Category: music

“The opera company, founded in 1883, on Wednesday said it closed its most recent season in the black, with a balanced budget and a $1 million surplus. The preliminary financial results, which haven’t been audited, are an improvement from the Met’s previous fiscal year. Last November, the company reported a $22 million shortfall for fiscal 2014 soon after it averted a potential lockout by striking a series of deals with unions representing its musicians, singers and stagehands.”

“One member of Carnegie’s board said Mr. Perelman might have decided to step aside next month because he was unlikely to be re-elected. The board member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the trustees had felt blindsided this summer when Mr. Perelman briefly suspended Mr. Gillinson. The board member added that while they would investigate the concerns he raised, they did not believe that Carnegie had governance or transparency problems, and denied that the board had been dragging its feet on hiring a lawyer to investigate.”

“He’ll conduct his usual eight concerts this season starting Friday night, then shift into a new role as artistic adviser and principal guest conductor next year. That means he’ll lead just four concerts a year during the following two seasons, leaving him more time to carry out his duties as the recently hired music director of the New York City Ballet.”

“If all goes according to the plan announced Wednesday morning in the concourse of Place des Arts, Yannick Nézet-Séguin will become a 20-year man with his hometown Orchestre Métropolitain.”

“Three years ago he was honoured with the lifetime achievement award, but this week conductor Claudio Abbado made a final posthumous appearance at the Gramophone Awards as his last recording – Bruckner’s symphony no 9, with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra – was awarded the prestigious recording of the year prize.”

Less than a day after the leak of an email in which board chair Ronald Perelman said that executive and artistic director Clive Gillinson had shown “a troubling lack of transparency” and that the Board of Directors was failing to provide “appropriate oversight,” Perelman told the board’s executive committee he would not stand for re-election next month.

That leading opera houses have continued to use blackface into the early 21st century, long after minstrel shows and similar performances have been rejected as racist, may be more surprising to many people than that the practice is now being ended by the Met, after 124 years, for the new production of “Otello” that will open its 2015-16 season on Monday, Sept. 21.

In an email sent to other board members, Ronald O. Perelman, the famously combative finance executive who became Carnegie’s chairman in February, said there was “a troubling lack of transparency and openness in the way [executive director] Clive Gillinson was interacting with me and the Board.”

“There’s nothing else quite like it in New York. Establishment venues like Zankel Hall have welcomed composers, the 28-year-old organization Bang on a Can has colonized virtually every concert space in the city, and (Le) Poisson Rouge has found a winning combination of eclectic programming, casual atmosphere, and poor acoustics. But new music has never had its own miniature Carnegie Hall, a space explicitly designed for musical experimentation.”

“We have to keep poking the tires and looking at new ways of approaching the art itself in the form of new productions and commissions, and also looking at the physical plant of the Met, and how we perform. We’re looking at everything.”