June 1, 2012  |
| | | Thought of the Day | | Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
--Oscar Wilde
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| Quote of the Week | | He who stops being better stops being good. --Oliver Cromwell
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| | Graham Vick's Godunov Strikes a Nerve | | 
ST. PETERSBURG -- British director Graham Vick's first collaboration with the Mariinsky Theater, his 1991 staging of Prokofiev's War and Peace, premiered exactly one month before the fall of the Soviet Union. It's a bit early to make any such predictions about his new Boris Godunov, which opened this year's Stars of the White Nights festival, but after two performances (the first on May 25 conducted by Valery Gergiev, the second the next day conducted by Pavel Smelkov), this new production has created quite a stir of its own. Until now, no one directorial vision has ever been given much room to tamper with the country's musical icon. What has generated the most public comment so far is precisely how much Vick's modern realization of a 16th-century tsar resembles the Russian leadership today. A scene in which demonstrators are held back by a line of riot police clearly evokes recent protests over Vladimir Putin's administration. A balding Boris makes his final case ostensibly to the boyars (seated in a modern parliamentary chamber) but really to the television cameras. Bright red graffiti on the back wall, presumably written in blood, reads, "The people demand change." MA.com subscribers read the full story |
| |  Composer and educator Bruce MacCombie died after a long illness on May 2 at his home in Amherst, MA, according to his publisher Schott Music. He was 69. A self-taught popular musician who started off as the pianist in Taj Mahal's blues band, the Providence, RI, native first studied composition with Philip Bezanson at the University of Massachusetts, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1967 and a master's in music in 1968. He joined the Yale School of Music's composition faculty in the mid- '70s and in 1979 was awarded one of the first Goddard Lieberson Fellowships by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The citation read, "Mr. MacCombie composes polished gems of musical understatement." As an educator, his most recent position was professor of music and associate dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. From 1992 to 2001 he was dean of the School of the Arts at Boston University, and from 1986-1992 dean of The Juilliard School. From 1980 to 1986 MacCombie was director of publications for G. Schirmer and Associated Music Publishers. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
| | | Van Walsums Get Back in the Business | | Joeske and Rachel van Walsum, veterans of the business, have launched a new music management firm/arts consultancy called "Maestro Arts." Its primary focus will be guiding conductors' careers, but it will also operate an artists' gallery of works for sale out of its headquarters in the Riverside quarter of London. This is by no means their first venture. Joeske, 63, founded his eponymous artist management firm some 35 years ago and served as its chairman until it was purchased by Stephen Wright late in 2008. At the time, Rachel, 48 was serving as the firm's managing director. The original plan was for the couple to stay on as artist managers, but in December of 2009, they stepped down saying they were going to "leave the agency business altogether." Apparently, they just couldn't stay away. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Bloody Despots, Then as Now | | 
LONDON --"I'm still alive," shouts the evil emperor in the closing pages of Detlev Glanert's Caligula, leaping to his feet after being murdered by his people, a neat reminder that bloody despots are as much a fact of 21st-century life as they were in ancient times. The UK premiere of Glanert's work was given by English National Opera at the London Coliseum on May 25. The theme is that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. At the opening the emperor is mad with despair at the death of his sister and lover Drusilla. A man who is banging his sister before the curtain rises is clearly up to no good, and so it proves. Faced with a dodgy economy (as if we needed more contemporary references), the evil one comes up with a simple plan: the proceeds of all wills will be donated to the state. So will savings. And just to speed the process along, let's start killing the citizens. Detlev Glanert's score for all this is lyrical, sparse and effective, with particularly imaginative use of percussion. There is a good "spot the composer" game to be had and Glanert struggles to keep the momentum in the final act, but as a study of dictatorship in action it is mostly taut and gripping. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Detroit Symphony "Resolves" Bank Loans | DETROIT -- The Detroit Symphony Orchestra announced Thursday that it has resolved $54 million in loans owed to five banks on a real estate deal for the Max M. Fisher Music Center, allowing the 125-year-old orchestra to more confidently move ahead in its financial recovery. The settlement was announced Wednesday; details were not disclosed. "The settlement had a very tight confidentiality agreement," orchestra executive vice president Paul Hogle told the Associated Press Wednesday afternoon. Resolving the loans enables the orchestra to move forward with its strategic recovery plan and follows several years of financial troubles, including a contentious six-month strike by musicians who in April 2011 agreed to major contract concessions. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
| New Artist of the Month: "The New Anna" | |  BERLIN -- Anna Prohaska dashes into a café in the Prenzlauerberg area of Berlin wearing jeans and a leather jacket, her long, black hair tied back into a knot. Her unassuming demeanor would hardly betray that she has just returned from performing Handel Motets under Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Musikverein or premiering Wolfgang Rihm's Samothrake in Leipzig.
Prohaska's precocious musicality and straightforward charm have made her something of a media sensation in the German-speaking world. "The new Anna," declared the Austrian newspaper Die Presse following her La Scala debut earlier this season as Zerlina, referencing Netrebko. The daughter of an Austrian stage director and an English opera singer, she has been a member of the Staatsoper Berlin since age 23. "It's been a huge help professionally and personally to have a home base where I can try out big roles," she says. "The environment is very exposed on the one hand because of Daniel Barenboim's star power, but it's also not the hugest house, so it's the perfect mixture."
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| I Want To Engage A Foreign Artist. Tell Me Everything I Need To Know! |  To submit a question to FTM Arts Law write to LawAndDisorder@MusicalAmerica.com Dear FTM: What needs to be done to bring a performing artist from a foreign country to play in a US concert? How is their pay reported to the IRS? Is withholding required? Do they have to pay taxes on the money that they earn in the US? Etc. Read the full story
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| Paying Retainers to Managers | |  For the answers to the question below, click here. Dear Edna: I am a member of a chamber ensemble which is in discussions with a small agency regarding management. We have been asked to pay a monthly "administrative fee" to cover the management's expenses on our behalf. Can you please tell me whether this is customary? Also, should these payments cease when the manager begins to receive commissions from concerts we perform? - D.B. Read the full story |
| | |  From "Why I Left Muncie" by Sedgwick Clark
It was quite a day yesterday for our last complete day in Africa: I rode Coco, a 34-year-old elephant, and got drenched in the all-consuming mist of Victoria Falls. Also, Zimbabwe's notoriously corrupt president, Robert Mugabe, 88, made a surprise visit to the historic Victoria Falls Hotel, where we stayed our last two days. He was receiving some odd sort of United Nations proclamation as a "leader for tourism," reported msnbc.com, which added that the U.N. was thus endorsing Zimbabwe as a friendly nation and safe-tourism destination. Human rights activists promptly criticized the move. Mugabe's anti-gay and -lesbian views are well known, as are his abuses on his own people to retain power. Hotel workers wisely put up a photo of the president to mark the occasion, which spoke volumes.  | | Victoria Falls-or, more accurately, a small fraction of the entire falls- viewed from Zimbabwe |
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