Category: music

The company “has posted a deficit of £2.5 million, with audiences running at 71 per cent of capacity – 9 per cent down on the previous year. Production costs are up £1.5million on 2011, box office income down £1.2 million. Reserves are now standing at under £1 million.”

“Buoyed by efforts to broaden its audience and attract younger patrons, the Cleveland Orchestra said its 2012-13 Severance Hall season-ticket sales revenue is on track to set a record, driven by the best-ever ticket sales in November and December.”

“The Minnesota Orchestra has canceled one more weekend of concerts, Feb. 14-15, and pushed another event into the 2013-14 season. … If there is a silver lining in Monday’s announcement, it is that the cancellations did not extend through the entire month of February.”

“After leading the Louisville Orchestra through bankruptcy, a bruising labor battle” – that attempts to hire non-union replacements via Craigslist – “and a return to the stage after a canceled season, chief executive officer Robert Birman is resigning.”

“I don’t think any of us are in a position to judge what someone else does to try to manage his health or an illness. … We each have different capacities for managing ill health. If this is the way he thinks he can do that, then that’s his choice.”

“The move postpones the world premiere of ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ which was set to debut in May, for at least two years. The opera, based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, was the centerpiece of the upcoming season and has been highly touted in ads and banners across the region.”

“The Coventry-born composer was part of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s, where she created sounds which would influence pop and electronic music for decades to come.”

“Nothing is essentially wrong with the ‘tonal enterprise,’ but most of us acknowledge that in the aftermath of the tumultuous 20th-century, we live in a dramatically expanded field of possibilities.”

“Despite the fact that its chief executive is about to depart to head up the BBC , the Royal Opera House has announced a bold new direction.”

“The Royal Opera House today unveiled a programme of radical new operas, including an adaptation of The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks’s cult novel about a psychopathic teenager. The move could transform the image of the venue, which has previously left rival English National Opera to court controversy over avant-garde work.”