Category: today’s top story

“After helping make the Los Angeles Philharmonic one of the world’s most adventurous and versatile orchestras, Esa-Pekka Salonen has decided to step down as music director at the end of the 2008-09 season. His successor, the Philharmonic will announce Monday, will be Gustavo Dudamel, a charismatic 26-year-old conductor from Venezuela. Salonen, who will still live in Los Angeles, intends to concentrate on composing, although he plans to continue to conduct the Philharmonic and other orchestras.”

“Until quite recently orthodox neuroscience held that only the brains of young children are resilient, malleable, and morphable–in a word, plastic. This neuroplasticity, as it is called, seems to fade steadily as the brain congeals into its fixed adult configuration. The mature brain, scientists concluded, can only decline. It turns out this theory is not just wrong, it is spectacularly wrong.”

The head of Miami’s struggling Carnival Center for the Arts has floated the idea of a temporary shutdown as a short-term solution for the venue’s cash crunch. But would such a stopgap obscure the deeper problems facing the center? “Everyone knew costs would skyrocket and private funding wouldn’t cover losses. The aim was to get it built, then let taxpayers fund losses forever… The structure isn’t working, the management isn’t working. No sense pointing fingers. We need solutions, fast.”

Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario is doing awfully well for itself these days, but even as it rakes in cash from private donors, reports are surfacing that the federal government has reneged on a pledge to come up with CAN$49 million for the museum’s major renovation and expansion project, and that the budget knife was wielded by the highest authority. “At the last minute, just before the final budget documents were sent off to be printed and translated, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stepped in and wiped out the $49 million.”

“China has become a considerable force in Western classical music. Conservatories are bulging. Provincial cities demand orchestras and concert halls. Pianos and violins made in China fill shipping containers leaving its ports. The Chinese enthusiasm suggests the potential for a growing market for recorded music and live performances just as an aging fan base and declining record sales worry many professionals in Europe and the United States.”

EMI said it will make its music tracks available for sale over the internet without digital rights management. “It was clear what we had to do because we hold the consumer at the center of our focus. We take the view that we have to trust our customers.”

Miami’s Carnival Center for the Performing Arts has been open for less than a year, and yet, the $473 million center, “borrowing from its future to combat cost overruns and lackluster attendance, will run out of money by mid-May and needs a $4 million cash infusion to get through the budget year.”

Several collections are included in the $1 billion gift of art to the Seattle Art Museum this week. But there were some omissions. “A couple of the weightiest local collections were conspicuously absent from SAM’s list of donors: Bill and Melinda Gates’, and Paul Allen’s. Asked about those absences, Mimi Gates (who is married to Bill Gates Sr.) was cryptic. ‘When we have announcements, we will make them’.”

“In most areas of higher education, entrepreneurship has long lost its stigma as a career path for those without one. But at the nation’s top music conservatories that stigma is still very much alive, despite the fact that the “traditional” career path for classically trained musicians–one that ends with steady employment in a symphony orchestra–is difficult.” But some schools are slowly starting to embrace the idea that a musical education can be supplemented with a practical back-up business plan.