Music Hall, Cincinnati Will it eat the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra?

It's the question few orchestras today want to answer.
   How’s your attendance?
   The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra makes figures available once a year and the results for 2006-07 were disappointing.   - [Read more]

This weekend’s Cincinnati Symphony concerts might have been authorized by an act of Congress.
Friday is “National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day” and according to 36 U.S.C. §129,  “The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.”

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It would seem the future of jazz in Cincinnati, as embodied by the legendary Blue Wisp Jazz Club, is in good hands now that a dedicated group of jazz lovers - who happen to be successful businessmen - has purchased the club.   - [Read more]

Sherri Prentiss, new marketing director for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, did not see red when she had her first look inside Music Hall.
She saw opportunity instead.   - [Read more]

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Which of this season's Cincinnati Symphony guest conductors made his
conducting debut leading Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story" with
drum sticks, has the same birthday (June 7) as CSO music director Paavo
Järvi's father Neeme Järvi, and was his country's junior lightweight
boxing champion?   - [Read more]

First Peter Frampton, then Bootsy Collins, now Wayne Brady. No, the three don't have that much in common - except they have all hooked up with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. It represents a conscious effort by the Pops to feature performers that might be considered "non-traditional" for the orchestra.   - [Read more]

Ripley, Ohio, population 1,822 (2004 estimate), 53.1 miles east
of Cincinnati on the Ohio River, once played a very big role in American
history.  Little Ripley, now a quiet village in Brown County,
was on the front lines of the "war before the war," the strife over
slavery that led to the Civil War.  One of them, John P. Parker, is the subject
of a new opera commissioned by Cincinnati Opera - "Rise for Freedom,"
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“We’ve lost at least a generation and a half,” said Kentucky Symphony Orchestra music director James R. Cassidy, speaking of the decline in concert attendance due to vanishing music education programs in the schools.  Cassidy, 49, who calls himself “half coach, half missionary,” is dedicated to bringing classical music to a wider audience.   - [Read more]

"How natural and nice to come back," Paavo Järvi told a
post-Cincinnati Symphony concert crowd in the Music Hall foyer Saturday
night.  "How much like home it is."  Järvi, 44, who opened his seventh season as CSO music director with a festive program of Wagner and Beethoven, has literally been around the world since leaving Cincinnati in early May.
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Visit pianist Awadagin Pratt’s web site and you’ll not only learn all about him, you can have some fun, too. It’s all part of the distinctive image of the 41-year-old in dreadlocks and beard, who took the music world by storm by winning the prestigious Naumburg Piano Competition in New York in 1992, the first African-American to do so.   - [Read more]

The death of tenor Luciano Pavarotti, 71,  on Aug. 6 deprives us of arguably the greatest lyric tenor since at least World War One. He sparked a dual devotion---not just among the operaficionados, but also in a far broader public drawn to his teddy-bear charisma, comparable to figures like Babe Ruth.   - [Read more]

Grand finale of Cincinnati Opera's 2007 summer festival will be Verdi's "Aida."
Performances are July 25, 27, 29 (a Sunday matinee) and 31. Each of the other operas heard this summer has had two performances each. So how does "Aida" rate four? The alphabet has something to do with it.   - [Read more]

The man behind the Richard Nixon mask in Cincinnati Opera's promo video for John Adams' "Nixon in China" is tenor Mark Panuccio, who will sing Mao Tse-Tung in the Cincinnati premiere of John Adams' epochal work this week at Music Hall.  The John Travolta look-alike who will preside in the pit -- not wearing a mask -- is conductor Kristjan Järvi.   - [Read more]

You can't bring popcorn or Twizzlers, but you can go to the movies with Cincinnati Opera at 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday at Music Hall.  "Cosi fan tutte," literally "Thus do they all," Mozart's 1790 comedy about love and infidelity, has been updated to 1930s Hollywood.   - [Read more]