Category: music

“Jonathan Pell, The Dallas Opera’s artistic director, has been the company’s resident taste-maker for three decades, making important decisions about everything from which operas get staged to who stars in them. This morning, TDO announced that Pell will be leaving the company at the end of this year. Well, sort of leaving.”

“Several sources on the front lines of the cultural business say the TSO deal has been made, the contracts have been drawn up and the staff know Jeff Melanson is on board. That’s a huge step forward because he is known as a great fixer — and there’s no organization more in need of a big fix than the TSO.”

“Admittedly, no one actually bestowed upon me the ability to be a new music critic. Such is the greatness of the internet: anyone can hang out a shingle.”

“The Nashville Symphony has paid off $2.5 million of its restructured $25.3 million debt. … However, with $22.8 million of debt on its books and labor negotiations looming with musicians, there’s still work to be done, including reaching its fundraising goal.”

“The symphony’s musicians will get a 2.85 percent annual raise under terms of the four-year deal, which will take their annual salary from $86,840 today to $97,240 during the 2017-18 season.”

Mariss Jansons, who has been the chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for nearly a decade, plans to resign his post there after the 2014-15 season, the orchestra announced on Tuesday.

“No one blinks when an experienced corporate manager earns a six-figure salary in this city. But an opera singer? We still romanticize the image of the starving artist. We like to think that talent will eventually fill dinner plates and checking accounts. But in real life, people who can’t pay their bills often put aside their passions, starved of the training, the attention and the resources they need to shine.”

Revisiting the furtive, constrained, vibrant, heady early days back in the USSR with people who were there from the very beginning in 1970s Riga and Leningrad.

“Resident conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and music director of the symphony’s Youth Orchestra since 2009, [Donato] Cabrera became music director of the Bay Area’s California Symphony and the New Hampshire Music Festival last year. He’s also music director of Wisconsin’s Green Bay Symphony, a post he’s held since 2011.”

“The composition – written in its earliest form exactly a century ago – toppled Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2, which had reigned for three years in the annual Classic FM Hall Of Fame list. The Lark Ascending last topped the poll in 2010 and three years ago it was named the nation’s favourite Desert Island Discs tune.”