Cosmic Burst Cafe: May 2013

Friday, May 31, 2013

News From Musical America Worldwide

May 31, 2013

In This Issue

Cairo Opera Chief Fired by Extremist Gov't

Mariinsky Rocks the Festspielhaus

New Chief for the Spanish National Opera

Oregon Symphony Players Forfeit $$

New Rep in an Old World Setting

"Fair Use" Just Isn't Fair!

The Joys of Summer

Le Sacre du printemps at 100

Latest Roster Changes

Also This Week on MusicalAmerica.com...

Thought of the Day

Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.

--George Edward Woodberry

Quote of the Week

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

--Oscar Wilde

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Cairo Opera Chief Fired by Extremist Gov't

CAIRO -- The Cairo Opera House has become a new battleground between supporters and opponents of Egypt's Islamist president, this time fighting over the direction of the Middle East's oldest music institution.

The new culture minister fired the head of the opera house, part of a shakeup he said is aimed at injecting "new blood" across art and culture programs he says were stagnant and corrupt.

But staffers are refusing any new boss. Earlier this week they protested outside the office of current chief Abdel-Dayem, accusing the minister of bending to pressure from Islamists. Staff has also cancelled all performances. For the first time in the opera house's history, Verdi's Aida, which premiered in Cairo in1871, was cancelled in protest. Singers instead held up posters on stage that said, "No to Brotherhoodization."

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Mariinsky Rocks the Festspielhaus

SALZBURG -- In the 13 years I've been attending various festivals in Salzburg, I cannot recall a single dance performance on the schedule. So it set this balletomane's little heart aflutter when I learned that the Mariinsky Ballet would be visiting the Whitsun Festival with an all-Stravinsky program, celebrating almost to the day the 100^th anniversary of Le sacre du printemps in a reconstruction of Vaslav Nijinsky's original choreography, along with L'oiseau de Feu and Les noces. The icing on the cake: the Chorus and Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater conducted by Valery Gergiev.

I have seen more versions of Le sacre du printemps than I can remember, and Nijinsky's, premiered on May 29, 1913, and reconstructed by Millicent Hodson in the 1980s, has always remained a true revelation. Yet on May 19, I felt I was seeing--and hearing--something entirely new.

Gergiev provided superb justice to this amazingly perfect marriage of music and movement, considerate of the dancers while conjuring mystical poetry from Stravinsky's masterpiece, memorable in every aspect from roof-raising tutti passages to the hushed pianissimo duet of two trumpets shortly after the opening of Part Two.

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New Chief for the Spanish National Opera

German conductor David Afkham is to be principal conductor of the Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España (OCNE or Spanish National Orchestra) starting in fall 2015. His four-year contract calls for an annual commitment of eight weeks. The 30-year-old Afkham is the winner of the 2008 Donatella Flick Competition and the 2010 Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award.

He succeeds Catalan conductor Josef Pons, who has been music director of the Gran Teatre del Liceu since last fall.

Félix Alcaraz, the orchestra's general manager, noted Afkham's "infectious" intensity in working with the OCNE. Afkham made his debut with the orchestra in 2011.

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Oregon Symphony Players Forfeit $$

In order to keep the ship afloat, the Oregon Symphony musicians will forego their scheduled end-of-the season payments, saving $315,000. They were supposed to get a salary increase next season, of 2.6 percent, but they have also agreed to waive that.

"It's frustrating, but we want to be as reasonable as we can afford to be," violinist Greg Ewer tells The Oregonian. "We want to do whatever we can to ensure the long-term financial health of this organization."

The regional arts council has recommended cutting the funds for the orchestra's free annual concert in the park, as well. The city's budget gap is $21.5 million.The orchestra also cancelled its scheduled appearance at Spring for Music at Carnegie Hall this spring, saving about $300,000.

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New Rep in an Old World Setting

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- This historic city has provided an ideal setting for Spoleto Festival USA to endure and prosper since its inception in 1977, but what keeps it going is adventuresome programming. Here classical music takes its place with theater, dance, jazz, and special events for an event-packed 17 days. Even opera offerings, which by nature might be thought to veer toward conservatism, are hardly that under Nigel Redden, general director since 1986.

Standard repertoire operas need not apply, and links to Asia are a plus. Spoleto USA was a site of Chen Shi-Zheng's 18-hour production of Tang Xianzu's epochal Peony Pavilion, and this year Chen returned with Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa's widely hailed Matsukaze in its American premiere. More traditional yet unlikely to have been seen previously by many were Giordano's Mese Mariano (Mary's Month) and Puccini's first opera, Le Villi (The Willies), given as a double bill in the Sottile Theater in absorbing stagings by Stefano Vizioli.

Midday chamber music remains a staple of the festival, but no longer with the avuncular introductions by pianist Charles Wadsworth. Geoff Nuttall, the estimable first violinist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, is Wadsworth's successor and has obviously won audience affection with his often comical prefatory remarks. But a more urbane approach to humor than linking the tempo indication "allegro ma non tanto" to the Lone Ranger might better suit the chamber music genre. Yeesh.

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"Fair Use" Just Isn't Fair!

To submit a question to GG Arts Law write to

LawAndDisorder@MusicalAmerica.com

Dear Law and Disorder:

I have read your clearly stated articles about mechanical use and rights. What about "fair use"? Aren't there specific scenarios where permission is not needed to use a recording of someone else's music?

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The Joys of Summer

From Ask Edna by Edna Landau

Since this will be my final Ask Edna blog post of the season, I thought it might be appropriate to offer some suggestions regarding how young musicians might want to use any extra time they might have over the summer. I contacted a number of good friends and colleagues to solicit their recommendations and am very grateful to them for their generous responses. They have inspired me to broaden my own horizons this summer as many of their suggestions have universal appeal.

Before sharing their recommendations, I would like to say that there is nothing wrong with taking the summer off (if we are lucky enough to be able to do that) and thoroughly enjoying the free time, as well as the absence of a rigorous schedule that can sometimes prove stressful during the rest of the year. I came across an insightful article by best-selling author Mitch Albom called The Joys of Summer in which he discusses the increasing amount of activity in which young people are engaged year-round.

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Le Sacre du printemps at 100

From Why I Left Muncie by Sedgwick Clark

At the very moment I post this blog, 100 years ago in Paris there was a riot going on in the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Even those who have never heard Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps know about the uproar that ensued moments into its first performance. I've probably heard this work in concert and on recordings more than any other. And now I've heard it even more, thanks to omnibus "cap" box sets released by Decca and Sony to commemorate the occasion.

The Decca "100th Anniversary Collectors Edition" is amazing, incorporating every recording made on the British Decca, German Deutsche Grammophon, Dutch Philips, and American Mercury labels, as well as a couple of stray recordings owned by the umbrella company, Universal Classics. Spanning 1946 (Eduard van Beinum leading Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra) to 2010 (Gustavo Dudamel leading the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela), these 35 recordings of the full-orchestra version present as vivid a history of the European style of recorded sound in the post-War era as we are likely to find in a single release.

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Latest Roster Changes

Musical America is helping presenters keep up with its advertisers! Managers whose rosters appear in the 2013 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

Hampson, Thomas, baritone, added, Opus 3 Artists (concerts, recitals)

Münch, Idunnu, mezzo-soprano, added, Artistainternational

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