Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
It is deadline day for the Metropolitan Opera (Met) and if the organization and its union employees fail to reach an accord by midnight, it is expected that the employer will initiate a lock out. Over the past few days, union employees have been removing personal equipment and any other personal belongings they don’t want to go without for an extended period of time the HR department is almost certainly buzzing …
Over the weekend, the Metropolitan Opera (Met) Orchestra musicians and their employer engaged in a round of he-said, she-said PR exchanges in the wake of the musicians 84 page document examining what they define as administrative failings. Granted, there’s plenty of material there worth exploring but today’s post is going to examine a crucial bit of news via the 7/25/2014 Associated Press (AP) that flew under the radar. Published in the …
The 7/23/2014 edition of New York Times published an article by Michael Cooper that reported on the communication from the Metropolitan Opera (Met) to its employees informing them to anticipate that they will be locking out union employees whose contract expires on July 31, 2014. What’s interesting to note in Cooper’s article is reference to the relatively low number of labor dispute related work stoppages in the Met’s history: a lockout …
The 6/25/2014 edition of The New Yorker published an article by Alex Ross which examines the Metropolitan Opera’s (Met) ongoing “Klinghoffer” saga. Ross adds yet one more prominent voice of reason to the growing chorus of negative feedback surrounding the Met’s series of executive decisions that produced their decision to cancel the opera’s broadcasts. At the same time, Ross adds an additional bit of observational insight that connects “Klinghoffer” with the …
On June 20, 2014, Michele Bachmann declared that John Adams’ opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, is “a sympathetic portrayal of terrorism against the Jewish people” (h/t @SoundNotion). Bachmann attempts to portray the Met, and by extension all arts and culture organizations in America, as a champion of anti-Semitism but it is clear that she’s doing nothing more than hijacking this topic as fodder for her lowest common denominator realpolitik gibberish. In …