The last time I saw Christoph von Dohnányi was at a lovely dinner at his apartment in Munich this last June. We were celebrating a positive health report his wife Barbara had just received and the mood was easy, relaxed, and convivial. The conversation with CvD covered enormous ground, as it always did—he spoke with […]
Category: News
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Low Note
In a video on the social media page High Note, an account launched on July 29 featuring “street interviews with classical music icons,” the tenor Freddie De Tommaso stands outside a pub drinking a Guinness, joking with a female interviewer about whether his favorite composer is Verdi, Puccini, or Sean Paul. In about 40 seconds, […]
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The Other Wage Gap
It is a truth universally if quietly acknowledged that a singer in possession of work will be paid less than the orchestral instrumentalists with whom they perform. So goes the consensus among the working singers of America’s classical music industry, and for good reason: job postings for opera singers often list compensation rates which break […]
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Gagged!
Contracts seen by VAN show that the management of Northern Ballet has inserted a confidentiality clause into the agreements for its freelance musicians. In this agreement, which VAN understands has been in place since the start of the year, the artist “shall make no adverse or derogatory comment or announcement to the public press, social […]
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City of Beasts
When your home becomes a nightmare, what sound does it make? In composer Xavier Muzik’s “Strange Beasts,” it growls. It hisses. It groans. It goes topsy-turvy, unrecognizable. It vanishes. As Muzik told a San Francisco audience in February, at some point during the pandemic, his city, Los Angeles, became the stuff of nightmares. The 29-year-old […]
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A Question of Endorsement
On May 26, Art Not Arms posted an open letter to Kings Place, the London classical music venue and conference center, that called for the cancellation of the upcoming Defence in Space Conference in October. This conference is sponsored by arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin. The open letter noted that Lockheed Martin is involved in the […]
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These Are The Top Republican Donors Also Donating To Classical Music
In May 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, many American classical music institutions joined what appeared to be a society-wide reckoning on racism. The Minnesota Orchestra commissioned a work in Floyd’s memory, by composer Carlos Simon and librettist Marc Bamuthi, called “brea(d)th.” The Chicago Symphony Orchestra shared sobering […]
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Behind the Screens
In 1972, Elayne Jones got her dream job. Within two years, it had become a nightmare. When she won the principal timpani seat of the San Francisco Symphony, Jones became the first Black principal player in any major American orchestra, as well as the first Black woman and, at the time, the only rostered Black […]
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A Freedom to Dream
Few classical music organizations in the United States are as vulnerable to the new “patriotic” diktats of President Donald Trump’s arts policy as White Snake Projects. Founded in 2018 by Cerise Lim Jacobs, a retired lawyer turned librettist, the Boston-based indie opera company’s mission is explicitly activist, with a longstanding emphasis on racial and cultural […]
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ENO Confirms This Season’s Designs Use “AI-Enhanced” Artwork
There’s something rather odd about ENO’s current season, and it’s not that it’s excessively short. As VAN has reported on previously, and others have recently noted online, there’s the strong whiff of unattributed AI involved in their work. First, it was in their website copy, which, for a time, claimed that Benjamin Britten was still […]