Sarah Brightman |
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Mon. July 31.2000 8:38 AM EDT |
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Classical Beat: Sarah Brightman, Opera Australia, Hortensia Coalla ...Brightman announces North American tour dates; Opera Australia gets funding; Cuban lyric soprano dies. |
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Sarah Brightman was at one time married to composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Simon Fowler) |
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Crossover classical artist Sarah Brightman has announced a string of North American appearances, extending from Atlantic City, N.J., to Vancouver, British Columbia. The soprano is on a world tour backing up her new
Opera Australia has been granted a last-minute increase in funding from the government. $2.3 million will be doled out in $600,000 amounts yearly, meaning the debt-ridden company can go ahead with expansion plans. Music director Simone Young stated that without the extra sum, she would have had to reconsider her plans to stay on with the company. OA begins its 2001 season Thursday (July 27). "If the money hadn't come through, I guess we would have had to have dumped half the winter season and played 'x' number of La Bohèmes again," she told the Sydney Morning Herald. ... Cuban lyric soprano Hortensia Coalla died Friday (July 21) in Miami of a heart attack. Born in Cuba, she was a frequent soloist with the Havana Symphony Orchestra and the Havana Philharmonic in the 1930s. She moved to the United States in 1959, where she was active in promoting the music of Cuban composer and friend Ernesto Lecuona. Coalla was 93. ... The U.S. House of Representatives passed the National Recording Preservation Act on Tuesday (July 25). The legislation would establish the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress to protect recordings that are deemed historically significant or culturally relevant. An annual appropriations budget of $250,000 has been established for the program, which will be supplemented by private-sector funding and gifts from the public. A companion bill to be introduced in the Senate is expected to obtain approval this fall. Officials of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS) will take part in the selection process, along with artists, members of Congress and audio experts. Musical recordings will be eligible for placement on the registry 10 years after their creation, with new recordings added to the registry each year. The Library of Congress will not only preserve the recordings, but also will make them accessible to the public for scholarly and research purposes. ... Nominations for this year's Technics Mercury Music prize were announced on Monday (July 24) at the Commonwealth Club in London. Joshua Bell's recording of Nicholas Maw's Violin Concerto was the sole classical entry. The concerto was written for Bell and was performed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The prize is an annual event celebrating the importance of British music and the music industry. Only 12 albums get put on the short list every year. In a statement, the judging panel described the album as "brilliantly played proof of the continuing power of classical romantic music." Last year, Thomas Ades' Asyla was nominated for the prize. ... Former New Mexico Symphony Orchestra director Yoshimi Takeda died Monday (July 24) due to complications from cancer. Takeda, a two-time ASCAP winner of the Adventurous Programming Award, was music director and resident conductor of the NMSO, a post he held concurrently with that of the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra from 1974 to 1984. Born in Japan, the 67-year-old conductor first made his debut with the Tokyo Symphony in 1958. He was an assistant conductor with the Honolulu Symphony for six years until moving to the NMSO in 1970. ... Albert Takazauckas, who directed both theater and opera, died Monday (July 24) at his home in Oakland, Calif., of a heart attack. Takazauckas had worked with the Canada Opera Company in Toronto and the Utah Opera, and he was scheduled to direct productions of Rigoletto for the Louisville Opera and Carmen for the Arizona Opera Company in Phoenix in the fall. His theatrical credits included directing the original Broadway production of David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago." "It's so unfair," choreographer Richard Gibbs, who co-founded the Allegro Theatre Company with Takazauckas, told the San Francisco Examiner. "He'd just received a very good review in The New York Times for his work at the New Jersey Opera Festival. We were about to start rehearsals on As Thousands Cheer [the season opener for Marin Theatre Company]." He was 56 years old. ... Superstar tenor Andrea Bocelli canceled a sold-out performance Monday (July 24) at the Greek Acropolis because of ill health. Tickets are being refunded. According to a Universal Music spokesperson, Bocelli has "not [been] in a good way, healthwise" for some time. The spokesperson did not disclose details of Bocelli's condition or indicate whether any other concerts would be canceled. They noted that Bocelli's condition wasn't serious and was probably due to his busy touring schedule. ... Opera Pacific is celebrating its 15th anniversary this season and has announced a performance series devoted to new American operas. Kicking off the series will be a production of Mark Adamo's Little Women in May. Little Women, based on the Louisa May Alcott novel, was first produced by the Houston Grand Opera and is Adamo's first opera. Other productions during the next few seasons include Jack Heggie's Dead Man Walking (which gets its premiere at the San Francisco Opera in October), William Bolcom's A View From a Bridge, based on the Arthur Miller play (which also premieres this October at the Lyric Opera of Chicago), and a workshop production of Hector Armienta's River of Women. ... Thea Dispeker-Greig, who for more than 50 years managed the careers of many classical artists, including Pablo Casals and Roberta Peters, died July 17. In addition to running her own talent agency, she helped found the Little Orchestra Society, founded and produced the New York University Chamber Series, and served as executive secretary for the prestigious Leventritt Foundation and managing director of the Casals Festival. Dispeker was 97. ... Hong Kong-based HNH International, which owns the Naxos and Marco Polo classical labels, is putting its musical catalogs online. Users will be able to purchase and download music from the company's library of titles, which contains more than 4,000 hours of music. The tracks will be available in the next few months from its Web site (www.naxos.com). ... While moviegoers this summer are being treated to the spectacle of Roman gladiators battling it out in a digitally re-created version of the famed Roman Colosseum, the restored Colosseum is offering its own spectacles for the first time in 1,500 years. Sunday (July 23) featured the premiere of conductor/composer Franco Mannino's Missa Solemnis pro Jubileo Domini Nostri Tertio Millennio. Mannino conducted the Rome Opera Theatre Orchestra in the work dedicated to Mother Teresa. A two-week festival of music and performance kicked off Wednesday (July 19), marking the completion of an eight-year restoration of the monument, which was built in 80 A.D. The opening featured a performance by the Greek National Theatre of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.... A man who donated more than $250,000 to New York's Metropolitan Opera was charged with swindling more than $10 million from investors in a wire-fraud scheme. Robert Whitehead, 57, had fraud arrests dating back 30 years and was arrested Friday (July 21) at Rikers Island, where he has been imprisoned for parole violation. Investors said they believed they were putting their money in no-risk Brazilian bonds. Whitehead was a member of the Met's "Golden Circle," restricted to those who have donated at least $250,000. "He did live pretty large," Assistant District Attorney Andrew Hruska told the New York Post. "He's a big opera fan." Whitehead faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted. Met officials were unavailable for comment. ... Italian composer Ivan Fedele has received one of the highest French cultural honors — a Chevalier in the Order of the Arts and Letters. Fedele, 47, first gained international attention winning Amsterdam's Gaudeamus Prize in 1981 for his works Primo Quartetto and Chiari. In 1989, he took first prize in the Goffredo Petrassi Competition in Parma, Italy for his orchestral piece Epos. Fedele teaches at the Conservatory Guisseppe Verdi and in the contemporary music section of the Civica Scuola, both in Milan, Italy. Other musicians who have achieved this honor include Jose Carreras, Bob Dylan, Philip Glass, Lalo Shifrin and Dexter Gordon. ... According to a report from the Finnish Music Information Center, 16 new operas from Finnish composers will premiere in 2000. In a country with a population of about 5 million, that's considered quite an achievement. The impressive showing has been linked to a strong commitment to musical education in the nation's schools. Highlights include Kaija Saariaho's "L'Amour de Loin," which sees its opening at Austria's Salzburg Festival next month in a production by Peter Sellars. In the fall, the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki will present Aulis Sallinen's "King Lear." ... — sonicnet.com staff report |
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