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| Thought of the Day |
"Home is where the heart is."
--Pliny the Elder
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Quote of the Week
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"Courage is grace under pressure."
--Ernest Hemingway
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Lepage Ring Will Come Out of Hiding in 2018-19
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Rumors of its trip to the nearest recycling plant to the contrary, The Met Opera's 90,000-pound mechanical money pit is scheduled to return in the 2018-19 season. Robert Lepage's production of the Ring, so famously described by Alex Ross in The New Yorker as "the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history," is getting a second chance to prove its worth--allegedly $16 million, but in fact far more according to insiders.
Prompting the news of its return, first reported in The New York Times, was a statement made by General Manager Peter Gelb at a private luncheon that he had decided to cast Christine Goerke as Brünnhilde. "After she sang in Frau the other night, it just made me realize that we'd better invite her sooner rather than later," he tells The Times. "Because I don't want anybody else stealing her from us."
Goerke, 44, is currently garnering raves for her role as the Dyer's Wife in Die Frau ohne Schatten.
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LONDON -- British composer John Tavener, who often is remembered for the elegiac "Song of Angels" performed as Princess Diana's coffin was carried out of Westminster Abbey, died Tuesday. He was 69.
His publisher, Chester Music, said he died at his home in Child Okeford, southern England.
Tavener's music is distinguished by quiet passages that seem to shimmer like dawn light, and by its other-worldly intensity and moments of ecstasy. He spoke of some compositions arriving instantaneously in his mind.
"If one is going to create this eternal, celestial music, one has got to listen, to be silent, to hear the angel of inspiration dictate," he once said.
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Ojai Fest Hires A(nother) New Exec Director
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Ojai Music Festival has another new executive director. A year ago, Jeffrey P. Haydon left to run the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Westchester County, New York. The job was then filled by Abhijit Sengupta, who left after less than one year due to an illness in the family.
The latest to take the spot is Janneke Straub [pictured], executive director of the Los Angeles-based American Youth Symphony since 2008, and, prior to that, in the development department of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Ojai Festival credits Straub with "restoring" AYS to financial stability. She starts in January.
Straub, who is based in Los Angeles, will report to Ojai's longtime artistic director Thomas W. Morris. Pianist Jeremy Denk, Musical America's 2014 Instrumentalist of the Year, is the 2014 festival's music director.
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In Chicago: A Stunning Parsifal
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CHICAGO -- To celebrate Wagner's bicentennial year, Lyric Opera of Chicago unveiled its newest Parsifal, a gripping production with an outstanding cast that deserved every bit of the stormy applause and cheers that erupted as the final notes faded Saturday night at the Civic Opera House.
In the pit Sir Andrew Davis, Lyric's music director, paced the five-hour evening expertly, allowing Wagner's noble melodies and lustrous orchestral colors room to blossom without ever losing a sense of forward momentum.
A touchingly human tale set in a timeless, essentially abstract space, the production, created by director John Caird with sets and costumes by Johan Engels, is only the third in the company's 59-year history.
Pictured: Thomas Hampson as Amfortas
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Nagano Re-ups in Montreal
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Speculation to the contrary, Kent Nagano has renewed his contract with the Montreal Symphony through 2020, which will make him the orchestra's second longest-serving music director after Charles Dutoit, who remained in the post for 25 years.
Nagano, in the job from 2006, helped to stabilize the MSO after Dutoit's stormy exit, which was prompted by a rebellion among the players who threatened a lawsuit if he didn't step down. They claimed he had become dictatorial and abusive. His departure set off a chain reaction of labor strife, financial precariousness, firings, and resignations, one of whom was the president of the Quebec Musicians Guild.
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| 100 Years Ago in Musical America: 8 November 1913 |
HISSES FOR SCHÖNBERG IN CHICAGO
"Futurist" Music Derisively Received as Played by Local Symphony--Even the Men in the Orchestra Have to Laugh at Some of the Weird Effects
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| Small Town Dance |
 From The Torn Tutu by Rachel Straus
I've been living in a small town in north central Spain since June. For someone who writes dance criticism and loves taking dance classes, this sounds like a near death situation. But I've embraced provincial life, at least European provincial life.
Salamanca may be two hours from Madrid and it does not have a professional dance company, but it has Espacio de Danza, a studio just outside the city center--the site of the third oldest university in Europe (founded 1218).
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| A Secret About Passports |
From Law and Disorder by Brian Taylor Goldstein
Dear Law and Disorder:
I have a question about a visa I am working on. This is one of those 0-1/0-2 visa things. The person getting the 0-1 is fine and dandy, but the person who is getting the 0-2 just got French citizenship and is waiting for her passport--hopefully here soon, but I have to get this visa petition in really soon. Can I submit a petition without a copy of her new passport, which she is waiting on? Or does that absolutely have to be in the packet? I think she has the number of the passport that's coming, but just not the physical booklet so that she can make a copy for me.
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| Whatever Happened to MTT? |
Fr om Why I Left Muncie by Sedgwick Clark
I've blown hot and cold on Michael Tilson Thomas's considerable abilities over the years. I vividly recall an extraordinary Ein Heldenleben (10/9/02) and an emotionally affecting Das Lied von der Erde (2/13/02) at Carnegie Hall with the San Francisco Symphony, of which he has been music director since 1995 and raised to one of the top seven orchestras in the country. His late-1970s recordings with the Buffalo Philharmonic of the complete music of the American master Carl Ruggles (Other Minds CD) will likely never be equaled. His irresistible programs, frequently of 20th-century American and Russian music, have drawn me to his concerts every season despite his tendency to interpretive fussiness and self regard. In Thomas's Carnegie concert on Wednesday (11/13), for instance, works by Beethoven, Steven Mackey, Mozart, and Copland perplexed to a degree I don't previously recall.
Thomas's apparent aim for a beautiful, unforced orchestral sonority à la Herbert von Karajan dulled both the lyricism and triumph of Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 3. In Mackey's program note for his playfully orchestrated Eating Greens (1993), he aspires to join "a tradition of American 'crackpot inventors' " led by Charles Ives, Elliott Carter, Lou Harrison, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Harry Partch, and Conlon Nancarrow. The music had no chance in Thomas's performance, however, which lacked any semblance of sparkle, wit, and vitality. Bernstein might have pulled it off if he had cared or lived long enough. Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 with Jeremy Denk seemed a near complete mismatch of minds.
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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
Agullo, Javier, tenor, added, MIA Artists Management
Doyle, Grant, baritone, added, Rayfield Allied (worldwide)
Gonzalez, Mariele, soprano, removed, MIA Artists Management
Mnozil Brass, added, Opus 3 Artists (North America)
Navarro, Amparo, soprano, added, MIA Artists Management
Rodin, Alaine, soprano, removed, MIA Artists Management
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