The Cleveland Orchestra will make its first commercial recording under music director Franz Welser-Möst this week, taking advantage of a new agreement with the musicians’ union which allows live concert recordings to be used for commercial releases without the usual upfront payments to the musicians. The recording of Beethoven’s 9th symphony will be Cleveland’s first new CD in seven years.
Tag: 01.10.07
Madison PAC On The Fiscal Ropes
Madison, Wisconsin’s three-year-old Overture Center for the Performing Arts is in a financial hole, plugging shortfalls with money it won’t be able to replicate in future years. A 29% drop in ticket sales and an over-reliance on those sales to meet budget goals aren’t helping, either. The center is hoping that an aggressive fundraising campaign can keep it from having to ask city or state officials for a bailout.
SF Opera Names New Chief Conductor
Italian conductor Nicola Luisotti has been appointed music director of the San Francisco Opera, succeeding Donald Runnicles, who departs the post at the end of the 2008-09 season. Luisotti, who made his debut the company in 2005, will conduct a minimum of four productions each season. “Luisotti’s rise as a conductor has been strikingly rapid, dating from his international debut in Stuttgart in 2002. Since then, he has made acclaimed debuts in Paris, Toronto, Munich and Los Angeles.”
Carlo Ponti, 94
Italian film producer Carlo Ponti, best known for his work on Doctor Zhivago and his marriage to Sophia Loren, has died in a Swiss hospital, aged 94. “During a career spanning four decades Ponti produced more than 140 films and worked with directors including Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lean. However, he was equally famous for discovering Loren as a teenager and turning her into one of the world’s most glamorous stars.”
Monster Malls
Enormous new shopping malls are rising in English town centers. “They call it urban renaissance, retail-led regeneration. I call it the biggest destruction of city centres since the Sixties. Then the bright hopes of postwar regeneration mostly dissolved into a developer’s free-for-all, as town centre after town centre was refitted with that new invention imported from America, a mall, with car park and ring road attached.”
Jazz’s French Accent
“If jazz is characterized as a blend of European and African elements that could only have taken place in America, then the French are entitled to take credit for the Old World side of that equation.”
A Smoking Ban For NY Arts Funding
A big tobacco company is breaking up. “What this has to do with the arts landscape in New York City might not be immediately clear — until one looks at the list of cultural organizations that Altria has supported, and which may not continue receiving support once its individual operating companies control the philanthropic purse.”