Author: Ginger Dolden

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s final 2021-22 season concert—curated by composer Shelley Washington, who regularly incorporates poetry into her work and featuring a range of new classical music—will take place June 11 at Boomtown Brewery in downtown Los Angeles. The program is entitled “Current: Heartbeat” and will feature Washington’s Uniforms, Aeryn Santillan’s Reconnect and Makeshift Memorials, Susanna Hancock’s Platforms, Sugar Vendil’s ooh wo aa oo wa o, and the first movement of Darian Donovan Thomas’s Fluid Suite. The concert, open to adults ages 21 and older, will feature experience design by Boss Witch Productions and projection design by Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh. The concert begins with a roundtable discussion featuring the composers, collaborators, and guest artists in conversation about representation and authenticity in classical music. Washington said, “The event was specifically set on June 11 to coincide with pride and is designed to complement the larger pride celebration. It’s queer-friendly; the cohort of participating composers and production artists is strongly aligned with the queer community. The artwork being presented is at the intersection of gender and identity.”

“The Cleveland Orchestra’s 42nd annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Concert … postponed from January to June, … went forward Saturday in glorious style,” writes Zachary Lewis in Saturday’s (6/5) Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH). “The MLK, Jr. Celebration Chorus remained a force to be reckoned with, as did the Cleveland Orchestra, and the sound of 2,000 voices singing all three verses [of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’] in unison extended its reign as the event’s musical highlight…. Saturday’s concert … also served as an early celebration of Juneteenth, the new federal holiday marking the emancipation of enslaved African-Americans…. For the first time at Severance, almost every [musical] bar stemmed from a composer of color…. Two composers on the program have at last become the household names they deserve to be, the shining lights of an earlier era: William Grant Still and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor…. ‘Celebration,’ a swirling, swinging work commissioned in 1993 by the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra [was composed by] Dolores White, the accomplished local pianist, conductor, and teacher, and winner of one of this year’s Cleveland Orchestra Distinguished Service Awards.” Associate Conductor Vinay Parameswaran led the concert, which also included music by Beethoven, Mary Watkins, Carlos Simon, and Brian Raphael Nabors.

“Summer festivals can’t seem to get enough of Rhiannon Giddens,” writes Peter Feher in Wednesday’s (6/1) San Francisco Classical Voice. “The singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist is seeing the premiere of her opera Omar, composed with Michael Abels, at Spoleto Festival USA this season…. Next summer is filling up, too. The Ojai Music Festival announced last week that Giddens will take the mantle of music director in 2023…. The festival’s signature, a different music director each season, has trended more collaborative since the onset of the pandemic. Composer John Adams, who oversaw the 2021 programming, adopted a collegial approach with the musicians who joined him on the schedule, among them Giddens. Naturally, her return in 2023 promises a slate of guest artists as well. Francesco Turrisi, Giddens’s partner on two acclaimed albums and a versatile performer in his own right, will, of course, be there. The duo is set to team up with the Attacca Quartet again, with whom they shared the stage at last year’s festival…. Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor and Chinese pipa player Wu Man, instrumentalists who range easily from folk to classical styles, also headline the 77th festival—set for June 8–11, 2023.”

“Three-plus decades into a career that’s brought worldwide acclaim and six Grammy awards, maestro Giancarlo Guerrero is facing perhaps his most daunting challenge to date: rebuilding a Nashville Symphony orchestra that was knocked off course by the COVID-19 pandemic,” writes Nate Rau in Monday’s (6/6) Axios Nashville. “As a result of social distancing restrictions, the Nashville Symphony was forced to cancel shows and put orchestra members on furlough.… Several of them have since accepted other jobs or moved…. That’s left Guerrero with the difficult task of permanently replacing about 10 musicians—a challenge he says will take a ‘couple of seasons’ to solve…. Guerrero says other orchestras have been faced with the same challenge of replacing musicians. ‘After 14 years with the orchestra, of building and getting the band breathing together, and thinking together, and making music together … it’s almost like putting the band back together again.’ … On the programming side, Guerrero [said] there will be an array of free community concerts across the region…. The Symphony schedule will be programmed with a mix of concerts ranging from intricate classical compositions to unique collaborations with pop artists like the alt-rock band Guster and Broadway legend Bernadette Peters.”

“This past weekend’s gun violence in Philadelphia appeared to have an effect on Philadelphia Orchestra music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who, in somber tones, addressed the topic with the orchestra’s Sunday matinee audience,” writes Peter Dobrin in Tuesday’s (6/7) Philadelphia Inquirer. “In comments before leading the orchestra, chorus, and soloists in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, the conductor noted the toll of those killed and injured in the city. ‘Just since we’ve been playing this fabulous set of concerts to end the season with you all, just this week, just in our city, 30 people have been shot by gun violence, five people have been killed by guns just in our city. We’re way past the time for thoughts, prayers, and all of that…. We all understand we are one society … As musicians, what we can do which is the most powerful is to be messengers—messengers of the great geniuses of the past and the present who are showing us the way, to aspire to peace. Let this performance we are about to give you … be true words of reminders of what we all aspire to—joy, peace, harmony between everyone, every living organism on this earth.’ ”

From June 9 to 12, California’s Pacific Symphony will present four Beethoven concerts, originally scheduled for March 2020 and postponed due to the pandemic. Music Director Carl St.Clair will conduct all four programs at Segerstrom Concert Hall; additional events include pre-concert talks by Assistant Conductor Jacob Sustaita. Concert programs will feature all five piano concertos with soloist Alexander Romanovsky, and Concertmaster Dennis Kim will serve as soloist for Romance Nos. 1 and 2 for violin and orchestra. Also planned are the “Egmont” Overture and Symphony No. 8.

“The National Symphony Orchestra announced Thursday it would extend the contract of Gianandrea Noseda by two years, through the 2026-2027 season,” writes Michael Andor Brodeur in Thursday’s (6/2) Washington Post (D.C.) “Noseda, now in his fifth season as music director, was named as the NSO’s seventh music director in 2016 after stints as principal guest conductor at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg and the Israel Philharmonic, and as music director for the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, England, and the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy. Since September, he has also served as general music director of the Zurich Opera House…. Noseda, 58, greeted the extension as an opportunity to make up for two seasons that, despite a boost in digital programming, were mostly lost to the pandemic. But the extension also represents insurance for Noseda’s primary goals with the NSO: to raise the orchestra to the level of a national ambassador and to test that mettle through a resumption of recording and touring activities…. Aaron Goldman, principal flute, voiced excitement at the news, and suspected his enthusiasm was shared across the orchestra, which he says has transformed under Noseda’s baton. ‘However long we can keep him,’ [Goldman] said, ‘we want to.’ ”