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    An Oasis in England’s Troubled, Polarized Opera Landscape

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    The sun shone brightly over the downs of East Sussex on a summer afternoon while people trickled onto the grounds of Glyndebourne to hear an opera by Handel. Most of the men wore black tie, and many women were in floral gowns, as they picnicked among gardens and sculptures, and under the shadow of the property’s grand, Jacobethan manor house.As they made their way into Glyndebourne’s opera house, old Oxbridge friends recognized one another and swapped life updates; introductions were made, photos were taken, and, when the time came for the show to start, the party was put on a respectful pause for the opening act of “Giulio Cesare.”It all had the appearance of opera in paradise, which isn’t so much of an exaggeration. Glyndebourne, a country house festival that over 90 years has grown into an enormous, year-round operation, has a reputation for elitism in its unofficial dress code and high prices. But there is also elitism, the good kind, in its level of music making.The Conrad Shawcross sculpture garden on the Glyndebourne grounds.Alice Zoo for The New York TimesIn the organ room at Glyndebourne.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Bargain at the Opera: Philadelphia Offers All Seats for as Low as $11

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      Seeking new audiences, Opera Philadelphia is putting in place a pay-what-you-can model, one of the first of its kind by a major opera company.In Philadelphia, a night at the opera may now be cheaper than going to the movies.Opera Philadelphia, a company with a reputation for innovation and ambition, announced on Tuesday that it was putting in place a pay-what-you-can model for the 2024-25 season, with all tickets for all performances starting at $11. The initiative, which the company calls Pick Your Price, is aimed at attracting new audiences.“People want to go to the opera, but it’s expensive,” said Anthony Roth Costanzo, the celebrated American countertenor who became the company’s general director and president in June. “Our goal is to bring opera to more people and bring more people to the opera.”It immediately proved popular. On Tuesday, the day the initiative was announced, Opera Philadelphia said it sold more than 2,200 tickets for the coming season, compared with about 20 the day before. The tickets were originally priced at $26 to $300.High ticket prices have long been a barrier to audiences, and especially to newcomers. In recent years a number of performing arts groups, including Lincoln Center, the Chicago Sinfonietta and Ars Nova, the Off Broadway incubator, have experimented with pay-what-you-can approaches. Other opera companies have experimented with discounts, including rush tickets and deals offered to young people. But Opera Philadelphia’s approach was one of the boldest yet.Its website explains that all tickets start at $11 but that people will be given the option of choosing to pay much more, including the standard price.Like many nonprofit performing arts organizations, Opera Philadelphia gets much more of its revenue from philanthropy than through ticket sales. Radically lowering the prices could encourage more donations, which will no longer risk being seen as subsidizing an expensive art form that is out of reach for many people. And Costanzo said that the new model would allow the company to concentrate more on staging interesting works, and less on worrying about ticket sales.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Burning Man Has Sold Out Since 2011. Why Not This Year?

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      The desert arts festival returns this month after two consecutive years of challenging weather, including mud that stranded attendees, and a Covid-19 hiatus.Burning Man, the Nevada desert festival that routinely sells out tickets, is set to return this month, and ticket sales have slumped for the first time in years.It’s too soon to pin down what has caused the ticket sales shift, but factors most likely include two consecutive years of extreme weather, economic conditions and the organization of the Burning Man community. Here’s what to know.Tickets usually sell out for the desert festival.This year’s festival begins Aug. 25 and ends on Sept. 2, bringing tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert to create a temporary community called Black Rock City, about 120 miles northeast of Reno.The festival began in 1986 on a San Francisco beach when people gathered to burn a wooden figure on the summer solstice. It moved to the desert in 1990 and sold out for the first time in 2011, and has continued to sell out, often quickly, every year since. Festival organizers had to cap attendance that year and stopped official ticket sales in early August, though last-minute tickets were usually still available on the resale market.The official ticket sale is done in segments, and this year, people can still buy a $575 ticket from the sale tier that opened on July 31. Tickets are also available for $225 for people with limited income. The Reno Gazette-Journal reported on this change earlier this month.Marian Goodell, the chief executive of the Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that organizes the festival, said in an interview on Wednesday that organizers expected this year’s Black Rock City population, which includes guests and staff, to be in the low 70,000s. Last year, the population was 74,126.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      San Francisco’s Arts Institutions Are Slowly Building Back

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      Although attendance remains down from prepandemic levels, the city’s arts groups are having some success getting audiences to return.On a recent clear day, visitors were wandering through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to gawk at works by Yayoi Kusama and Alexander Calder, and, a few blocks away, making their way through the galleries at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Museum of the African Diaspora.That evening, music lovers poured in to Davies Symphony Hall to hear Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct the San Francisco Symphony and into the War Memorial Opera House across the street, where the San Francisco Opera was giving the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”Although attendance at the city’s arts institutions remains down from prepandemic levels — with tourism, hotel occupancy and office attendance yet to fully recover — its cultural ecosystem has been showing signs of inching its way back.Arts organizations around the nation have been struggling to regain audiences since the pandemic, with Broadway attendance about 17 percent lower than before and precipitous declines at many regional theaters, museums, orchestras and opera companies.San Francisco has its own particular challenges: People are returning to work, but the city’s office buildings remain emptier than those in Los Angeles or New York. Fewer people are taking Bay Area Rapid Transit downtown; the number of riders exiting at downtown stations is still down by more than half since 2019.The city and its cultural organizations have been struggling to overcome what Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, referred to as the “doom narrative,” the widespread media coverage of the city’s challenges, both real and exaggerated.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Film Academy Chief Gets a Sequel: Bill Kramer’s Contract Is Renewed

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      Amid challenges in Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences renewed its chief executive’s contract a year early.In a time of flux in Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that oversees the Oscars, placed a bet on continuity, announcing Monday that it would extend Bill Kramer’s tenure as chief executive through July 2028.Kramer’s contract, which was up for renewal in 2025, was approved one year early “due to his exceptional leadership and significant contributions,” the academy said.“He is the ideal person to continue to broaden the Academy’s reach and impact on our international film community and successfully guide the organization into our next 100 years,” Janet Yang, the academy’s president, said in a statement.The academy has faced a number of challenges in recent years: It has worked to diversify the Oscars after nominating only white actors in 2015, faced the steep drop-off in television ratings facing award shows, struggled with the fallout after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards and opened a museum.This year’s Academy Awards drew 19.5 million viewers, a four-year high, according to Nielsen. It was the third consecutive year that Oscar viewership had grown, but it was still far below previous levels: Before 2018, the telecast never had fewer than 32 million viewers. This year’s telecast started an hour earlier than usual.Before becoming chief executive of the Academy in June 2022, Kramer served for two years as the director of its new museum, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and he was credited with helping get it open after years of delays. Kramer’s total compensation was $865,568 from the academy and related organizations in 2022, the year he started as chief executive, according to the academy’s most recent tax filing.Kramer’s contract extension comes as the Academy Museum is working to recover from criticism over how it tells the story of the Jewish immigrants who started movie studios and helped create the U.S. film industry. When the museum first opened, it was faulted for saying relatively little about them, even as it celebrated diversity in film. The museum responded by opening a permanent new exhibition highlighting the contributions of Hollywood’s Jewish founders, but when that installation was criticized by some Jewish film professionals, the museum announced that it would makes changes.Kramer now oversees all aspects of the academy, which has more than 700 employees in Los Angeles, New York and London.The academy has an annual operating budget of about $170 million, 70 percent of which comes from its Oscars broadcast deal with Disney and ABC, which runs through 2028. Last month, the Academy announced a global $500 million campaign to shore up its financial future.“Like any healthy organization or company,” Kramer said in an interview as he announced the international fund-raising effort, “the academy needs a sustainable and diverse base of support to allow for solid long-term planning and fiscal certainty.” More

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      Discord at the Symphony: Losing a Star, San Francisco Weighs Its Future

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      The struggles of one of the nation’s finest orchestras show the difficulties facing classical music in the United States.For a night at the symphony, there was a lot of tension in the air.As concertgoers filed in to Davies Symphony Hall earlier this month, they were greeted by players from the San Francisco Symphony passing out bright yellow fliers accusing management of having “no clear artistic vision.” Then, shortly before the performance began, a shout echoed from one of the balconies, exhorting people to “Act!”It was the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s first concert in the hall since March, when he stunned the classical music world by announcing that he would step down as the orchestra’s music director amid a dispute with management over budget cuts. The evening’s program was just the sort of thing he had promised when he was hired with a mandate to rethink the concert experience: Ravel’s charming “Mother Goose” brought to life by dancers from Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, and then Schoenberg’s nightmarish “Erwartung” staged by the director Peter Sellars.His decision to leave once his contract is up next year has upset fans — “Who he is and what he brings can’t be replicated,” Mark Malaspina, an audience member, lamented as he entered the hall — and left some concerned about the future of the 113-year-old San Francisco Symphony.“An orchestra that was in very good shape is now in crisis,” said Peter Pastreich, a longtime arts administrator who managed the San Francisco Symphony from 1978 to 1999. “It is heartbreaking to watch.”Salonen’s unexpectedly short tenure in San Francisco is in some ways a very local story, but it also says something about the challenges facing classical music in 21st century America. Even before the pandemic, many orchestras around the country were struggling. Audiences were aging and shrinking. Costs were rising. Old business models were withering. And philanthropy, which has replaced ticket sales as the main source of income for most orchestras, was becoming increasingly hard to come by.When San Francisco landed Salonen, it was hailed as a coup.The orchestra enjoyed a reputation for musicianship and innovation and had a relatively large endowment. But it also had been running deficits, losing subscribers and seeing its donor base diminish. Salonen — a pathbreaking, charismatic conductor and composer from Finland who had previously led the Los Angeles Philharmonic — was seen as someone who could capture the imaginations of new audiences.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      DeSantis Vetoes All Arts Grants in Florida

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis gave no explanation for zeroing out the $32 million in grants that were approved by state lawmakers.For the past 10 days, Richard Russell has been rattled, poring over budgets and working the phones in an attempt to limit the consequences of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s veto pen.Mr. Russell, the general director of the Sarasota Opera on Florida’s Gulf Coast, had expected his nonprofit organization to receive a state grant of about $70,000 once Mr. DeSantis signed a budget that state lawmakers had approved in March.But in a move that stunned arts and culture organizations, Mr. DeSantis vetoed the entirety of their grant funding — about $32 million — on June 12, leaving them scrambling to figure out how to offset the shortfall.“It’s not going to close us,” Mr. Russell said. “But it is a gap that I am going to have to figure out how to make up, and if I don’t find alternate sources of funding, that could be someone’s job.”Leaders of arts organizations in Florida, many of whom have worked in the state for decades, cannot remember a governor ever eliminating all of their grant funding. Even in the lean years of the Great Recession, at least a nominal amount — say, 5 percent of the recommended total — was approved.Established arts organizations usually know better than to overly rely on nonrecurring state dollars subject to the discretion of politicians, said Michael Tomor, executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art. But to cut funding at a time when arts organizations are still struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic sends a concerning message “that taxpayer dollars should not be used in support of arts and culture,” he added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Audiences Are Returning to the Met Opera, but Not for Everything

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      The Met is approaching prepandemic levels of attendance. But its strategy of staging more modern operas to lure new audiences is having mixed success.Four years after the coronavirus brought the curtain down on the Metropolitan Opera, audiences are nearly back, the company announced on Thursday. But the company’s big bet on contemporary opera this season had mixed results.The Met, which has been facing serious fiscal challenges, said that the 2023-24 season ended this month with 72 percent paid attendance overall, approaching the 75 percent it had in the last full season before the pandemic.About a third of this season was devoted to contemporary operas, and those by living composers, as it works to connect with younger and more diverse audiences. Some were hits: Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” drew 78 percent attendance, behind only Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” Bizet’s “Carmen” and Puccini’s “Turandot.”But two recent operas that had drawn sold-out crowds in previous seasons fared less well when they were revived: Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up In My Bones” drew 65 percent attendance, and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which reunited the stars Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato, drew 61 percent.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said the mix of old and new operas was helping drive a recovery at the box office by bringing new people into the opera house. But the company still faces significant obstacles. The Met, whose credit rating was downgraded in February by Moody’s Investors Service, has withdrawn about $70 million in emergency funds from its endowment over the past two seasons to help cover costs.“We believe we’re on the right path artistically,” he said. “But we’re still climbing out of the hole that the pandemic left us in.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Film Academy Looks Overseas for Donors

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      The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced a global $500 million campaign to shore up its financial future.The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Friday announced a global $500 million fund-raising effort to help diversify its base of support and ensure its financial future in a period of transformation for the film industry and the nonprofit cultural sector.“Both are going through radical business model shifts right now due to changing audience habits and revenue streams,” Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said in an email. “As a nonprofit, and like any healthy organization or company, the academy needs a sustainable and diverse base of support to allow for solid long-term planning and fiscal certainty.”Announced during a news conference in Rome hosted by the Italian film studio Cinecittà, the campaign is called Academy100, in honor of the 100th Oscars ceremony in 2028. The academy plans to use about $300 million of the new funds to bring its endowment to $800 million; the remainder will go toward operating expenses and special projects.The academy currently has an annual operating budget of about $170 million, 70 percent of which comes from its Oscars broadcast deal with Disney and ABC, which runs through 2028. About $45 million of the operating expenses are used by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.Given the challenges experienced by many cultural organizations, the academy has reason to want to shore up its finances. In March, for example, Joana Vicente of the Sundance Film Festival resigned after less than three years as chief executive amid questions about her fund-raising abilities. Last summer, Center Theater Group in Los Angeles announced a series of sharp cutbacks — including suspending productions at the Mark Taper Forum — to deal with drops in revenue and attendance. And the Metropolitan Opera in New York has withdrawn emergency funds from its endowment.The academy said in its news release that the money raised “will endow and fund programs that recognize excellence in cinematic artistry and innovation; preserve our film history; enable the creation of world-class film exhibitions, screenings and publications; train and educate the next generation of diverse global film artists; and produce powerful digital content.”More than $100 million has already been committed to the campaign, the academy said, including support from Rolex, which is based in Switzerland.As part of the effort, the academy plans to host gatherings and events in locations around the world to “become increasingly global,” press materials said, and help develop a global “pool of new filmmakers and academy members and support the worldwide filmmaking community.”The academy said its “expanded international outreach” will include Buenos Aires; Johannesburg; Kyoto, Japan; Lagos, Nigeria; London; Marrakesh, Morocco; Melbourne, Australia; Mexico City; and Mumbai. More