Musical America Blogs

by Keith Clarke

By the time this reaches the blogosphere I shall be swanning round Venice, gaping at art and canals and hoping not to encounter too many people playing Vivaldi at me. It’s my luck, one way or the other, to be out of the UK when the Arts Council makes its biggest funding announcement in history, but I’m not losing too much sleep over that. It’s a great way to use up airmiles while British Airways is still in business, and we booked it ages ago.

Of course it not so easy to escape the world of rolling news and avoid taking the office with you. There’s a worrying message on the Venice hotel website that wifi is available in all rooms, but I think I’ll forget that and dedicate my few days to the study of renaissance art and fine wines, though not necessarily in that order. I shall survey the remains of the British music industry when I get back to Blighty.

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If any Venetian students do try to run me down with The Four Seasons, I am at least protected by an ear problem that is currently quieting the world down a bit. A deaf music critic is probably as useful as card tricks on radio, but this is not the full works, just a little local difficulty that can almost certainly be cured by large doses of Grappa. Not like a few years ago when a very unpleasant inner ear infection had the effect of making music sound entirely weird, single notes sounding as discordant chords. I took the opportunity at the time to say in an editorial that Angela Gheorghiu was singing like a drain, and that if the London Symphony couldn’t do better than that the players  should take up gardening instead, swiftly diving in with an explanation before the lawyers turned apoplectic.

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As we sit and wait for the funding axe to fall, cheapskate music is all around. A colleague tells me he went searching for Gustav Holst’s Fugal Concerto in the Naxos Music Library and got the message: “Did you mean holst frugal concerto?” Look out for The Love of Two Oranges and other cost-cutting works.

by Cathy Barbash

While cultural export is again a priority in China’s new Five Year Development Plan, investment in venue construction is still more visible than investment in exportable cultural products. The latest high-profile foray is a joint venture between the Beijing Oriental Songlei Musical Development Company (of Butterflies and Love U Teresa fame) and the Dongcheng District Government of Beijing, which (like every district) wants to make itself a “Center of Culture.” The Beijing Oriental Songlei Theatre (under construction) is part of this plan. Founded in the year 1989, the parent Songlei Group of Companies is a vast conglomeration of industries dealing in real estate, commerce, education, property management, banking, finance, transportation, culture, as well as media and communications. Such conglomerates are increasingly the developers of new venues.

It will be a proscenium theater with 1200-1400 seats, smallish stage, not unlike Broadway theaters, and a pit that can accommodate about 16 players. Terrific location, just south of the Dongsishitiao subway station and directly across the street from the Ministry of Culture along the Second Ring Road. They plan to be a mostly rental house, though understand that during the early years they will have to pay to bring in a certain number of shows. The theater will also present Beijing Oriental Songlei Musical Development Company’s own musicals, including the aforementioned “Love U, Teresa” and the new magic-themed musical “The Joker’s Game.”

Their focus is musical theater and general all-ages entertainment, i.e. magic shows and that ilk; including both domestic and international productions. The rental pricing structure is still in development, but I’m guessing the aim is to be more affordable than places of comparable size such as the nearby Poly Theatre. This is definitely a for-profit venue.

The most unusual and interesting aspect of the project is not only the active involvement, but also the public acknowledgement of the continuing involvement of foreign management expertise. Chinese veteran cultural producers and officials Li Dun (Chairman), Jiang Haiyan (CEO) and Pan Yong (CEO, Beijing Oriental Songlei Theatre) are joined by Broadway veterans Tony Stimac and Don Franz as respectively Chief and Company Consultants. Dance specialist and recent Kennedy Center Fellow Alison Friedman serves as Director of Programming.

Contacted for his comments, Stimac waxed euphoric: “This is historic. To date there is not one theatre in China that a big musical can book for an open-ended run; this theatre will break that mold. On top of that, this is one of the first venues dedicated to musical theater. It really is a break through.” A grand opening Broadway gala review is slated for Oct. 28, 2011, with plans for a three-day theater-related conference the preceding week.

by Keith Clarke

No elephants, but quite possibly naked dancing girls. That was the undercover promise for a new in-the-round production of Aida coming to the Royal Albert Hall in February 2012. And if you just can’t get the elephants these days, it’s clear where you go for tenors. “America is a good place for tenors right now,” said director Stephen Medcalf, announcing the show at an Albert Hall press launch today. Both his Radames come from the USA – Marc Heller and Joseph Wolverton- singing alongside an international cast.

This Aida comes from legendary impresario Raymond Gubbay, whose Madam Butterfly is currently selling out the Albert Hall on its fifth revival, having seen some 300,000 people through the turnstiles over the years.

Unlike Butterfly, which is sung in English, some classy amplification doing it best in the Albert Hall’s bathroom acoustics, Aida will be sung in Italian, giving producers the tricky task of making surtitles visible to 5,000 people sitting in a large oval.

Gubbay said it was exciting to be launching something special at a time of arts cuts. He has famously taken the risk on all his productions, which have not seen a penny of state funding. But he was keen to defend the need for public subsidy. “This is not the answer to the cuts,” he said. “It won’t fix everything else, but it works here.”

Aida will run for 18 performances, with tickets from $35 to $121. It remains to be seen whether the price includes naked dancing girls.

by Keith Clarke

One of the best things about living in London is getting out of it. True, the city’s cultural offerings are pretty spectacular (though Paul Moor, RIP, would always insist that it couldn’t even hope to begin to compete with his beloved Berlin), but it is also noisy, overcrowded, and cursed with an often dysfunctional transport system.

My answer is to beat the retreat every couple of weeks to the south-west coast of Wales, where I swap the roar of London’s traffic for the soothing cry of Pembrokeshire’s seagulls.

So after last week’s diary of Anna Nicole on Monday, Lucrezia Borgia in 3D on Wednesday, a play in a pub theatre on Thursday, Madam Butterfly on Thursday and The Mikado on Saturday (“Why didn’t you do the Berlin Phil on Tuesday?” suggested a friend who thought I wasn’t getting out enough), I am sitting a two-hour drive from the nearest major concert hall – Wales Millennium Center in Cardiff.

Tenby is a small seaside town that punches above its weight in many ways, and has a lively arts festival every September – this year is its 20th – but it does not provide an urgent need to catch the hot ticket every night of the week, which is fine by me. A chance to recharge the batteries does wonders for the cultural appetite, and makes one ever more appreciative of the sheer volume of first-class entertainment that London has to offer.

At a time when all of us around the globe have a constant multi-choice of material making a claim on our time, it is no bad thing just to stop, and listen to the seagulls instead.

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The deliberations of the Association of British Orchestras annual conference continue to reverberate. One of many issues creating heat was the large gulf between the earnings of top-name conductors and soloists and the rank-and-file musicians on stage. One player had done her sums and reckoned that when all things were taken into account, she was working for about £30 ($48) an hour.

There were some mutterings about how this compared with the going rate for a plumber in London, but the musician’s beef was how it compared with conductors, who she reckoned were getting five to ten times as much as the players. Must be something wrong with her calculator, for the great divide is far worse than she thinks, given the caliber of conductors who wave a stick at her band.

The major London orchestras have an agreement in place to cap conductor and soloist fees, but the big names still put a big smile on their accountants’ faces. At the other end of the scale, soloists on the way up the career ladder are being offered the kind of fees which hardly cover their expenses, a situation which we shall be investigating in a forthcoming issue of Classical Music magazine.

One singer told me how he had been rung to see whether he was available for a date. He wasn’t, but suggested a number of excellent young post-graduate singers from the music college where he is a tutor. “Oh no,” came the reply, “They cost £190 [$309]. I was thinking more of £130 [$211] maximum.”

by Keith Clarke 

In ancient times, when the Metropolitan Opera first started beaming into movie theaters, I remember reading one man’s comparison between the real live experience at the opera house and the screened version. For him, having Anna Netrebko in glorious close-up won hands down against seeing her from 100 yards back in the opera house.  Last night I got my chance to agree with the verdict, when English National Opera’s Lucrezia Borgia became the world’s first live 3D opera.

This is the production where Movie director Mike Figgis takes us straight from the wonder of movie to a live stage production where the characters stand like lumps of wood and sing, so the idea of sitting through it all again was not the biggest thrill of the week. But lo and behold, could this really be the same production? With the wonder of close-up and slick direction, we were dealt an entirely different experience. You could see how these guys on stage were straining every sinew to put on a performance. And of the characters didn’t move, the cameras did.

The movie house version did not have ENO’s surtitles, but the amazing thing was that they were not needed. With everyone close-miked, every word rang out gloriously, and always came from the right part of the screen. Sometimes parts of the orchestra seemed to have moved to a side aisle—trying to find the bar, maybe—but the sound of the singers was bang on target.

The 3D was impressive, and if I had known that the Borgias were going to be coming quite so close I’d have lined up a few more drinks. But it was not the clincher. It was the imaginative transformation of a live performance from stage to screen that really won the evening. Let’s have more.

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Venue for this Lucrezia was Westfield in west London, heralded as Europe’s largest urban shopping mall. In US terms, it would probably be considered tiny, but for some arts journalists lured through its doors for the first time by the Lucrezia invitation, it was a bit of a surprise to discover that the cinema was what felt like a five-mile hike from the entrance. I am no Westfield virgin, as the center is on my doorstep and my kids seem to live there, but it was amusing to see first-time callers clearly in need of rescue dogs carrying brandy as they made their way to the multi-screen.

by Keith Clarke

Every corner of Westminster Abbey was filled this Tuesday as the late Dame Joan Sutherland was remembered in style with a grand memorial service, the highlight of which was hearing her voice again, sounding out over the echoing spaces, singing “Let the Bright Seraphim”from Handel’s Samson and “Casta Diva” from Norma.

The service was set off in style with Tony Pappano conducting the Royal Opera House Orchestra, and Valda Wilson was the soprano chosen to honor La Stupenda with “Pie Jesu” from the Fauré Requiem and the Alleluia from Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate.

Former Royal Opera House general director Sir John Tooley gave an address that was more catalog of achievements than personal reminiscence, but there was a very nice story about how the young Joan Sutherland had been refused entry into a youth choir that she auditioned for. It was declared that she sang too loudly, and would have drowned out the other girls.

It fell to a former prime minister’s wife to sum up in the order of service. As Dame Norma Major put it, “She was born with a God-given talent and shared it generously with the world.”

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Wednesday saw the country’s orchestra managers heading for Derby, in the Midlands, for the 2011 annual conference of the Association of British Orchestras. The area is the home of RollsRoyce, and most managers were clearly wondering whether they could keep the wheels on the old wagon while they wait for the Arts Council to declare the winners and losers in the great funding carve-up. It was, said the chief exec of one of London’s major symphony orchestras, “like the sword of Damocles.”

It looked like it was going to be a long three days, chewing over the ABO conference theme of “Protect and Survive,” but at least it brought the delegates three days closer to being put out of the misery of not knowing their fate, one way or the other. A full report will appear on MusicalAmerica in due course.

by Cathy Barbash

I’ve caught the Met’s Nixon in China twice, live and by Saturday radio broadcast, and have been trying to find out if any US-based Chinese officials or their surrogates have attended, and if so what they thought of it. No evidence has surfaced yet, though I was pleased to see that China Daily’s US online edition covered it, albeit more as a feature. http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2011-02/11/content_11984376.htm. This constitutes official acknowledgement that the work exists and is of interest, the first step in what could be either a long or short road to a production in China. More on that later.

The opera was telecast in HD last Saturday in both in Japan and South Korea, but, to no one’s surprise, not in Hong Kong. Instead, this week’s Hong Kong offering was Don Carlo. I have been told that Don Carlo was originally scheduled for that day in Hong Kong. Not sure whether this means that Nixon was not originally on offer: was Don Carlo the original programming in Japan and Korea too, but then they changed their choice when Nixon became available?  Does this have to do with conservative audience tastes, realpolitik, or a little of each? Still trying to sort this out.  Inquiries to the Met, while graciously received, have not yet been answered. My take? I loved the opera, but I would wager that the current production could not be presented in China. I would agree with the belief expressed elsewhere that the simulated sex, even more than the politics, would be the deal-killer.  

Those of us who work in China enjoyed the many resonant and evocative production details, from the trees at the airport, the platitudes at official meetings, and the need to know what one does and doesn’t discuss at such meetings (at one point Nixon is told to “save that for the minister”), to the big tables and endless ganbei toasts at the banquet, and the squared-off black beds in the last act. Mark Morris captures the spirit of The Red Detachment of Women with great élan.

The Met invited all of the remaining Old China Hands who had worked on the Nixon visit to the dress rehearsal, a gracious and savvy gesture. Resulting press coverage has been fascinating. Here are links to some of the best:  

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/02/14/110214ta_talk_talese
http://www.worldpolicy.org/blog/2011/02/01/nixon-china-redux
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/arts/music/13nixon.html?scp=2&sq=Max%20Frankel&st=cse

To which Alex Ross eloquently reacted in his February 12 post on his blog, The Rest is Noise.

In China, younger generation cultural professionals are in fact interested in presenting the opera either live or telecast, though this has not yet been possible. Chinese netizens have commented on the opera, and some have watched online excerpts from previous productions. One comment on http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjA5NjMxMTMy.html reads:

我擦, 这段历史。老美比我们认识还深刻啊。
Wǒ cā, zhè duàn lìshǐ. Lǎo měi bǐ wǒmen rènshi hái shēnkè a.
My god, this period of history. Old U.S. knows it more deeply than we do. 

I had suggested to relevant people that a private feed into the U.S. Embassy might be arranged for use as a special by-invitation event, as an opportunity for dialogue. It seems the stars did not align. I will go out on a limb however and bet that within the next 5 years, one or more of the major Chinese cultural institutions will produce the opera. All have the resources, guanxi (connections), and the appetite for projects of this scale. And when this happens, that will truly be news…news…news….

by Keith Clarke

Those nice people at MasterCard seem to be all over the London arts business at the moment. No sooner has the ink dried on a three-year agreement with the Southbank Center that will support three annual summer festivals than the pen has come down on another three-year deal. Newest beneficiary is the Society of West End Theaters, which is using the cash (or is that credit?) to relaunch the Olivier Awards.

The society’s suitably theatrical president, Nica Burns, was clearly very excited to announce the news at the Theater Royal, Drury Lane on Feb. 7, almost going into vertical take off as she enthused over the healthy state of London theaters, which last year enjoyed a record $822 million and 14 million ticket buyers. “How brilliant is that?” asked Nica with a rhetorical flourish. And she had a ready answer: “It’s because we’re just bloody good at what we do!”

Such hearty back-slapping may have seemed a little un-English to arts writers quietly dunking their chocolate chip cookies, but never mind. Enjoying a bloody good place in the opera nominations was English National Opera, winning two nominations, for Elegy for Young Lovers and A Dog’s Heart. That should bring cheer to a company that is currently weathering the charge that it has a produced a turkey in Mike Figgis’ Lucrezia Borgia, just at the moment that it is being weighed in the Arts Council balance, along with every other arts organization in the country.

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Nervous times at BBC Radio 3, the UK’s principal classical music station. The mighty BBC Trust has passed some tablets down the mountain, expressing the view that the station is elitist, heavy, inaccessible and daunting. What needs to be done, apparently, is to make Radio 3 “more welcoming and accessible”. 

This will cause consternation among those for whom the station’s moves towards greater accessibility have already been unpalatable. At a time of monumental dumbing down, while Radio 3 has loosened its stays considerably in recent years (I understand some of the presenters even wear open-neck shirts), it has managed to maintain its position as a network for grown-ups with brains that are still functioning. If the BBC Trust wants to bring in the kind of unbelievably idiotic continuity announcers who fill the BBC Television networks with saccharine, there will surely be an uprising among Radio 3’s loyal and discerning listenership.

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A footnote to the obituaries for the great Welsh soprano Margaret Price: Some years ago she came on to the stage of the Wigmore Hall to do a recital, supporting herself on crutches, one foot heavily encased in a plaster cast. Was it a skiing accident? Some falling scenery in the opera house? Not at all. She had dropped a magnum of champagne on her foot, she explained.