Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
At the end of last week, the Sequoia Symphony Orchestra (SSO) published a teaser video about their upcoming Music Uplink digital series. I managed to get a head’s up about the program when recording an upcoming Shop Talk episode with SSO music director Bruce Kiesling and Niccolo Go, Partner and Creative Director at Go Creative Group (the company that partnered with the SSO to create the series). They described the program …
Last weekend, I attended a Beethoven Festival concert here in Chicago featuring John Elliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. In a word, the group was exquisite. But I’m not a music critic so their musicality isn’t the subject of today’s post. Instead, we’re going to examine the program notes. Typically, I don’t even bother reading program notes, but this one drew me in thanks to some top-notch art design. I have …
Audience surveys have been around for ages but most I come across are still rooted firmly in an old-school approach that relies on a certain level of understanding on the part of respondents in order to be effective. But there’s value in considering an approach that relies more on narrative driven questions. Narrative driven questions combine description and explanation of personal experiences in order to understand or explain reactions and behaviors, …
We’ve taken a look at singer/songwriter Ben Folds’ work within the live orchestra field a few times over the years and his recent work with the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) was the focus of a Fox News Power Player segment on 2/16/2020. Folds, who serves as an Artistic Advisor at the NSO, has always been an engaging advocate for live music and the segment does a fantastic job at capturing his …
Over the 2014/15 and 2015/16 seasons, the Los Angeles (LA) Opera implemented a program to promote opera to the general public by placing opera and opera-related stories and images in popular television, film, and other entertainment media. The program came about thanks to an Opera America’s Building Opera Audiences grant. Part 1 in this series examined the program’s scope and implementation and today’s installment will focus on what the LA Opera …