June 15, 2012  |
| | | Thought of the Day | | Inspiration comes of working every day.
--Charles Baudelaire
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| Quote of the Week | | Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy. --Benjamin Franklin
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| | Major Exit at the Washington National Opera | | 
Will Francesca Zambello take on full time the artistic directorship of the Washington National Opera? The area is wide open, now that Christina Scheppelmann, director of artistic operations, has said she will step down at the end of November to take on another post. Which one it is, she is not saying. Zambello was named artistic advisor last year, following Domingo's exit as artistic director and the WNO merger with Kennedy Center. So Scheppelmann in some ways had been a lame duck. "Scheppelmann... has been largely, if not exclusively, responsible for WNO's artistic profile in the past few years," reports The Washington Post. "There has been some question about how well two women with divergent artistic visions would be able to work together." MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Pittsburgh Symphony Contest Fizzles | | PITTSBURGH--The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra has chosen to not name a winner in its nationwide online concerto competition. Music director Manfred Honeck announced the first-of-its-kind contest in February. Honeck and symphony officials came up with the idea in hopes of finding talented musicians who were not already represented by artist managers and who otherwise might not have come to the symphony's attention. Robert Moir, senior vice president of artistic planning and audience engagement, didn't explain why no winner was chosen. "We were very pleased with the four finalists. But we always maintained the right not to pick a winner," he said. "It was a very difficult decision." The winner was to have received $10,000 and a solo slot in two symphony concerts this fall. MA.com subscribers read the full story Photo credit: Jason Cohn |
| | | Domingo's Operalia Olympics Picks Winners |  BEIJING--Last weekend, 40 singers between the ages of 18 and 32 gathered at China's National Center for the Performing Arts for Plácido Domingo's Operalia competition. "This is like the Olympic Games for opera singers," said Domingo Sunday night (June 10), announcing the winners from the NCPA Opera House stage. Now in its 20th year, Domingo's contest for young vocalists has led a rather itinerant life, moving to different opera-loving cities annually (with Paris, Madrid, and Los Angeles as repeat hosts). This year's iteration in Beijing marked the first time it had been in Asia since Tokyo in 1997. Both the quarterfinals on June 4 and 5 and semifinals on June 7 were all-day affairs with piano accompaniment; Sunday evening opened with a two-hour final round, with Domingo himself conducting singers with the NCPA Orchestra. Not surprisingly, given the location, more than a quarter of the singers were Asian. And much like the 2008 Olympics, the finals provided clear evidence of China's coming of age, with the evening's concluding award count--after nearly an hour of deliberation--becoming a face-off between China and the U.S. |
75 Archival Recordings Honor Tanglewood's 75th | | 
As previously noted, the Tanglewood Music Festival will honor its 75th-anniversary season this summer by streaming archival recordings of 75 performances, one for each day of the festival, on its website. The recordings, spanning from 1937-2009, will be free for the week on which they are posted, and available for purchase thereafter. For an explanation of how the recordings were chosen, BSO Artistic Administrator Anthony Fogg describes the process, and the sources, in an informative essay. Retired Boston Globe music critic Richard Dyer provides annotations. What follows is the complete schedule: MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Linc Inc's White Light Festival, Volume III |  Lincoln Center's third annual White Light Festival, Oct. 18-Nov. 18, is a programmatically mixed bag, designed apparently to address the spirituality of life as it relates to music. The idea was borne originally out of Lincoln Center Artistic Director Jane Moss's interest in Yoga. Calling urban life "time-constricted and stress-filled," Moss in her comments said that the festival is designed as "an artistic sanctuary" and a "reminder of the many dimensions that make up an individual's life." Her choice of program also has many "dimensions," not to mention genres and vintages, from Schubert sonatas to a new work by Heiner Goebbels to Charpentier motets by Les Arts Florissants under William Christie. What country singer Mary Chapin Carpenter has in common spiritually with India's Malavika Sarukkai only Jane Moss knows for sure, probably about as much as Wang Li on jaw harps and calabash flute shares with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting his Philharmonia Orchestra in Mahler's Ninth Symphony. No matter; out-of-the-ordinary nuggets are perhaps best experienced in familiar contexts. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
| Hippolyte et Aricie est Arrivé à l'Opéra de Paris |  PARIS--As the Paris Opéra approaches the end of an unusually dynamic season, its last new staging, which opened June 9, revives Rameau's first opera. Fresh looks at Hippolyte et Aricie in recent times have been infrequent; the last Opéra production was in 1996, replacing the previous effort, which dated back to 1908. The sparse attention has not done this important work justice. Its premiere in 1733 was an evolutionary step in French opera. Its lyric qualities are far stronger than those of the earlier French repertoire, and the harmonies so much more sophisticated that musicians of Rameau's day reportedly had trouble playing them. Voltaire even quipped that the composer had the misfortune of knowing more about music than Lully did. Ivan Alexandre originally created this production for Toulouse's Théâtre du Capitole in 2009. The effort could be called old fashioned, but its drop sets and extensive use of traditional theatrical machinery make for seamless transitions between the operas five acts. Antoine Fontaine's appealing neo-classical decors rely on pastel colors that complement the passions at work on stage. Only the fourth-act appearance of the sea monster (which actually does devour Hippolyte) borders on camp. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
| How Do I Protect My Personal Assests From Claims of Copyright Infringement? |  To submit a question to FTM Arts Law write to LawAndDisorder@MusicalAmerica.com Dear FTM Arts Law: Could owning copyrights individually (as opposed to being owned by a corporate entity) ever be a personal liability? I understand that if copyrights are held in the name of a S-corp, C-corp, or possibly LLC, the corporate veil would shield my personal assets. Read the full story
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| Spring for Music II Highlights; Frühbeck's Carmina | 
From Why I Left Muncie by Sedgwick Clark
The blockbuster of Carnegie Hall's second Spring for Music festival last month was the second (!) performance this season of the rarely played, 70-minute piano concerto by the turn-of-the-20th-century piano virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni. It's not a "great" piece, as one considers Beethoven's Emperor great, but it's a hoot and was stupendously negotiated on May 9 by the Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin and sympathetically accompanied by the New Jersey Symphony under Jacques Lacombe. Alex Ross's New Yorker review (January 9, 2012)of the earlier performance this season, by Piers Lane and the American Symphony under Leon Botstein, is necessary reading for anyone interested in the piece. He calls it "a wildly entertaining creation" and approvingly cites Bernard Holland's loveable summation of the concerto-"a hymn to immoderation"-in his Times review of the work's previous local performance, in 1989 at Carnegie. As fun as this garrulous example of late-Romantic mysticism is, however, its requirement of a men's chorus in the finale will likely ensure its infrequency. Read the full story
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| 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."
NEW THIS WEEK Churilove, Irina, soprano, added, Bel Canto Global Arts
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