Friday Miscellanea

If anyone is in the market, you can actually buy five adjoining stall seats in Royal Albert Hall. Price is listed at £825,000. I didn't even know this was a thing.

Seatholders are entitled access to their seats for all Ordinary lettings, which amount to approximately to two thirds of the performances in the Hall in any twelve month period. For those events for which seatholders do not use their tickets, the Hall operates a sucessful Ticket Return Scheme.

I guess the last sentence means you can rent your seats out when you are not using them. I'm still sorry I missed the Cream reunion concerts there in 2005.

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 Via Slipped Disc: IS BUDAPEST THE NEW WORLD CAPITAL OF ORCHESTRAL MUSIC?

Since I moved to Budapest in 2015, the constant question from Hungarians is: “Why on earth would you move here?” My answer is “the music life is like no other city in the world” — an answer that usually elicits confused stares from the questioner. My response to them is: “How many professional symphony orchestras does Budapest have?”

Here is the list of 12 professional orchestras (in no particular order):

MÁV Symphony Orchestra

Budapest Festival Orchestra

Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra

Concerto Budapest

Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra

Zugló Symphony Orchestra

Óbuda Symphony Orchestra

Liszt Chamber Orchestra

Pannon Philharmonic

Orfeo Orchestra/Purcell Choir

Hungarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra

Hungarian National Opera Orchestra

I then pose the question to the questioner(s): How many orchestras do you think New York City has? The answer is: one! That answer is the same for Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston. And none of them are supported by state or federal governments…

I think I just put Budapest on my must-visit list. But I think that other large cities have more than one orchestra. Montreal has two, the Orchestra Symphonique de Montréal and the Orchestra Metropolitaine--perhaps three if I Musici de Montréal is still going and even four if you count the McGill Orchestra. I suspect New York has a few as well. But I sure don't know of any cities that have twelve!

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Norman Lebrecht does an Inquest into the death of ENO

When the company’s funding line was finally cut this month, there was little uproar. ENO was a much-loved maiden aunt being laid gently to rest.

Did it have to die? The cause of death, in this coroner’s verdict, is a prolonged failure to address reality. Take opera in English, a founding act of faith. In the vast Coliseum the words were hard to hear, so subtitles were screened above the stage. We faced a Brobdingnagian drama of a Lithuanian tenor mangling Verdi in a foreign tongue while a trendy translation flashed above our eyelines.

This was comic opera on a boardroom scale with a lamentably unEnglish lack of irony. The decline and fall of England’s national opera is a lesson to all working in the arts that you cannot kick problems down the road. ENO died not for lack of cash or love but for want of definition.

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As you may recall, I am an occasional attendee at the Salzburg Festival. But I am thinking of checking out some other European fests. The one in Aix-En-Provence looks interesting as this review in the New York Times attests: At This Summer’s Aix Festival, the Only Laughter Is Bitter.

The characters who feel the freshest at this year’s Aix Festival are populating Ted Huffman’s vivid staging of Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.” Almost 400 years old, “Poppea” is startlingly contemporary in the gray zone of morality it occupies. Almost no one is entirely likable or unlikable; lust and ambition are simultaneously reveled in and condemned.

At the jewel-box Théatre du Jeu de Paume — which seats fewer than 500, an ideal intimacy for Baroque opera — there is barely a set. Pretty much the only element is a huge pipe, half painted white, half black, hanging over the action, perhaps a symbol of the fate that never quite falls on the adulterous, power-hungry leads.

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The Culture Workers Go On Strike:

This season culture workers are organizing against their own exploitation. Professors of art, workers at museums, and assistants at a publishing house have all gone on strike or staged public protests during contract negotiations. Call this a black-turtleneck-worker uprising rather than a white-collar one. “Wages are stagnant and we earn far lower salaries than our peers elsewhere,” the union representing employees at the Brooklyn Museum recently tweeted. They’ve been busy protesting outside their work site. During one action, workers held up signs decrying the vacuity of the VIP opening for the museum’s haute couture fashion exhibit: One read, “You can’t eat prestige.” (The union is calling for a 7 percent salary increase this year and raises of 4 percent per year for each of the two years following.) Unions are currently on strike at the publisher HarperCollins and at the University of California system, where 48,000 academic workers are sitting out their underpaid teaching gigs.

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Climate activists target Elbphilharmonie:

Just as the Sächsische Staatskapelle was about to begin its concert, two climate activists from Germany's "Letzte Generation" (Last Generation) movement walked onto the stage and glued themselves to the conductor's podium. They began calling for resistance to what they saw as the German government's indecisive climate policy.

You know, I would like to stage a protest of my own, if I could just figure out how and where!

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Let's hear some of those Budapest orchestras. This is the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra with the Beethoven Symphony No. 4:

This is the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra with the Kol Nidre of Max Bruch:

And here is a whole program from Concerto Budapest:

Well, I'm impressed.