May 4, 2012  |
| | | Thought of the Day | | I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.
--Edvard Munch
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| Quote of the Week | | Don't play the notes. Play the meaning of the notes. --Pablo Casals
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| | Germany's Orchestras Facing Massive Cuts | | 
BERLIN -- Germany, with 132 orchestras even two decades after reunification, has maintained a thriving economy in the midst of a European financial crisis that has taken its toll on arts institutions from Spain to the Netherlands. Yet a national law requiring orchestras to clean up their debt by the 2019/2020 season has sent some scrambling toward mergers and, in some cases, outcry from the stage. Most recently, the city of Duisburg announced 2.5 million euros in cuts to its orchestra, the Duisburger Philharmoniker, and plans to reduce performances at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, which provides the Philharmoniker with 70% of its work. German Orchestra Association Executive Gerald Mertens says that if Duisburg follows through, it could cause a "chain reaction" across Germany. Opera Cologne and its orchestra are also in a precarious situation; the Bergische Symphoniker is contending with massive budget cuts. The region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is encouraging the orchestras of Rostock and Schwerin to merge. Seems that chain reaction is already well underway. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Masur Breaks His Shoulder Blade | Stefana Atlas, Kurt Masur's operations director, reports that the conductor was in fact injured in his fall from the podium while conducting the Orchestre National de France in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on April 26. As reported earlier, the 84-year-old maestro lost his balance and fell sideways off the podium onto the stage and then into the audience. Atlas reports that Masur fractured his left shoulder blade in the fall and so has withdrawn from conducting until "the beginning of the next season in September 2012." She also reports that doctors at the facility where he has been hospitalized since the accident anticipate "a full recovery." MA.com subscribers read the full story |
| | | Drama Desk Reinstates 'Best Orchestrations' | | Kudos to Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown for raising a ruckus when the Drama Desk decided to eliminate the Outstanding Orchestrations category from the 2012 awards. This year's nominations, announced April 27, came with the statement that "The Board decided to eliminate the category of Orchestrations." No reason was given. Brown immediately jumped on his blog, writing, "I think the Drama Desk's decision to simply delete the category this year (while retaining the Outstanding Sound Design in a Musical category) is a slap in the face to the people who are at the front lines of keeping a degree of musical integrity in the musical theater scene, and it should be answered in kind." He also called on some of Broadway's major composers to join him in protest. They did, and so did nearly 3,000 members of the theater community by means of an online petition. The following Monday, the Drama Desk Board backed down and reinstated the category. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Opera Comique, 21st-Century Style | | 
LONDON -- Of all the operas crying out to be staged, Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest must surely be at the head of the list. When it got its European concert premiere on April 26 in the Barbican Hall, English National Opera Artistic Director John Berry was in the audience; it would be a crying shame if he went home without the firm intention of adding the work to ENO's collection of the wild and wacky. Heaven knows, the original Oscar Wilde play is nutty enough, and Barry's musical treatment heightens the humor in an irresistible way. The vocal writing is extraordinary, with stratospheric lines, much falsetto, and a tendency to split words - whole, pregnant silences separating the syllables of a word, effectively notating the hesitation and awkwardness of conversation. The orchestral score is equally inventive, with punchy brass, crisp woodwind, mad percussion, and a string quintet. It is all fast and economical, not a note wasted, a fast-moving score with no space for doubt or hesitation. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Opera News Awards Honor the Big Names | NEW YORK -- Director Peter Sellars was among those honored on Sunday by an Opera News Award, along with Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, German soprano Anja Silja, Swedish baritone Peter Mattei, and Finnish soprano Karita Mattila. Sellars says he "took the starch out of the Bugs Bunny version of opera" - with productions like the wrenching story of how the nuclear bomb was created in his collaboration with John Adams on Doctor Atomic. With his trademark hair shooting straight up, Sellars accepted the award at Manhattan's Plaza hotel. "Nothing in my life prepared me for this ballroom," the Pittsburgh native deadpanned to the bejeweled fans, including Princess Madeleine of Sweden. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
| |  Zoë Keating is often described as a one-woman orchestra -- an apt description for an artist charting a singular path. The California-based cellist-composer is steeped in classical technique; she warms up playing Bach's Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, and, in encores, frequently performs a looped version of the Allegretto movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. But her original music - a restless, electronically enhanced 21st century blend - is decidedly her own. "From the beginning, the music I wanted to create was multi-layered, played by one person," says Keating, who lives just north of San Francisco, in Sonoma County, with her husband and their 22-month-old son. According to Keating, the classical world has yet to embrace her. Her career has progressed without a record label, agency, or public relations machinery. She's self-produced two albums, selling over 47,000 copies on iTunes and her website. Her use of social media tools has been a draw as well - at recent count, Keating had over one million Twitter followers. For Keating, those tools aren't gimmicks. They're essential components in an organic lifestyle.
MA.com subscribers read the full story |
| Generic Forms: A Prescription For Trouble |  To submit a question to FTM Arts Law write to LawAndDisorder@MusicalAmerica.com HELLO - How can an organization that presents music programs, and puts some of them on the Internet, find a good general release form for artists/speakers to sign? Read the full story
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| Soloist, Collaborator or Both? | |  For the answers to the question below, click here. Dear Edna: I am a pianist finishing my first of two years in a graduate program at an American conservatory. I received my undergraduate degree at the same conservatory. Over the years, I was fortunate to have been frequently sought out as a collaborative artist for recitals with singers and instrumentalists. While I have always greatly enjoyed filling this role, I still dream of the possibility of having a solo career. It is very helpful for me to have the income from this work but if I continue along this path, will I rule out that possibility altogether? -Brian W. Read the full story |
Resounding Crumbs; Ruggles on CD | | 
From "Why I Left Muncie" by Sedgwick Clark We hear entirely too little of George Crumb's music in New York. On 4/19 Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra stepped into the breach with crackerjack performances of the American composer's early Variazioni (1959, but not premiered until 1965) and Star-Child (1977), played with power and sonority, especially by Crumb's beloved array of exotic percussion. In between came Echoes of Time and the River (Echoes II), Crumb's 1968 Pulitzer Prize winner and a Botstein favorite. The first piece -- a partly 12-tone work that reveals his student infatuation with Berg's Lyric Suite and Violin Concerto and Bartók's MUSPAC, among others, along with clear evidence of the Crumb to come -- deserves frequent hearing, as does the more fancifully astronomical Star-Child. The sheer size and virtuosity of the latter's forces obviously mitigates against performance, but Botstein and the expanded ASO -- "including soprano, solo trombone, children's choir, a male speaking choir that also plays hand-bells, organ, and enlarged sections that include six horns, seven trumpets, and eight percussionists," writes annotator Robert Carl -- were up to Crumb's demands in the resounding acoustic of Carnegie. |
| Latest Roster Changes |  Musical America is helping presenters keep up with its advertisers! Managers whose rosters appear in the 2012 edition of the Musical America Directory should write to listings@musicalamerica.com with the names of artists and attractions that have been either added or removed, and please be sure to indicate "added" or "removed." Csövari, Csilla, soprano, removed, Artistainternational Fischer, Laila Salome, soprano, added, Artistainternational Werle, Anna, mezzo-soprano, removed, Artistainternational
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