travelogue, will be her last. “Calling the music industry a ‘corrupt cesspool’, the Canadian rages that: ‘I’m quitting because the business made itself so repugnant to me. Record companies are not looking for talent. They’re looking for a look and a willingness to cooperate’.”

London’s Royal Philharmonic Society music archive has been sold – and it’ll stay in the UK after an emergency public appeal for funds. The library includes the score for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (commissioned by the Society) “as well as original scores by Elgar and Vaughan Williams, it holds correspondence from Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Berlioz, and Liszt, and, perhaps most poignantly, a letter from Beethoven announcing his intention to write a 10th Symphony to honour the society – eight days before his death in 1827.”

“Opera as a subject for film peaked during the silent era, when movies were accustomed to non-stop music and a kind of melodramatic posturing that’s still taken as normal on many opera stages. But there’s no current shortage of film directors willing to do opera in its usual habitat, or even to write and stage new works.” And we’re not talking about filmed versions of La Boheme, either, but new operas written by real composers in collaboration with the directors. Maybe there’s hope for the mass appeal of the high arts yet.

Music recording giant EMI reports sales down 3 to 6 percent for the year. “EMI held back on new releases early in the year while it reorganized, eliminated 1,900 jobs and dropped some 400 acts from its roster, including a $28 million buyout of Mariah Carey’s contract in January.”

“For much of its two-decade long life, the CD single has existed as the music industry’s latter-day version of the Betamax tape — technologically advanced, high quality — and a commercial flop… The industry is looking to change all that. As of last week, HMV stores around the country started heavily promoting singles in their stores, encouraged, no doubt, by an industry suddenly willing to supply a product it had once been hesitant about… So why the singles pitch? The short answer is crisis, says Brian Robertson, president of CRIA, which has been studying a marked downturn in music sales. File-sharing, music downloading and home CD-burning is bleeding revenue away from the music industry at an alarming rate, he said.”

Throwing a major festival of new and unusual arts and music is always a dicey proposition – throwing one in an upper-crust suburban county is beyond daring. But for the last four years, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County (California) has done just that, staging Eclectic Orange, a multi-disciplinary festival of music and theater. Unfortunately, the fest lost $434,000 on the latest festival after spending millions to bring in a French equestrian troupe, and will likely have to scale back such plans for future seasons.