Category: News Briefs

The New York Philharmonic will embark on an eleven-concert tour of Asia this October that marks the orchestra’s first performances in Hanoi, Vietnam, and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Details of the tour were announced at a June 2 press conference in Tokyo given by Music Director Designate Alan Gilbert and President and Executive Director Zarin Mehta. The October 8-24 tour, “Asian Horizons: Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic,” also encompasses performances in Tokyo, Japan; Seoul, Korea; and Singapore. The orchestra’s two performances in Vietnam will take place at the Hanoi Opera House; plans are underway for a large-screen simulcast of the concerts on the plaza adjacent to the opera house. The two concerts in Abu Dhabi, at the Emirates Palace Auditorium, will mark the opening of the 2009-10 season of Abu Dhabi Classics, described as the first year-round performing arts series in the Arab world. During the tour the orchestra will perform works of Barber, Beethoven, Berlioz, Mahler, Mendelssohn, and Mozart, as well as a new commission by Magnus Lindberg, the Philharmonic’s composer-in-residence beginning in September 2009. The Lindberg piece will have its world premiere in New York at the Philharmonic’s opening-night gala in September, prior to the tour.

Posted June 5, 2009 

This spring, the Seattle Opera has been holding a contest to choose the host for a new video project, “Confessions of a First-Time Operagoer.” The contest was launched a few months before the company’s upcoming Ring cycle performances, and is envisioned as a way for young people with limited operagoing experience to become involved with the opera. Applicants must never have previously seen Wagner’s Ring cycle. The winner of the contest will make a documentary this summer about his or her first Ring cycle experience. The company received 49 applications over the past several weeks, which were submitted through Facebook and by mail; there was also a live casting call held on May 15. The five finalists’ audition videos have been posted at Seattle Opera’s website, where visitors viewed them and voted for a favorite. The winner will be announced on June 6, the day the company begins its online pre-sale for single tickets to the Ring cycle performances. Earlier this spring, the Chicago Opera Theater’s “Why Do You Deserve Free Tickets to COT?” YouTube contest allowed people to compete for 2009 COT spring festival tickets by uploading videos with their own answer to the contest question. Four winners in that contest received two COT subscriptions; the cost was underwritten by the company’s board of trustees.

Posted June 5, 2009

Lincoln Center has announced that PBS’s Live From Lincoln Center will air an August 12 concert by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, led by Music Director Louis Langrée. The major symphonic work on the 8 p.m. telecast from Avery Fisher Hall will be Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 (“London”). The concert will also feature violinist Joshua Bell in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, Mozart’s Adagio for Violin and Orchestra in E major, and Mozart’s Rondo for Violin and Orchestra in C major. The Mostly Mozart Festival takes place this year from July 28 to August 22. In addition to offering concerts by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the 2009 festival will present John Adams’s opera A Flowering Tree; visiting performers will include pianists Piotr Andreszewski and Simone Dinnerstein, the Mark Morris Dance Group, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

Posted June 5, 2009

In Thursday’s (6/4) New York Times, Stephanie Strom writes, “The board of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has loosened the strings on some grants to arts organizations to help them weather a severe downturn in fund-raising and income from ticket sales and the like. … Foundations are facing a sharp increase in demand for aid, even as their assets have declined, which is forcing them to rethink the way they do business. Some foundations have decided to increase the amount they dispense each year, even though that may trigger a higher excise tax. Others are allocating their grants to support nonprofit groups’ operating costs, when they have traditionally supported only program expenses. In ordinary times, renegotiating grant agreements, as Duke is doing, would be unusual. But of the 79 foundations responding to a recent survey by the Center for Effective Philanthropy, 16 said they had invited organizations to do just that. … Last November, James E. Canales, chief executive of the James Irvine Foundation, sent a letter to the nonprofits its supports offering flexibility on grant terms.”

Posted June 4, 2009

In Wednesday’s (6/3) Times (London), Rosemary Bennett writes, “Stringent new visa controls have brought one ballet company to the brink of collapse and threaten dozens of concerts, festivals and exhibitions. Rules designed to prevent illegal immigration have left international performers struggling to gain access to Britain, a report says. Other artists have decided that it is simply not worth the hassle to travel. It is feared that the new rules could destroy Britain’s reputation as a centre for international arts. … The visa controls are part of the new points-based system for immigration. The rules for touring artists, which came into force in November, include a requirement for each artist to show £800 of savings, and financial support and constant monitoring by a ‘sponsor’ to make sure that they do not abscond during their visit. … In the past artists have been able to obtain, within a few days, a simple short-term visa to tour in Britain. The report, UK Arts and Culture: Cancelled by Order of the Home Office, was compiled by the Manifesto Club, which campaigns against red tape. … It found evidence that more than 20 major events had been cancelled or badly affected by the new system.”

Posted June 4, 2009

In Wednesday’s (6/3) Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), Mark Washburn reports, “A young arts leader from Cincinnati, known for bringing innovative technology to the business of fundraising, was named president of Charlotte’s struggling Arts & Science Council on Tuesday.” Scott Provancher, 32, “moves from Cincinnati’s Fine Arts Fund, the nation’s oldest and largest arts and culture fundraising group, to Charlotte’s ASC, which is reeling from internal layoffs and a spring fund drive that fell millions short. But Provancher said Tuesday the job was an attractive one—getting to come at a crucial time to a strong organization that he admired from afar. … His first job was raising money for the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. In 2000, he was named an orchestra management fellow with the American Symphony Orchestra League, gaining management training assignments at the San Francisco Symphony, Aspen Music Festival and School, and Fort Wayne Philharmonic. … At the Fine Arts Fund, Provancher presided over an annual campaign that ended in April by raising about $11 million, 8 percent short of its goal.”

Posted June 4, 2009

In Thursday’s (6/4) Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), Peggy McGlone reports, “The Colonial Symphony is pleased to be the recipient of 45 gifts—from its 44 musicians and conductor—who will perform a benefit concert Sunday afternoon to raise much-needed money for the organization. ‘We were thrilled. It’s an acknowledgment on their part that they know what is happening,’ said Colonial Symphony executive director Suzanne Sampson, who said the gift is worth about $18,000. … The idea of the benefit concert came from the orchestra committee and received the approval of Local 16 of the American Federation of Musicians, the union that negotiates the collective bargaining agreement between the players and the nonprofit institution. The musicians, led by conductor [music director] Paul Hostetter, perform at 4 p.m. in the Morristown High School Auditorium. … The Colonial Symphony musicians are not the only ones using their talents to help their employers. This spring, the musicians of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra agreed to waive the wage and benefit increases called for in next year’s contract and donate the $1 million savings to the organization in the form of a challenge grant.”

Posted June 4, 2009

It’s a tough time for Michigan’s arts institutions, writes Mark Stryker in Wednesday’s (6/3) Detroit Free Press. “But the Detroit Symphony Orchestra just hit a $1-million jackpot. The DSO has received a million-dollar grant from the New York-based Ford Foundation for fund-raising and marketing initiatives around music director Leonard Slatkin. The three-year gift is designed to help the DSO expand its donor base. The gift reaffirms the significant effect that the 64-year-old conductor has made in his first season on several fronts, including generating artistic ideas, audience-building and fund-raising. ‘They see us going in the right direction, and they think that the Slatkin appointment was pivotal to the ongoing success of the orchestra,’ said DSO president Anne Parsons. The DSO has responded to falling donations, endowment declines and soft ticket sales with more than $1.6 million in cost-cutting this year, including layoffs, pay cuts and canceled programming. The DSO still must raise $2 million by Aug. 31 to balance its [FY 2009] budget.”

Posted June 4, 2009

Photo: Detroit Symphony Orchestra Music Director Leonard Slatkin
Credit: Courtesy of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra

In the June 8 edition of Time magazine, Richard Lacayo reports on how the recession is affecting arts organizations nationwide. “On May 18, the First Lady traveled to New York City to inaugurate the newly refurbished American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later she moved on to the city’s other Met—the Metropolitan Opera House… As a moment of social and cultural pageantry, the visit was a hit. But it carried an anxious subtext. The Great Recession has struck museums and performing-arts groups with a vengeance… The problem is that these groups have been hit in all three of their main revenue streams. For many of them, audiences are down sharply, because in a recession a theater ticket or concert seat can seem like an indulgence. Meanwhile, with corporate profits tanking and charitable endowments badly deflated, donations and underwriting have also been drying up.” In the article, Robert Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, says, “Most organizations have been hurt. But arts organizations aren’t driven by profit. They’re driven by mission. And they’ll do anything to survive.”

Posted June 3, 2009 

In a June 1 post at Slate.com, Jan Swafford makes his case for why we should listen to the music of Charles Ives. “If you’re the keyboard-prodigy son of an imaginative small-town bandmaster father who, in the 1880s, teaches his son to sing in one key while he accompanies in another; who tells the boy he can write any chord as long as he knows the reason for it … if you’ve got the guts to keep experimenting with the materials of music when everybody, but everybody, tells you you’re crazy—then you’re in the direction of a Charles Ives. Except no important composer had a background like Ives’, with its mingling of the traditional and radical, small-town and sophisticated.” Swafford mentions the New World Symphony’s four-night Ives festival in February, while praising the Symphony No. 4 (which got a performance this March by the Boston Symphony Orchestra) as Ives’s “greatest completed work—the boldest in conception, the most universal in theme, the grandest in execution… The Symphony No. 4 is a work of universal religion, made from the concrete stuff of everyday American music and life but leaving our gaze turned upward.”

Posted June 3, 2009