November 1, 2013   |
| | | Thought of the Day | "You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream." --C.S. Lewis |
| Quote of the Week | | "Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience." --Paulo Coelho |
| | | Nicholas McGegan Leads Juilliard415 in Rare Bohemian Works | | ADVERTISEMENT  Known for his enthusiasm and buoyant conducting style, British early music specialist Nicholas McGegan goes Bohemian, leading Juilliard415 in 18th C. music from the two Courts of Dresden and Berlin, Monday, November 4 at 8 PM in Alice Tully Hall. Juilliard violinist Edson Scheid performs Pisendel's D-Major Concerto, framed by works from Zelenka, Benda, and C.P.E. Bach.
Tickets $20, Students/Seniors $10. |
| NAC Orchestra Finds Successor to Pinchas Zukerman | | 
Capping a 15-month search, Canada's National Arts Center (NAC) Orchestra has announced U.K. conductor Alexander Shelley as its music director designate, taking on the full title in fall of 2015. He succeeds Pinchas Zukerman who exits at the end of next season after 15 years in the job. Now in his fifth season as chief conductor of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, Shelley, the 2005 winner of the Leeds Conducting Competition, also performs with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen fairly regularly and is considered something of a hot ticket. He has led the NAC Orchestra on five occasions in the last four seasons. Shelley is married, with no children. The conductor, age 34, pointed out in his comments the "ambitions" he shares with the NAC Orchestra: "to engage with audiences and communities around the...country, to promote and support the creation of new Canadian work and...to further cement the highest of artistic standards." MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Zarin Mehta to Run California Arts Center | |  The newly opened Green Music Center, on the campus of Sonoma State University in Northern California, has appointed Zarin Mehta, longtime president of the New York Philharmonic until 2012, as its co-executive director. Mehta will be responsible for programming the 1,400-seat Joan and Sanford I. Weill Hall, named for the noted banker/philanthropist and Carnegie Hall chairman and his wife. In his new job, Mehta will be booking "Weill Hall West" with orchestras, ensembles, and artists across all genres. As such, he is functioning as artistic director, a post assumed in April by Emmanuel Morlet and quickly vacated, apparently "for personal reasons." The Weills' decision to spend more time on their new, 360-acre estate in Sonoma County no doubt motivated their $12 million gift to complete the 1,400-seat hall that is named for them. They were also eager to have Mehta program it, subsidizing his $300,000 salary by 80 percent, according to The New York Times. The Times further reports that Mehta will carry out his duties long-distance, from New York. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
| | | Louisville Orchestra Taps 26-Year-Old Music Director | | 
The Louisville Orchestra is on the fast track to full recovery from the bitter strike that sabotaged its 2011-12 season. Just two weeks ago it announced that Andrew Kipe was to start as executive director next month, succeeding interim David Hyslop. Then on Oct. 29, it announced 26-year-old American conductor Teddy Abrams as its music director designate. He becomes music director for three years in Sept. 2014, succeeding Jorge Mester, who has been in the job for two separate terms, one from 1967-1979, the other from 2006 to the present. When Abrams takes over, Mester becomes music director emeritus. Abrams studied with Otto-Werner Mueller and Ford Lallerstedt at the Curtis Institute of Music and was a conducting fellow at the New World Symphony under its music director, Michael Tilson Thomas. He has since conducted an impressive variety of ensembles for his age and is now the resident conductor of the MAV Symphony Orchestra in Budapest and assistant conductor of the Detroit Symphony. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
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| Charleston Symphony Players Exit Musicians Union | | 
Musicians of the Charleston Symphony have voted to forego union representation. According to the Post and Courier, 76 of the 175 eligible players voted 49-27 to quit Local 502 of the American Federation of Musicians. The orchestra has a $2.6 million annual budget and pays its players on a per-service basis. There are only 24 "core" players. "For the health of our organization, it's really important that the musicians have a collaborative working relationship with the board and management," trumpeter and negotiating chair Michael Smith tells the Post and Courier. "Under the previous conditions it became virtually impossible to do that." His additional comments indicate that support from the community and the orchestra organization has been very strong, and Smith wants to keep it that way. Past union negotiations have brought the organization to its knees--twice; the second time was during the 2009-10 season, which ended early as the board considered bankruptcy. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
Lawrence Leighton Smith Dies | | 
Lawrence Leighton Smith, whose First Edition Recordings with the Louisville Orchestra continued the ensemble's priceless documentation of contemporary American orchestral repertoire, died on Oct. 25 in Colorado Springs, CO. He had been living there since becoming music director of that city's Symphony in 2000 and of the newly formed Colorado Philharmonic in 2003. He was 77 when he died, from complications of Binswanger's disease, a form of vascular dementia. Leighton Smith trained as a pianist and collaborated with any number of major artists of his day, from Sherrill Milnes and Zara Nelsova to Renata Tebaldi and Pinchas Zukerman. He was musical assistant to Erich Leinsdorf at Tanglewood and, after winning the Mitropoulos International Conducting Competition in 1964, became an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera (1964-1967), then music director of the Westchester Symphony Orchestra (1967-1969), principal guest conductor of the Phoenix Symphony (1970-1973), music director of the Austin Symphony (1972-1973) and, over the ensuing years, of five additional U.S. orchestras. He held the emeritus title for both the Colorado Philharmonic and the Louisville Orchestra. A celebration of his life is planned for the weekend of Nov. 16-17. MA.com subscribers read the full story |
| New Artist of the Month: Lisa Chavez | | SAN FRANCISO -- Mezzo-soprano Lisa Chavez started the fall season tormenting an old fat man. This month, she's turning herself into a lost boy. By season's end, she'll have been a loyal servant and an angry, vengeful daughter.
A rising star on the Bay Area opera scene, Chavez has already earned accolades for her facility in a variety of roles. In a recent interview, the Opera San Jose resident artist had just completed a run as Meg Page in the company's production of Verdi's Falstaff and was preparing to sing Hansel in this month's revival of Hansel and Gretel, followed later in the season by Suzuki in Madama Butterfly, and Donna Elvira in Opera San Jose's new staging of Don Giovanni.
Calling her first on-stage Meg Page experience "wonderful," she described the role as "actually quite difficult; there's not that much solo singing, but it's all about the ensembles. The patter and the words are all different, and it's just so fast." |
100 Years Ago...in Musical America: 25 October 1913 | | 
HOLDING THE MIRROR UP TO LEONCAVALLO Pagliacci's Author Soliloquizes on Himself and His Works in an Interval of a Six Weeks' Trip to San Francisco--Regrets That but One of His Ten Operas is Familiar to Americans--Opinions of Contempory Musical Tendencies Delivered in a Hurried Visit to New York--New Operas He "Is Working On" See the Original Page and Read the Full Story
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| Richard Strauss, Elektra, Paris Opera, October 27, 2013 |  From An American in Paris by Frank Cadenhead The Paris Opera finally gets it right with a "less is more" production of R. Strauss's Elektra at the Bastille Opera, viewed on Sunday, Oct. 27. This new production by Robert Carsen features 20-plus Doppelgängerin, young women wearing simple black dresses exactly like Elektra's who move in unison and almost always surround her on stage, reflecting her emotions and disappearing as appropriate. This production, first seen at the Maggio Musicale Florentino in 2008, is one of Carsen's best efforts. And musically, both cast and conductor give it the attention and anguish it deserves. |
| Oh, Canada! |  From Law and Disorder by Brian Taylor Goldstein Dear Law and Disorder: I represent a performance group from Canada who will be touring the United States. Three of the members are Canadians, but two are not. I have applied for a P-1 visa. Because the group is from Canada, can they enter the US just with the approval notice or do they first have to go to the consulate and get actual visas in their passports? Read the full story |
| Shostakovich October |  From Why I Left Muncie by Sedgwick Clark It's amazing, really. This month New York has been graced by a veritable deluge of Shostakovich. I remember when the Fifth Symphony was all we could hope to hear with any frequency. These days, I can barely stand to hear it because of the unbearably "meaningful," post-Testimony manner in which most conductors distend the finale. My first exposure to the Fifth was Bernstein's 1959 New York Philharmonic recording, made immediately following the orchestra's return from its Soviet Russian tour. Bernstein tears through the finale like a bat out of hell (this was long before his meaningful, slow-is-profound period began in the 1970s), and all other interpretations appear schleppy to me. Shostakovich was in the audience for the Moscow performance and wrote to a young Russian conductor a year later: "I was very taken with the performance of my Fifth Symphony by the talented Leonard Bernstein. I liked it that he played the end of the finale significantly faster than is customary." (Quoted from Laurel E. Fay's Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford), page 309, note 83, in which she sorts out this most controversial of Shosta Sym questions.) Happily, the Fifth wasn't played this month. Free association: Before I go on with the Shostakovich works that were performed this month, I must alert readers to a DVD of a Bernstein/London Symphony Orchestra performance of the Fifth from December 1966--an incredibly exciting example of his impassioned music-making at its zenith--on the Idéale Audience label, released by EuroArts. For those who never saw Bernstein conduct live ("Ah, youth!"), this video is a must. The film quality shows its age, but who cares? The BBC also filmed a two-hour rehearsal to go with the concert performance, and an extremely disappointing five-minute snippet of perhaps that morning's only temperate moments is included. It's nothing like the incendiary excerpts contained on Teldec's first "Art of Conducting" video, now retrievable on YouTube, in which an ill-tempered Bernstein savagely berates the LSO musicians for not committing themselves completely to the piece. |
| 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 Beutel, Joseph, bass-baritone, added, Scott Levine Management Calloway, Rachel, mezzo-soprano, added, Alpha Artists Management Cormio, Marcello, conductor, added, United Artists and Authors Agency/UNA Haider, Friedrich, conductor, added, Artistainternational Hu, Ching-Yun, piano, added, Parker Artists Kares, Mika, bass, removed, Bel Canto Global Arts Levit, Igor, piano, added, IMG Artists (worldwide general management) Pescevich, Jon, bass, added, MIA Artists Management Robinson, Benjamin, tenor, added, MIA Artists Management Zorman, Itamar, violin, added, Victoria Rowsell Artist Management (European management) |
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