Category: Editorial

Music and the print media

28 September 2009

The arrival on our desk of the two-monthly English magazine, Opera Now, prompts thoughts about the satisfactions and delights that are to be gained from real magazines, alongside the easy immediacy of the Internet.

Even one who is basically fearful of a technology which seems ephemeral (who can say how safe is the stored material on tapes, CDs, memory chips, and how accessible it will be as the technology to access it evolves, becomes redundant), confesses to making frequent use of it for reference; and occasionally I find myself pursuing an unintended line of research or study. But for a generation not made accustomed in childhood to a computer screen and the complexities of software, its use remains fundamentally disagreeable.

I simply love books and the printed word on paper, and I’m not about to throw out my large collection of reference books. Thus I print articles from the Internet so that I can read them in a civilized manner.

In spite of the sad decline in the intellectual standards and coverage of the more significant arts by most newspapers (and all of those in New Zealand), I still subscribe to a daily paper, as my parents did, reading what is worth reading (in about 15 minutes). I also subscribe to magazines, varying over the years from Landfall and the New York Times Review of Books to New Zealand Books and the Guardian Weekly and many others from time to time.

And the Listener, though with increasing despair as it sinks to the level of Sunday News or Women’s Day: the Listener still has the best books section in New Zealand, even if its handling of music is now skeletal (in its first few decades it was the most important vehicle for news about music in the country; nothing has taken its place).

I’d intended to write about music magazines however.

William Dart ran New Zealand’s only substantial music magazine in recent times, for more than a decade, Music in New Zealand. Its loss is serious, and it seemed to me an indictment on both the professional musical sector (NZSO, the other orchestras, New Zealand Opera and Chamber Music New Zealand), Radio New Zealand Concert and the university music schools, that means were not found to rescue and maintain it.

Most of those bodies publish their own so-called magazines, but they are merely promotional tools. If only they would recognize that most of their readers toss them in the bin after five minutes perusal, and instead, devoted the otherwise wasted money, collaboratively, to producing a real New Zealand music magazine. (As an aside, I deplore the universities indulging in similar, extravagant and fatuous corporate image-making: glossy ‘magazines’ seem de rigueur; and then there’s the advertising! It astonishes me that the Tertiary Education Commission doesn’t simply forbid this sort of make-believe commercial behaviour, as utter waste; overt commercial-style competition has no place in a proper university).

The only musical genre in New Zealand that enjoys an independent magazine is opera, with New Zealand Opera News (as former editor, I take pleasure in its important role and am pleased that Garth Wilshere and the New Zealand Opera Society are successfully continuing its publication).

Opera Now is something else. It’s now 20 years old and undoubtedly the best opera magazine in the world (I can make the comparison as I also see the A5-sized London-published Opera, the New York Opera News, the French Opéra Magazine and the German Das Opernglas).

Opera Now does much more than print reviews and interviews with the latest and hottest young singers and conductors and directors; there are articles on aspects of opera production, history, on opera companies and their funding and their political environment; a regular series by architect Adrian Mourby studies wonderful opera houses old and new around the world; and 23 pages schedule opera performances that proliferate around the world. This issue features on the scene in Berlin and the former east Germany, and St Petersburg, incidentally tracing the sites of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades.

It is evidence of the extraordinary renaissance of opera worldwide, that you’d never guess from reading our own media, and which brings despair at the poverty-stricken state of opera here, and of music in general.

Opera Now is also big and glossy, full of brilliant photos of the bizarre and unbelievable productions that mainly European companies create; the increasing flow of new operas, many of which still play to thin audiences, but some of which are discovering that there are benefits in paying a little attention to audiences’ tastes. Even if you never get there, this is the magazine to fill your dreams of St Petersburg, Lyon or Valencia, Dresden, Venice or Barcelona, or even of Santa Fe, Buenos Aires, Sydney… and today, Shanghai and Beijing.

L.T.

What’s happening with the Wellington Orchestra?

15 September 2009

In comparison with such events in most other areas of entertainment, particularly pop music, television and film, the reasons for this sudden severing of what had seemed a most successful relationship, have remained out of sight and all concerned have been tight-lipped.

What is most clear is the continuing excellent relations between Pearce and Musical Director, Marc Taddei. There has never been such a happy and successful team; which makes unbelievable, speculation about some sort of putsch against Taddei. The orchestra has never been as successful as it has under the guidance of Pearce and Taddei.

Previous attempts to establish a subscription series have rather failed, but in the past two or three years, well-conceived programmes, together with Taddei’s entertaining, colourful presence on the podium, have filled the Town Hall time and again. And no season has met with success comparable to that of 2009, with pianist Michael Houstoun playing all the Beethoven piano concertos.

There have been speculations about the orchestra’s size in recent concerts; for example, in the Last Night of the Proms which did seem to suffer from a lack of weight in several of the items that called for dramatic impact and sheer depth of sound.

Was the orchestra’s financial penury preventing it from engaging extras, as it usually has, to cope properly with big Romantic works?

Christine’s successor has been appointed – Diana Marsh – and her record in musical administration does offer the hope of continued lively and successful management and artistic policy.

Is the orchestra properly funded?

Whatever has triggered this situation, it seems likely that inadequate funding is a not unimportant element.

Of the four professional ‘regional’ orchestras, Wellington’s has always been the least well funded per capita. Creative New Zealand’s largest musical client is, naturally, the Auckland Philharmonia, with $1.8 million (the NZSO, of course, is funded directly, like the Royal New Zealand Ballet, by the Ministry of Arts, Culture and Heritage); whereas the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra used to receive perhaps 50% more than the Wellington Orchestra, it now receives more than twice as much ($600,000). The Wellington Orchestra received $285,000 in the current year, while the Southern Sinfonia in Dunedin gets $265,000.

When you compare the total budgets of orchestras, these funding levels take on a different look.

The Wellington Orchestra’s total budget is around $1.6 million while the Southern Sinfonia’s is between $700,000 and $900,000.

Thus the Dunedin orchestra gets around a third of its income from State sources; the percentage in Wellington’s case is about 17%.

The other revenue sources for Wellington are 29% from hiring by opera, ballet, musical theatre, choirs etc, and 25% from its own concerts.

That leaves around 30% (say $530,000) from other sources – mainly commercial sponsorship. The largest of those are Vector, the New Zealand Community Trust and the Lion Foundation.

It has a always been assumed that Creative New Zealand has tended to feel that with the NZSO based in the city, the need for a second orchestra is not great.

Nothing could be more wrong.

The role of the Wellington Orchestra

Even though the NZSO is based in Wellington, most of its concerts are elsewhere and that is obviously the reason for its far greater budget and level of State support. Thus the other city-based orchestras are in very much the same relationship with the NZSO as is the Wellington Orchestra, and accordingly there is no reason for the big difference in funding levels (on a percapita basis) among them.

The orchestra has an indispensable role as a pit orchestra for opera and ballet, for oratorios and other choral performances, for musical theatre, and most importantly, to take classical music to other centres in the lower North Island. One should also be able to count among its major functions the taking of music to schools, but the orchestra’s activities in that sphere are confined to bring groups of school pupils in to a municipal hall; that is in sharp contrast to the work of the Auckland Philharmonia which is able to run a quite lively educational programme.

Now that the school curriculum has sidelined music as a core subject, has ceased to provide musical instruments and tuition in primary schools, the burden of getting some small amount of classical music into schools falls almost entirely on the independent musical bodies such as orchestras, opera companies, Chamber Music New Zealand (and of course on the sort of support that dedicated and energetic music teachers in schools can inspire from their principals and colleagues to undertake musical activities outside school hours).

Here is another, and very persuasive reason, for providing much larger funding to these not-for-profit organizations.

The other major area of misunderstanding is the need for a part-time orchestra to give as many of its own concerts as possible, in order to maintain technical and artistic standards.

Self promoted concerts are vital, and the happy development in the last two or three years has been to have finally awakened quite a big following for the orchestra’s own subscription series, and occasional individual concerts such as the Last Night of the Proms.

But every concert, even with a full house, runs a deficit; the beloved economic notion of economies of scale works in reverse: the more you do the more you lose.

Yet one still hears the philistine contention that elitist cultural activities like classical concerts should pay for themselves. To do so tickets would probably need to be over $200, and orchestra members would outnumber the audience.

L.T.