Author: Jennifer Melick

From July 19 to August 5, the Dudamel Foundation and the Los Angeles Philharmonic will co-present “Encuentros LA 2022,” a new summer music education and global leadership program for young orchestra musicians. The program is a project of LA Phil Music & Artistic Director and Dudamel Foundation Co-Chair Gustavo Dudamel and Dudamel Foundation Co-Chair María Valverde. Workshops and rehearsals will be conducted by Dudamel and LA Phil Dudamel conducting fellows with additional sectionals and masterclasses led by musicians from the LA Phil and guest artists from orchestras including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Opéra National de Paris, Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Chile, and SWR Symphonieorchester Stuttgart. More than 100 students from 22 countries will form the Encuentros (Encounters) Orchestra, which will perform the world premiere of a commissioned work by Giancarlo Castro D’Addona at the Hollywood Bowl and at UC Berkeley on August 2 and 4. Gustavo Dudamel will conduct the concert, which will feature the Encuentros Orchestra as well as musicians from YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles) and vocalist, bassist ,and composer Esperanza Spalding. In the program, young musicians will participate in community initiatives, mentorship opportunities with the YOLA National Festival, and projects throughout Los Angeles.

“For almost any type of music, there’s a bar in Portland where you can experience it live…. Classical music lovers have long been excluded,” writes Sam Pape in Tuesday’s (7/5) Portland Monthly (OR). “Luckily for us bar-crawling Beethoven-heads, that’s about to change. Enter: Mendelssohn’s, Portland’s first classical music-themed bar… It will feature live chamber music three nights a week, to be enjoyed alongside classic cocktails…. Mendelssohn’s is the brainchild of Lisa Lipton, who happens to be a direct descendant of the OG Romantic-era German composer Felix Mendelssohn. Lipton [a clarinetist] cut her teeth in the service industry for over a decade at beloved late-night haunt Rimsky-Korsakoffee House, and currently serves as the executive director of both the Newport Symphony Orchestra and Opera Theater Oregon.… Like so many of us, Lipton spent the early months of the pandemic exploring the world of cocktails [to be] featured on Mendelssohn’s cocktail menu, including ‘Bach Talk,’… and ‘The Red Mendelssohn,’ a blood orange Manhattan inspired by Felix Mendelssohn’s long-lost Stradivarius.… Weekly performances will include classical guitarists, string and wind quartets, soloists, and more…. ‘It’s an invitation into the world of what the after-hours are like with classical musicians,’ Lipton explains.”

“OPERA America has released the Field-Wide Opera Demographic Report 2021, an industry-wide study of issues related to race/ethnicity, gender, and age,” writes Sarah Shay in Thursday’s (7/8) Musical America (subscription required). “The report reflects data gathered in the spring of 2021 from companies representing all five of OPERA America’s membership budget groups. Responding to the survey were 2,700 individuals—1,200 administrative staff and 1,500 trustees—representing 97 U.S. and Canadian opera companies, slightly more than half of the 184 companies invited to participate. The major takeaways from the report include: women hold a majority of administrative positions throughout the industry, although the margin decreases at the senior staff level; one-fifth of opera administrators identify as BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color], as compared to two-fifths of the U.S. population; nearly 60 percent of administrative staff are under the age of 45, although the percentage decreases to 40 percent for company leadership; opera company boards are relatively even in gender but skew older and are less diverse than company administrators…. This initial research provides benchmarks for understanding the effectiveness of the industry’s efforts to achieve the diversity of the communities they serve.” Read the complete report here.

“Texas’ heat wave strikes again. For the third time this year, the Austin Symphony Orchestra has had to cancel one of the Hartman Foundation Concerts in the Park series of shows: this time, it’s tonight’s scheduled performance by its brass quintet,” writes Richard Whittaker in Sunday’s (7/10) Austin Chronicle (TX). “This year marks the 20th anniversary of the free series on the Long Center City Terrace…. However, so far this year, ASO has been forced to cancel three of the five scheduled weekly free concerts [June 12, June 19] and tonight’s show…. Only two performances have gone ahead as planned [June 5 and 26]…. ASO had already pushed the start times for the concerts back from 7:30pm to 8pm in hopes of avoiding the worst of the heat, with the aim that the air temperature would be below 95 degrees by the start of the show. However, with the forecast showing temperatures still over 100 by 8pm tonight, ASO has canceled the event completely. So far, the plan is to continue with the next scheduled show, a performance by the wind quartet next Sunday, July 17, and the rest of the series, running through to August 28.”

“Classical composer Quinn Mason intends to make the most of a new yearlong residency that he begins this year with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, coming frequently to Connecticut and using those experiences to fuel a new composition, which the orchestra will premiere in June 2023,” writes Christopher Arnott in Thursday’s (7/7) Hartford Courant (CT). “ ‘I will be making four visits during the season. The first time will be in September,’ Mason said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. ‘I want to get to know the community at large. I want to generate public interest in the Hartford Symphony. I want to do outreach because I myself am a product of it—I attended my first classical music concert at age 10 as part of a class field trip.’ The residency exists due to the Joyce C. Willis Fund for Excellence and Equity in the Arts, founded in 2020 to support prominent young Black artists of national stature in creating new works for major Hartford arts institutions. Mason, who is based in Texas, says he has already had several conversations about the residency with Tim Brown, the HSO’s director of learning and social impact.”

On September 22, the Plano Symphony Orchestra in Texas will perform an outdoor concert at the 2022 Plano Balloon Festival. Music Director Hector Guzman will conduct the family concert, which will feature music by Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Bernstein, and Ellington, plus selections from films including Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Magnificent Seven, and Silverado, as well as from James Bond films. “I am always excited when we can present music to a wider audience, and the Plano Balloon Festival will allow us to do just that,” said Guzman. “This is a wonderful way for the PSO, and myself, to celebrate 40 years of making music for North Texas.” Jo Via, executive director of Plano Balloon Festival, Inc., said, “Welcoming the Plano Symphony Orchestra to the 2022 H-E-B | Central Market Plano Balloon Festival will mark the first time the Symphony has performed an outdoor, family-friendly, community concert. We’re very excited to showcase the Plano Symphony Orchestra at this year’s festival.”

“Ishmael Ali wears many musical hats: composer, guitarist (in the bands Je’raf and Errata) and co-founder of a recording space,” writes Hannah Edgar in last Tuesday’s (6/28) Chicago Tribune. “But it’s his most recent instrument—cello—that has become an all-out obsession…. Ali is one of several artists exploring the cello’s expressive potential, seemingly converging on Chicago overnight. Some have … returned here after sojourns in other cities—like Tomeka Reid, long a stalwart of Chicago’s free jazz scene, and Helen Money, the stage name of rock musician Alison Chesley. Others are brand-new arrivals, like olula negre, a resident artist at the venue Elastic Arts who co-curates its AfriClassical Futures series…. Katinka Kleijn … [is] a cellist who plays in the Chicago Symphony and on the city’s improvised music circuits…. She … remembers when Chicago’s cello improvisers more or less started and ended with her, [Fred] Lonberg-Holm and Reid. Now, she enthuses about the city’s younger cello guard…. Kleijn regularly teams up with Lia Kohl, another cellist in the city who takes an expansive, performance-art-inspired approach to the instrument…. ‘It’s very cool that there’s a lot more string players in general, and especially more cello improvisers,’ ” says Reid.

“In our field of Western classical music, we often set the expectation with young musicians that if they are just talented enough, hard-working enough, or entrepreneurial enough, they will find themselves on a pathway to success,” writes Juhi Bansal in Monday’s (7/6) I Care If You Listen. “But as anyone who has worked with graduating college and conservatory students knows, this is a very incomplete truth…. We have made measurable strides over the last few years in supporting underrepresented composers, diversifying the voices we champion, and trying to build alternatives to the top-down, stylistically narrow, white-male-centered culture that was the norm in classical music for centuries. But … under these positive currents, you don’t have to dig far down to see musicians walking away from the creative art they have poured time, blood, sweat, and tears into. And very often when we press to understand why, the answer is money and opportunity…. It often feels like we are afraid to say out loud what so many of us have seen or experienced—that the workings of money and opportunity in classical music present an insurmountable obstacle that pushes talented musicians out.”