August 10, 2012  |
| | | Thought of the Day | | I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.
--Andy Warhol
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| Quote of the Week | | Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive. --Elbert Hubbard
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| | Atlanta Symphony in Debt Spiral |  According to figures published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's accumulated debt has grown from $1.1 million in 2003 to a projected $19.8 million in 2013. The musicians' four-year contract expires Aug. 26; given the circumstances, which the newspaper describes as "dire," management is seeking major cuts in labor costs. Negotiations are not going smoothly. The musicians, according to the players committee, are being asked to take 12 weeks of furloughs, or a $20,000 cut per year. Management is seeking $3.1 million in concessions; musicians are offering about $1 million. ASO President Stanley Romanstein, who in 2010 succeeded Allison Vulgamore (now CEO of the just-out-of-bankruptcy Philadelphia Orchestra), tells the AJC that continuing on without cutting labor expenses is "playing Russian roulette with the future of the Atlanta Symphony." Base salary for ASO musicians is $88,400. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Jonas Kaufmann Steals the Show |  SALZBURG, Austria -- Opera-goers attending Salzburg Festival's new production of Puccini's La Bohème expected the worst when the man with the microphone stepped out shortly before show-time earlier this week. But then came the good news. Piotr Beczala, who had received rave reviews at last week's premiere, had lost his voice, they were told; Jonas Kaufman would sing the role of Rodolfo instead. Bezcala would act; Kaufmann would sing from the sidelines. [Kaufman is Musical America's 2012 Vocalist of the Year.] They were not disappointed. Kaufmann performed brilliantly between chews of what appeared to be a sandwich and gulps of mineral water -- an indication that he got the call to perform just ahead of his dinner. He was supposed to be "only" the voice, with Bezcala miming the words and action -- but the audience was hard put to keep its eyes on the stage. As he threw himself into the role of the poor poet in love with the consumptive seamstress Mimì, Kaufmann accented his broad, full-throated tenor with gestures and facial expressions reflecting his total identification with the role of a man tossed and turned by the forces of love and despair. |
| | | | |  LOS ANGELES -- Marvin Hamlisch, who composed the scores for dozens of movies including The Way We Were and the Broadway smash A Chorus Line, has died in Los Angeles. He was 68. Family spokesman Jason Lee said Hamlisch collapsed and died Monday after a brief illness. Other details were not released. Hamlisch's career included composing, conducting, and arranging music from Broadway to Hollywood, from symphonies to R&B hits. He won every major award in his career, including three Academy Awards, four Emmys, four Grammys, a Tony, and three Golden Globes. Hamlisch, a Juilliard grad, composed more than 40 film scores, including Sophie's Choice, Ordinary People, and Take the Money and Run. He won his third Oscar for his adaptation of Scott Joplin's music for The Sting. His latest work came for Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! On Broadway, Hamlisch received both a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for the long-running favorite A Chorus Line and wrote the music for The Goodbye Girl and Sweet Smell of Success. He was scheduled to fly to Nashville, TN, this week to see a production of his new musical The Nutty Professor, according to his publicist. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
| | |  SANTA FE, NM -- At a time when opera companies in the United States are retrenching or worse, the Santa Fe Opera shows little sign of economic distress. In fact it is currently enjoying one of its best seasons ever, bolstered by two operas from off the beaten path, each of which can plausibly be called a masterpiece -- Szymanowski's King Roger and Rossini's Maometto II.
These are not operas a company in financial trouble would dare to undertake. "We have an incredibly loyal subscriber and patron base -- many generous, supportive friends," said Charles MacKay, who took over as general director in the fall of 2008 when the economy was in freefall, and promptly trimmed the budget (currently $18 million) by 15 percent with minor impact on the artistic side. Tosca, the only warhorse among the five-opera season (all new productions), has done best at the box office, "but the others are catching up," MacKay said. "There's a good chance we will set a record this year. Every night nearly 50 percent of the audience is first-timers to us. We want to hang on to them while appealing to hardcore aficionados." MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Charles Ives Home Endangered |  Charles Ives may be the granddad of American classical music and certainly one of the most important composers of the 20th century, but real estate developers licking their chops to buy his house couldn't care less. Such is the state of things that the home this American original built in 1912 in Redding, CT, and lived in until his death in 1954, is not only up for sale but threatened with demolition unless someone can come up with $1.3 million to buy it. Last weekend, composer Oliver Knussen and British cellist Zoë Martlew went to visit Ives's house. They found that the composer's library had been packed up and stored away, but that much remained in the order of furniture and mementos -- enough to open a museum, perhaps. Martlew has written that Ives's studio appears to have been left "untouched. Cobwebs grace the mementos lying on the table and writing desk." Newspaper clippings, photos, letters are scattered about. "Two metronomes set at different speeds sit side-by-side next to assorted empty hooch bottles. There's a rusty-springed couch behind the piano for when he got too musically worked up and had to lie down." The real-estate agent reports that he is getting pressure from investors to sell the property so they can develop it. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Eugenia Zukerman's Tanglewood Vlog | |  | | John Harbison, Composer, on Jazz |
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Pulitzer prize-winning composer John Harbison is one of the most honored and prominent artists of our time. A great friend of Tanglewood and the Boston Symphony, he has often been commissioned to write for the orchestra, and this summer his commissioned work for chorus and orchestra, Koussevitzky said: will be performed on August 26, along with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. "To see what kind of music might happen in that space in the program before Beethoven's Ninth was an interesting kind of assignment," Harbison said. "I wanted it to have something to do with Koussevitzky, having been more and more impressed at his design for Tanglewood that has proven so durable and original. I'm using some of Koussevitzky's own words, and I decided to use informal remarks, things that he said in conversation in rehearsal. They tend to be sometimes quite funny, sometimes very brief and pithy, and expressed in quite an unusual way. They make for an interesting choral text, and give some of the flavor of Koussevitzky 'off duty.'" |
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| Can Newspapers Charge To Quote Reviews? |  To submit a question to GG Arts Law write to LawAndDisorder@MusicalAmerica.com
Dear Law & Disorder: I recently came across the website of an artist management agency in Europe where they had posted the following: "The press review is temporarily not available. German newspapers Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung recently started to pursue institutions and artists using texts (press reviews, interviews, commentaries etc.) published by those newspapers on their websites or in any other commercial context without having paid for them. We have been advised to remove all press quotations from our website as the same phenomenon seems to happen in other countries like Switzerland and Austria."Is this a copyright trend that will spread to other European countries and the USA? Will agents, and artists have to start paying for the use of (press reviews, interviews, commentaries) used to promote an artists career? Also, if an American agency has press reviews, interviews, commentaries from Europeans newspapers on their websites, such as from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung, will these agencies be liable for payment of the use for this information, as well, as it is being used in a commercial context? (Thank you for your column on Musical America, and I also thank Ms. Challener for her leadership in including such information in the weekly email Musical America updates.)
Read the full story |
| AfricaViews, Part 2 | 
From Why I Left Muncie by Sedgwick Clark By popular demand, I offer another baker's dozen of Africa photos to tide over a humid summer. Our last two weeks of May were in South Africa's fall season-very dry, with Kruger National Park's brown grass sparsely green only near the river. The jungle foliage may have desiccated, but the bare bush gave us a better view of animals that, even then, blended into the background to an uncanny degree. In the morning the temps were around 40° Fahrenheit, and we dressed in five layers and bundled under blankets as the Land Rover whisked us to the bush to observe the changing of the wildlife guard. By 9 a.m. several layers had been shed, and at midday it was nearly 80°. Our late-afternoon return to the bush required that we dress in retrograde. The unexpected benefit of the season was that bugs were near nonexistent. Usually a magnet for their stingers, I didn't get a single bite. Read the full story
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| Latest Roster Changes | |  Musical America is helping presenters keep up with its advertisers! Managers whose rosters appear in the 2012 edition of the Musical America Directory should write to listings@musicalamerica.com with the names of artists and attractions that have been either added or removed, and please be sure to indicate "added" or "removed."
NEW THIS WEEK Carty, Sharon, mezzo-soprano, added, Artistainternational
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