“Mélisse Brunet thought she was just picking up a last-minute guest conducting gig in May, when she came to Lexington to lead the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra’s season finale concert,” writes Rich Copley in Monday’s (7/11) Lexington Herald Leader (KY). “Monday, the Lexington Philharmonic announced that she will be the Philharmonic’s new music director, conducting her first concert in that role Oct. 22. Brunet will be the fifth music director in the Philharmonic’s 61-year history and the first woman in that role. She succeeds Scott Terrell, who led the orchestra from 2009 to 2019…. Brunet was suggested as a guest conductor by a musician in the Philharmonic who also plays with the West Virginia Symphony, which Brunet frequently guest conducts…. ‘The [Lexington] musicians were really eager to play great music … and it was great teamwork at all times,’ she said…. Brunet [moved] from her native France, where she was a protegee of … Pierre Boulez and earned six diplomas from the Paris Conservatory, to … study at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2010…. She is the Director of Orchestral Studies at the University of Iowa School of Music…. Brunet … will be in her final year leading the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic in the 2022-23 season.” Brunet participated in the League of American Orchestras’ 2018 Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview.
Author: Ginger Dolden
Mariachi: making a home in classical programs
Trumpeter and composer Jeff Nevin (center) performs July 16 with his Mariachi Champaña Nevin as part of the 2022 Mariachi Summit Gala Concert in San Diego.
“In the midst a global pandemic, mariachi music champion Jeff Nevin [held] the 2020 edition of the Mariachi Scholarship Foundation’s International Mariachi Summit Gala Concert … online,” writes George Varga in Friday’s (7/8) San Diego Union-Tribune. “The foundation still gave out more than $25,000 in scholarships, the same amount as in pre-pandemic years. [This year’s in-person event in San Diego] will feature … [music and dance groups] and the San Diego Binational Symphony Orchestra, which is also led by Nevin…. [The] composer, trumpeter, band leader and educator … has devoted nearly 25 years to teaching and promoting the traditional Mexican music style. In [1996 he created] created San Diego County’s first high school mariachi group… Nevin earned his doctorate in music at the University of California San Diego … For his dissertation, Nevin wrote his groundbreaking Mariachi Concerto. He has since performed with the San Diego Symphony and other orchestras…. ‘I don’t claim to be the first person to put mariachi with an orchestra,’ Nevin said. ‘But as far as I know, my concerto is the first serious classical music piece that uses mariachi. The trick was to get both audiences to accept it as classical and as mariachi.’ ”
Mizzou International Composers Festival, in person in Columbia, MO, July 25-20
After two years of online performances during the pandemic, the Mizzou International Composers Festival’s 13th annual event will take place in person from July 25 to 30 in Columbia, Missouri. Admission is free to the festival, which is presented by Mizzou New Music Initiative (MNMI) and the University of Missouri School of Music; concerts will also be streamed at Mizzou New Music’s Facebook page and the School of Music’s YouTube channel. Five concerts at venues throughout Columbia will feature music by composers Meredith Monk and Angélica Negrón as well as eight resident composers, who include five chosen this year and three selected for the 2020 festival, when their works could not be premiered due to the pandemic. The eight resident composers are Caterina Di Cecca (Rome, Italy); Oswald Huynh (Columbia, MO); Jia Yi Lee (Baltimore, MD); Piyawat Louilarpprasert (Ithaca, NY); Cassie Wieland (Brooklyn, NY); Pascal Le Boeuf (New York, NY); Felipe Tovar-Henao (Chicago, IL); and Niko Schroeder (Columbia, MO). As in prior years, Alarm Will Sound will serve as the resident ensemble, led by Artistic Director Alan Pierson. For more information visit http://composersfestival.missouri.edu/.
Obituary: Music historian and scholar Richard Taruskin, 77
“Richard Taruskin, a music scholar and historian of wide influence and spectacular fecundity who wrote the gigantic ‘Oxford History of Western Music,’ died July 1 at a hospital in Oakland, Calif. He was 77,” writes Tim Page in Saturday’s (7/2) Washington Post. “The cause was esophageal cancer, said his wife, Cathy Roebuck Taruskin. Dr. Taruskin, a longtime professor of musicology at the University of California at Berkeley, was best known for his writings about Russian music and particularly about Igor Stravinsky…. His ‘Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through “Mavra” ’ (1996) combined in-depth technical analysis of the composer’s scores with an exhilarating overview of Russian musical life … Taruskin published his first book, ‘Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the 1860s,’ in 1981…. In the mid-1980s, Dr. Taruskin became a contributor to the New York Times…. where he … became a figure of controversy…. Dr. Taruskin attacked composers Carl Orff, Arnold Schoenberg and Sergei Prokofiev as well as … Milton Babbitt, Donald Martino and Elliott Carter…. He [received] a master’s degree in 1968 and a doctorate in musicology in 1975 from Columbia, he taught in the university’s music department until 1987, when he joined Berkeley’s faculty…. Dr. Taruskin was said to have grown gentler in his later years and he befriended many young critics and scholars.”
U.K.’s Oxford Philharmonic performs newly commissioned music by Afghan composers
“The musicians of Afghanistan have again been silenced by the Taliban,” writes Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, a conducting fellow of the Oxford Philharmonic, in Monday’s (7/4) Guardian (U.K.).”I first visited the country in July 2018 to meet the members of the Afghan Women’s Orchestra at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, the specialist school set up in 2010 by Ahmad Sarmast and which—before its forced closure last July—had 350 students…. The country’s music traditions go back thousands of years and have flourished in dialogue with their Persian and Hindustani neighbors in the south and the people of the areas of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan in the north, as well as with European and American popular and classical music…. The world now has a new opportunity, however, to hear from those musicians forced into exile … at this summer’s Spitalfields festival in London…. I have co-curated the project with composer and pianist Arson Fahim…. The Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, under my direction, will be joined by musicians playing traditional Afghan instruments to premiere newly commissioned works by eight Afghan composers [on July 5]…. For Afghan’s young musicians, orchestras offer an opportunity to spread a message of peace and hope at home and internationally.”
National Symphony Orchestra records Beethoven, Copland, Dvořák, Walker, with plans for more
“The DC area has a proud tradition of homegrown, do-it-yourself record labels: Dischord, Teen-Beat, Sister Polygon, and many more. New to that list: the National Symphony Orchestra,” writes Rob Brunner in the July issue of Washingtonian. “The city’s premier classical-music outfit … records and releases CDs and digital tracks of live NSO performances [beginning] in early 2020 with a recording of Dvořák’s ‘New World’ Symphony and Aaron Copland’s ‘Billy the Kid.’ … This summer, things are ramping up [with] a digital recording of Gianandrea Noseda and the NSO performing George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 4, the first in a series of all five Walker sinfonias. (A CD will follow.) Later this year, it will begin releasing recordings of all nine Beethoven symphonies…. Noseda is playing around with several other ideas [such as] a disc featuring pieces written by Europeans after they moved to the US [including] Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky…. Noseda … loves the idea of a recording as a snapshot [of] a certain time and … place…. ‘After two difficult years,… I listened to the [Beethoven/Walker recording], and I can still feel it: that extra gear in the engine, the attention and the commitment of the playing.’ ”
Baltimore Symphony’s summer BSO Academy for adult musicians returns
“The performance will begin something like this: The ‘A’ note of an oboe will sound out on stage at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall,” writes Mary Carole McCauley in Saturday’s (7/2) Baltimore Sun. “This year marks the first time since 2018 that the BSO Academy—essentially an adult fantasy camp for classical music nerds—has held its weeklong series of workshops, lessons, lectures and rehearsals, during which 76 amateur musicians perform alongside professionals from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The program culminates … in a pair of free public concerts…. For [oboist] Christine Scott, 72, the academy was a chance to submerge herself … in a profession that had little room for women or Black musicians when she was growing up…. ‘Playing here is an emotional experience for me,’ said Scott…. During a recent rehearsal of the Shostakovich [Symphony No. 9], the orchestra was at full throttle. [Assistant Conductor Jonathan Taylor] Rush extended one arm and held up his index finger. Little by little, the music began to fade away. The dying sound was so haunting. [Participating flutist] Christina Vermeulen, 58, said, … ‘Being able to sit on stage with this orchestra has been a life-changing moment.’ ”
Mutual admiration: Detroit Symphony and Music Director Jader Bignamini
Jader Bignamini, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s 18th music director, wears a Detroit Tigers jersey with the number 18 at a Tigers game on June 14. Photo: Akash Pamarthy / Detroit Free Press
“It’s hard to pin down exactly when Jader Bignamini cemented his bond with Detroit,” writes Brian McCollum in Sunday’s (7/3) Detroit Free Press. “For the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s music director, appointed in 2020, perhaps it was his emotional performance of Beethoven’s Third with a scaled-down ensemble at an audience-less Orchestra Hall, the finale to a grueling pandemic year. Or possibly it was an evening this spring, when he led a triumphant Beethoven’s Ninth…. Or maybe it came last month … at Comerica Park … sporting a Detroit Tigers cap and jersey…. The gregarious Italian conductor was at his feet, pumping his arms and grinning wide as his face appeared on the giant outfield screen…. Musicians lauded the energy, fun and camaraderie Bignamini has brought to Orchestra Hall…. The admiration is mutual. ‘There’s a very particular atmosphere here in Detroit,’ Bignamini said. ‘Your love for life is strong. Onstage with the orchestra, it’s the same—just smiling, smiling, smiling.’ … He’ll conduct half of the [upcoming] season’s 20 classical weeks…. He said he’s thrilled to be immersed in it in Detroit. ‘The community needs the orchestra,’ he said. ‘And the orchestra needs the community.’ ”
Steven Shaiman appointed director of Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra’s education and community engagement and Hilton Head International Piano Competition
Veteran arts administrator STEVEN SHAIMAN has been named the director of the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra’s education and community engagement activities and the Hilton Head International Piano Competition. He joined the South Carolina-based organization in June. Shaiman succeeds HHIPC Director Mona Huff, who led the competition for over a decade. Previously, Shaiman served as senior vice president and director of artist management at Concert Artists Guild in New York City for more than 16 years. Prior to that, he worked at IMG Artists in various capacities for nearly 13 years, managing artists including Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, James Galway, André Watts, John Eliot Gardiner, The King’s Singers, and Canadian Brass. He has served for three decades as a trustee of the New York Youth Symphony, the organization with which he started his career as manager of operations, after earning a degree in arts management from Oberlin College. Following a hybrid working situation this summer, Shaiman and his wife, Laura, a seasoned music educator, will move from Long Island, NY, to the Lowcountry, SC.
Portland Columbia Symphony names Kevin Irving executive director
Oregon’s Portland Columbia Symphony has appointed KEVIN IRVING as executive director, effective July 1, 2022. Irving succeeds Interim Executive Director Jane Kenworthy. Irving was most recently artistic director of Oregon Ballet Theatre, where he led the organization’s financial and artistic turnaround. Irving is a former modern dancer who moved into arts administration. He studied at the school of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in NYC, studied ballet in Canada, and danced for choreographer Twyla Tharp. Upon leaving the stage, Irving went to Madrid, Spain and became associate director of Spain’s national dance company under the direction of Nacho Duato, and then moved to Sweden to become an artistic director at the Gothenburg Opera House. Back in the U.S., Irving launched and ran a nonprofit that connected American teachers with Latin American dance communities, prior to becoming artistic director at Oregon Ballet Theatre in 2013. Steven Byess is music director of the Portland Columbia Symphony Orchestra, which performs in Portland and neighboring communities.