Tag: 05.09.04

London’s new Savoy Opera, born only a month ago, and dedicated to presenting opera with affordable tickets, has decided to close. “We just haven’t sold enough seats, and it’s impossible under those circumstances for us to continue. But the experiment is not by any means over. We intend to review the situation. We are looking at why we were not selling enough and whether there is any way forward.”

Why did Raymond Gubbay’s new Savoy Opera fail to make it? “The product was simply not good enough. For opera regulars the performing standards were very ordinary; coach parties would have found the stagings skimpy and unambitious, while general theatregoers, used to the zip and glitz of musicals with production budgets many times larger than the Savoy’s, would have regarded the shows as village hall efforts. There was no razzmatazz, nothing striking enough to make an instant convert out of an opera sceptic, nothing you cannot see regularly at a decent music college production. Musically and dramatically, standards have simply not been high enough.”

“Since Moby’s Play parlayed the blanket licensing of its track listing to innumerable TV ads into several million in record sales five years ago, it has become almost de rigueur for artists slightly outside the mainstream to let their songs sell Volkswagens and iPods. The stigma against “selling out” has faded considerably as artists from the Dandy Warhols to the Flaming Lips to Bob Dylan have conceded that a paycheque and the extra traffic at the record shop that comes with having your song drilled into people’s heads 14 times a night are preferable to not selling at all.”

Christophe Eschenbach has been music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra for a year. So how’s it going? “The orchestra’s board and members are thrilled with Eschenbach’s energetic community profile, his fund-raising success, his congenial personality. But a cloud of doubt hangs over the music-making. Eschenbach’s relationship with the players, some inside and outside the orchestra have said, has been slow to jell.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra just hired a new music director, writes Peter Dobrin. But it’s not too soon to be looking for his successor. “All the major orchestras have experienced change at the helm in the last decade; orchestras everywhere seem to be in a perpetual state of search. Chicago is looking for a new music director, and no sooner will it announce a choice than New York will reveal that it is in the market. Such is the pace of a peripatetic profession. Ideally, Philadelphia would be developing relationships with conductors now, so that when it finds itself looking for new leadership, an actual leader will already be in the pipeline.”

“The Cleveland Orchestra is facing an annual deficit of $4 million this season that will raise the accumulated deficit to a disquieting $7.5 million.” The numbers are forcing a hard look at some of the orchestra’s operations.