National Opera Considers Merger
Erica Orden
•
The Wall Street Journal
The Washington National Opera, facing financial challenges and questions about its future, is exploring a merger with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, according to a person familiar with the matter. The arrangement under consideration would mimic the Kennedy Center's relationship with the National Symphony Orchestra, the person said. The center would assume the opera's assets and liabilities, and the opera would cede to the center approval on artistic and budgetary matters. Merger discussions began around March, the person said.
|
COMMENTARY: Should our theater leaders be homegrown?
Chris Jones
•
Theater Loop (Chicago Tribune)
When it comes to fruits, meats and vegetables, we're increasingly believing it's better not to truck in superstar carrots or overachieving fruit from far away, but to munch happily upon that which is locally raised or grown.
So should this rule apply to the arts? Should cultural institutions — organic and homegrown as so many of them are — strive to hire local for their creative leadership?
|
Huge Set for The Ring Arrives at the Met
Daniel J. Wakin
•
The New York Times
The leviathan has landed. The 45-ton set for the Metropolitan Opera’s new Wagner Ring Cycle created by Robert Lepage has arrived at the house. On Wednesday, it passed a key test when it was rolled from a wing onto center stage. The trial run was delayed by several hours when an inspecting engineer found that the metal structure underneath the stage needed some touch-up welding.
|
Fund for Arts drive for 2010 comes up short
Andrew Adler
•
Louisville Courier-Journal
The Fund for the Arts raised a shade more than $8million in its 2010 campaign — almost $900,000 less than last year and its weakest overall showing since 2006. But officials said they regard it as a success considering the weak economy. And leaders of local arts organizations said they were cautiously optimistic that their own cost-cutting and belt-tightening would make program cuts unnecessary. Overall, the 2010 campaign took in $8,009,246. The 2009 effort raised $8.86 million, although it included about $500,000 in bequests that officials considered unlikely to be repeated. That leaves about a $350,000 drop from last year, which organizers said isn't a surprise.
|
Beyond Fur And Pearls: Opera For The People
Jessica Alpert
•
wbur.org
The gilded performance halls, the tuxedos, the mink coats — for many people, images of opera remain stuck in the 1950s. While that world may stay intact in some parts of the arts world, Boston’s Lyric Opera is trying to change the way we interact with their performances. Our guests discuss about accessibility, performance in HD and the future of opera in Boston.
|
Mysterious Tampa Bay area arts benefactor dies
Andrew Meacham
•
St. Petersburg Times
When a well-known philanthropist dies, accolades tend to flow in quickly. Former colleagues and beneficiaries bring tales of humility and timely generosity. It is almost a staple of death when a person has reached the upper rungs of charitable giving. But reaction was more subdued after last week's death of retired businessman Doyle McClendon, whose lavish — and usually anonymous — contributions underwrote concerts and helped keep art museums afloat.
|
Another major orchestra feels the pain; deep cuts proposed for Detroit Symphony
Tim Smith
•
Clef Notes (The Baltimore Sun)
Not that there really is much comfort in knowing that other people are suffering the same fate, but news from the musicians of the Detroit Symphony speaks to the continuing stress of the economic downturn and its effect here in Baltimore. Of course, the city of Detroit has been in trouble for a long time, so a lot of folks have wondered how the resident orchestra could maintain its position for the long haul.
|
Vagabond Opera goes Bohemian with shows in D.C., Baltimore
Emily Cary
•
Washington Examiner
Are the words "vagabond" and "opera" mutually exclusive? Not in Eric Stern's eyes. The European-trained operatic tenor cast aside all the formalities associated with classical opera by marrying it with Bohemian cabaret, klezmer, gypsy music, jazz, folk-punk, blues and multiple ethnic flavors to create an electrifying new genre: Vagabond Opera.
|
|
|
|
|
Annenberg Study: 0% Would Pay for Twitter
Dylan Stableford
•
The Wrap
According to the results of a study just released by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, exactly 0 (zero!) percent of the the 2010 Digital Future Report’s 1,981 participants said they would consider paying for the popular – and to this point, free -- social messaging service.
|
Classical music venues: Not for the faint-hearted
Staff
•
The Independent
You may think classical music lovers are dinosaurs, but that doesn't mean we are happy to live in a swamp. I often feel that when concert halls are built or refurbished, the needs of the audience are the last things taken into account. Going to a concert can be like budget air travel: venues pack in as many seats as possible, skimp on the loos and ventilation and fill the foyer with outlets to make us buy stuff that we don't need.
|
Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Farmer Turned Opera Star, 69
Margalit Fox
•
The New York Times
Anthony Rolfe Johnson, an Englishman who began his professional life as a farmer and ended it as a distinguished lyric tenor who had performed to glowing notices in the world’s most storied opera houses and concert halls, died on July 21 in London. He was 69. Mr. Rolfe Johnson, who did not begin formal training until he was nearly 30, eventually sang leading roles on opera stages including those of Covent Garden in London, the Paris Opera and the Metropolitan Opera, where he appeared 20 times in the 1990s.
|
The last opera director standing
Zachary Woolfe
•
Capital.com
In the days preceding an opera's premiere, weeks of discourse about grand themes and philosophical subtleties are mostly replaced by talk of lighting cues and costume changes. "Sequin ladies come out, please," Thaddeus Strassberger intoned into a microphone during a technical rehearsal in a darkened theater at Bard College on Sunday. "I need to see about your traffic patterns."
|
Opera San José Presents Anna Karenina West Coast Premiere
BWW News Desk
•
BroadwayWorld.com
Opera San José proudly launches its 27th Anniversary Season with the West Coast premiere of Anna Karenina, an American opera by composer David Carlson with libretto by the late Colin Graham. Eight performances are scheduled from September 11 through 26 at the California Theatre. Opera San José will present Anna Karenina with a new scene added by the composer following the opera's 2007 world premiere at Florida Grand Opera.
|
Wye Jamison Allanbrook, an Expert on Mozart, 67
James R. Oestreich
•
The New York Times
Wye Jamison Allanbrook, a musicologist who altered modern ways of thinking about the music of Mozart and his contemporaries, died on July 15 at her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 67. Her work, cited by the conductor Roger Norrington and the director Peter Sellars, among others, has influenced stagings of Mozart operas and provides a standard critical tool for opera studies today.
|
Culture Club - Does the Nation’s Culture Need Federal Protection?
Drake Bennett
•
The Boston Globe
In 2000, two years before he died, the legendary television comic Milton Berle sued NBC for losing track of 130 film reels of his early shows. A few years later, the Supreme Court upheld the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, extending copyright terms to 70 years past the death of the author, or 95 years from the date of first publication. And in the last decade and a half, the ownership of the nation’s commercial radio stations has become more concentrated, with the number of owners decreasing by 40 percent even as the number of total stations has grown. These may seem like unrelated developments. But to Bill Ivey, they’re part of the same story: American culture is being taken over by powerful private forces and, as a result, fenced off from public use.
|
Running gets Merola Opera mezzo-soprano going
Sam Whiting
•
San Francisco Chronicle
On the day that Robin Flynn was to sing a complicated seven-minute aria in Herbst Theatre, she needed to get her breath going. So she ran up Russian Hill, then dropped down to the waterfront to fight a headwind from Crissy Field to Fort Point — 10 miles in all, with rap pounding through her ear buds. Flynn, 27, is a mezzo-soprano in the Merola Opera Program, an intense summerlong workshop for top operatic talent from all over the world.
|
Four Asheville performers create new opera company
Carol Motsinger
•
Asheville Citizen-Times
The collective resumes of Timothy Wilds, Karen Svites, Simone Vigilante and Vance Reese read like an A-list of Asheville's music performance groups: Asheville Choral Society. Asheville Symphony Children's Chorus. Asheville Lyric Opera.
So it makes sense that these four friends are teaching the next generation of Asheville opera performers with their new company, Opera Creations, Svites said.
|
Civic Light Opera: Big and blustery beginning at Civic Arena; but curtains there before anyone knew it
Sharon Eberson
•
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
What is now Pittsburgh CLO has been around since 1945, when Edgar Kaufmann put up $50,000 to jump-start City Councilman A.L. Wolk's dream of a Civic Light Opera summer company. The first show came the following year, when Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta opened on June 3 at Pitt Stadium. In the 1950s, only six other cities east of California had such large-scale, community-sponsored musical theater — Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Louisville and St. Louis. Managing director William Wymetal put on dazzling productions, with reported costs of $53,000 a week.
|
Portland's major performing arts groups cut budgets to stay in the black
David Stabler
•
The Oregonian
The Department of Lowered Expectations announced today that four of Portland's five major performing arts groups ended the 2010 fiscal year in the black by shrinking their budgets. Cuts in salaries and a range of other expenses kept the Oregon Symphony, Portland Opera, Portland Center Stage and Oregon Ballet Theatre out of trouble in the wake of the recession. The fifth group, White Bird Dance, increased its budget slightly and ended with a deficit of $6,000. What the numbers mean is that, like families with fewer dollars to spend, arts groups are finding ways to live within their means.
|
Going out by staying in: where to watch the arts online
Leo Benedictus
•
The Guardian (U.K.)
To get the most from any show, apparently, you have to be there. No technology can transmit the sound of a real orchestra or the immediacy of theatre, can it? If you haven't shared a room with your favourite band, you can't really call yourself a fan. Even giant plasma screens and Blu-ray players cannot properly display those films that, everyone agrees, "you have to see in the cinema". And everyone is probably right. But they overrate some aspects of the live experience, too.
|
Life Is a Dream Remained a Dream for Three Decades
Lewis Spratlan
•
The Los Angeles Times
In 1978, Lewis Spratlan wrote an opera but couldn't get it staged. In 2000, he won the Pulitzer Prize for the second act of that opera in concert version but still couldn't get it staged. This summer, Life Is a Dream finally will get its world premiere at Santa Fe Opera. Spratlan tells of a work that waited three decades to come to life.
|
Lawmakers Seeking Cuts Look at Nonprofit Salaries
Stephanie Strom
•
The New York Times
State and federal officials are starting to take their knives to the pay of leaders of nonprofit groups they do business with to help share the pain of tighter budgets. Compensation has long been a point of controversy among donors to nonprofits. By far the biggest category of complaints posted on the Web site of Charity Navigator, which offers research and analysis of nonprofit groups, involves complaints about pay.
|
George Soros tries arts philanthropy -- but he's not saying `Move over, Eli Broad'
Mike Boehm
•
Culture Monster (Los Angeles Times)
Culture Monster is kind of tired of applying the label "billionaire arts philanthropist" to Eli Broad and hardly anybody else.So the news Wednesday that hedge fund titan George Soros is giving $11 million to New York City performing arts organizations through his Open Society Institute to help them out of the squeeze caused by cuts in local government grants got us thinking. We'd be more than glad to anoint Soros -- or any other wealthy folks -- as "billionaire arts philanthropists."
|
Mad Men City | Opera Supernumerary
Emily S. Rueb
•
City Room (The New York Times)
"I’m a super," says Don Draper’s date at Jimmy’s La Grange in Sunday’s opening episode of the AMC drama "Mad Men." "A supernumerary," she adds, referring to her role as an extra at the Metropolitan Opera.
|
U.S. Pledges To Speed Up Visa Process For Artists
Ben Sisario
•
The New York Times
Addressing years of complaints about slow and inconsistent processing of visa applications for foreign performing artists, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services told arts groups this week that it was making an effort to speed up and improve its visa operations.
|
After an Abrupt Exit, Opera Changes Key
Pia Catton
•
The Wall Street Journal
The sudden departure of German theater director Peter Stein from the Metropolitan Opera's production of Boris Godunov due to personal reasons, as announced on Wednesday night, strips the company of a marquee artist—just about 10 weeks before the show makes its October 11 premiere. The replacement director, Stephen Wadsworth, will have to chart a fresh course—on someone else's ship and without the benefit of the long gestation process that typically precedes a new opera. He has, however, already met with Mr. Pape and conductor Valery Gergiev in Europe, according to the Met.
|
In Santa Fe, an Early Look at a New Opera
Anthony Tommasini
•
ArtsBeat (The New York Times)
Opera companies typically do not want critics anywhere near a dress rehearsal for a major new production....But companies sometimes make exceptions for a world premiere since it can be really helpful for a critic to hear a new piece twice. On Thursday night the Santa Fe Opera allowed reviewers to attend the dress rehearsal of the composer Lewis Spratlan’s “Life is a Dream,” based on the landmark 1635 play by Calderón, with a libretto by James Maraniss. The opera is receiving its premiere production here in Santa Fe and opens on Saturday night.
|
|
|
Deborah Voigt to Become a Pistol-Packin' Annie
Daniel J. Wakin
•
ArtsBeat (The New York Times)
Debbie, get your gun. Deborah Voigt, a leading dramatic soprano known for portraying Strauss and Wagner heroines, will be packing heat next summer in the title role of Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival. The performance will be a major departure for Ms. Voigt, a celebrated singer with an ardent fan base, but it will be within a longstanding tradition of opera stars stepping onto the Broadway stage.
|
Orchestras Seek BFF by Cellphone Texts
Daniel J. Wakin
•
The New York Times
Before the New York Philharmonic presented its first concert of the season in Central Park last week, the executive director of the orchestra had an announcement: Audience members could vote for an encore from the evening’s soloist by text message. The choices were a Chopin étude or, in honor of the guest musicians from the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, a traditional Chinese melody.
|
|
|
What's so wrong with proscenium arch theatre?
Dan Rebellato
•
The Guardian (U.K.)
There is widespread enthusiasm for immersive, site-specific performance, as well as a revival of interest in older performance forms like theatre-in-the-round, traverse, promenade and street theatre. But what have we all got against the proscenium arch? No single manifesto or programme announced its demise, but various accusations seem to come up time and time again.
|
Orchestrating racial harmony in the French banlieues
Cheryl Roussel
•
The Independent (U.K.)
The concert is the culmination of the "Demos Orchestra" project, an ambitious scheme which took 450 children aged seven to 12, living in disadvantaged areas of the Parisian suburbs, and taught them to play an instrument from scratch through four hours a week of group work.
The project is about more than teaching music. It is also about rehabilitating the image of the banlieues, the stigmatised suburbs around Paris that the French associate with the violent youth riots of 2005, criminal gangs — and now the collapse of the national football team (many of whom were born in troubled banlieues).
|
'You're part of something bigger'
Jeremy Eichler
•
The Boston Globe
David Malek was working at a community center in Los Angeles in 2007 when he stumbled onto a YouTube video of Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra performing a sizzling, incredibly joyful rendition of Bernstein’s “Mambo’’ — musicians dancing in their seats, twirling instruments in the air — at the Proms in London. It was both thrilling and perplexing, he recalled.
“I had never seen an orchestra — let alone a youth orchestra — do anything like that,’’ he said. “And I thought to myself, ‘What the hell is happening in Venezuela?’ ’’
|
Drive for $85M Asheville performing arts center still alive
John Boyle
•
Asheville Citizen-Times
You don't have to be a real estate genius to notice the Great Recession has put a damper on several big projects around town. Also, I suspect those who still have money are probably experiencing a little charity fatigue, especially after the magnificent-yet-bathroomless Pack Square Park recently opened after five years of construction and $18.5 million in spending, much of it donations.
Honestly, I thought the Performing Arts Center plan was as dead as Mel Gibson's career. But it turns out it's still kicking, thank you very much.
|
Tweeting At the Theatre
Chloe Veltman
•
Lies Like Truth (ArtsJournal)
Since SF Playhouse allowed a few audience members sitting in a specially-designated area of the theatre to send Twitter messages, an interesting debate about whether this activity should be allowed in the theatre or not has been going on on the Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Facebook page.
|
With deficit gone, the show goes on
Michael Grossberg
•
The Columbus Dispatch
Like the climactic scene late in a staging, Opera Columbus has overcome financial uncertainties and gained enough confidence to schedule three productions for the 2010-11 season.
|
'Resignation' bogus, musicians contend
Michael Tsai
•
The Honolulu Star Advertiser
The Honolulu Symphony Society announced yesterday that it has "accepted the resignation" of the 63 musicians that comprise its orchestra—much to the surprise of the musicians.
|
USCIS Proposes Fee Increase
•
The Performing Arts Alliance
Opera organizations experiencing difficulty obtaining artist visas have a new opportunity to weigh in with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) as the agency proposes an across-the-board fee increase. The USCIS proposes a $5 increase in the fee for the regular I-129 visa processing form (which would bring the fee to $325), and a $225 increase in the Premium Processing fee (bringing the total fee to $1,225). The performing arts community is urging USCIS to immediately make long-overdue improvements to the regular artist visa process and to refrain from increasing the already-unaffordable Premium Processing fee. Comments to USCIS are due by July 26.
OPERA America, as a founding member of the Performing Arts Alliance, will submit detailed comments in collaboration with our national colleagues in the Performing Arts Visa Working Group: American Federation of Musicians, Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Dance/USA, League of American Orchestras, North American Performing Arts Managers and Agents and Theatre Communications Group.
Visit the following link to access the Action Alert and submit comments to USCIS.
http://paa.convio.net/site/MessageViewer?em_id=1221.0
|
Charities mail out coins, hope for larger return
Stacy Jones
•
USA Today
A growing number of charities across the USA are taking a nickel-and-dime approach to encourage donations by mail, despite some evidence that including coins in solicitations turns off potential donors.
|
Lessons in the art of giving
Rebecca Knight
•
Financial Times
Most aspiring MBAs go to business school to learn how to make a great deal of money. But these days, business schools are also teaching students how to give it away.
|
Conductor Charles Mackerras dies
Matthew Weaver
•
Guardian.co.uk
The Australian conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, who led the opening concert at the Sydney Opera House, has died in London at the age of 84.
|
|
|
Managing Multimedia
Elliott Masie
•
Chief Learning Officer
In the past few years, there has been a sharp increase in the use of video among large organizations. Following the YouTube trend, companies have become fascinated with the potential for harvesting stories from employees and customers.
|
A tribute to Sir Charles Mackerras
Rupert Christiansen
•
Telegraph.co.uk
Singers found him particularly exacting; he had no time for hissy prima donnas or big-baby tenors, and he expected even the most timid newcomers to meet his generally brisk tempi and take criticism on the nose. To work with Sir Charles was a privilege, but it wasn't an easy ride.
|
|
|
Pit vs. Stage: Longer Nights and More Rubato
Daniel J. Wakin
•
ArtsBeat (The New York Times)
Erik Ralske, a member of the New York Philharmonic’s French horn section, had an interesting choice: be promoted to the principal horn position at the Los Angeles Philharmonic or take that job at the Metropolitan Opera.
|
San Francisco Opera Takes to the Silver Screen
Jessica Hilo
•
San Francisco Classical Voice
Funded by a grant from the Koret Foundation and support from patrons, the San Francisco Opera launched an initiative to take opera outside the opera house in an accessible, approachable manner: The San Francisco Opera Cinema Series.
|