Author: BFC

“Composer and conductor Karel Jaroslav Husa, who taught at Cornell [University] for 38 years and conducted major orchestras as well as campus ensembles, died Dec. 14 at his home in Apex, North Carolina, He was 95,” writes Daniel Aloi in Friday’s (12/16) Cornell Chronicle. Born in Prague, Husa earned a doctorate from the Prague Academy of Music and furthered his studies in Paris. He “saw his early compositions performed throughout Europe…before emigrating with his wife, Simone, and two young daughters in 1954 to conduct the Cornell orchestra and teach theory.” Aside from Cornell, where his students included composers Steven Stucky and Christopher Rouse, Husa “taught at Ithaca College from 1967-86, and was the first director of the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra from 1977-84.” He “composed more than 90 works for orchestra, concert band, chamber ensemble, winds, chorale and keyboard, and three ballets.” Music for Prague 1968, commissioned by the Ithaca College Concert Band, was “written after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and [features] such symbols of resistance and hope as a 15th-century Hussite war song and the sound of bells.” Husa won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his String Quartet No. 3 and the 1993 Grawemeyer Award for his Cello Concerto.

Posted December 19, 2016

“The Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki and the world-famous Juilliard School of Music in New York will join forces, forming a joint symphony orchestra to celebrate the centenary of Finland’s independence,” reads an unsigned Friday (12/16) article at suomifinland.fi (Finland). “The orchestra will perform in Helsinki, Stockholm and New York and will be conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. The joint symphony orchestra will have some 80 members—half of the orchestra will come from the Sibelius Academy and half from Juilliard. The tour programme will feature both Finnish and American music: Four Legends from the Kalevala (Lemminkäinen Suite), Op. 22, by Jean Sibelius, Mania by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Radical Light by Steven Stucky.… Collaboration between the Sibelius Academy and the Juilliard School was launched in 2005 with a visit from the Juilliard orchestra to Helsinki as part of the school’s centenary tour…. The orchestra will give concerts at the Music Centre in Helsinki on 26 August, at the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm on 28 August and at Lincoln Center in New York City on 5 September 2017. The orchestra will be conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, an alumnus of the Sibelius Academy.”

Posted December 19, 2016

“The most remarkable thing in Boston classical music in 2016 was a trio of performances that not only upgraded the city’s profile as a locus for contemporary music but promised more to come,” writes David Weininger in Sunday’s (12/18) Boston Globe. “The common thread was composer-conductor-pianist Thomas Adès, beginning his three-year stint as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first artistic partner. That term has a dully bureaucratic ring to it, but there was nothing routine about Adès’s activities during his time here. With the Boston Symphony Chamber Players he devised a variegated program that stretched across centuries; with tenor Ian Bostridge he gave an idiosyncratic yet devastating performance of Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’; finally, he curated and conducted a death-haunted program dominated by his own vocal tone poem ‘Totentanz.’ … That program also demonstrated a composer’s depth of insight into scores by Sibelius and Britten.… Whatever his residency brings in the future—he will be at the Tanglewood Music Center next summer—it is already off to an inspiring start. It has also given the orchestra a high-profile collaborator at a time when its affiliation with music director Andris Nelsons is flourishing on a week-in, week-out basis.”

Posted December 19, 2016

“Throughout musical history, women who wanted to write music have done so against the until recently mainstream view that women are incapable of creating high art,” writes Elinor Cooper in Friday’s (12/16) BBC Music Magazine. “Today, we are beginning to appreciate the huge body of work by these women which is still, in many cases, unexplored. Here, in the second article of our series [the first was published March 8, 2016], we reveal the complex lives of ten more great female composers who deserve to be better known today.” Included are Maddalena Casulana (c1544-90) “the first woman ever to have her own volumes of madrigals printed,” Marianna Martines (1744-1812), pianist/composer Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831), Adele aus der Ohe (1861-1937), “one of the few child prodigies accepted as a pupil by Liszt,” Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944), American composer Amy Beach (1867-1944), Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979), whose Viola Sonata “tied with a sonata by Ernst Bloch” to win the 1919 Berkshire Festival of Music Competition, Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), Florence Price (1887-1953), whose Symphony in E minor was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, making Price “the first African-American woman to have an orchestral work performed by a major American orchestra,” and English composer Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-94).

Posted December 19, 2016

“For a pivotal 2016 moment in classical music—and the broader arts world—look to the appointment last month of Debora L. Spar as the first female president of Lincoln Center in New York, ensuring that our country’s three great performing arts centers will be run by women,” writes Mark Swed in Sunday’s (12/18) Los Angeles Times. “Two years ago Deborah F. Rutter became the first female president of Kennedy Center in Washington. Last year Rachel Moore took over the Music Center of Los Angeles. Once Spar moves down Broadway some 50 blocks from Barnard College, where she has been president since 2008, women will preside over a large and influential swath of performing arts. …. Rutter at Kennedy Center has been in her post the longest… She has … appointed an excellent new music director, Gianandrea Noseda, who begins next season” at the National Symphony Orchestra. Also noted are Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla’s appointment as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in England, Francesca Zambello, who is “breathing new life into Washington National Opera,” and Jenny Bilfield, who “has made Washington Performing Arts one of the liveliest presenting organizations in the country.”

Posted December 19, 2016

Pictured (left to right): Debora L. Spar, Deborah F. Rutter, Rachel Moore

Connecticut’s Hartford Symphony Orchestra has announced that the first concert in its new contemporary-music series will take place on January 26 at Hartford’s Real Art Ways event space, with food and drink. HSO Music Director Carolyn Kuan will lead the concert mixing contemporary music and classics. Featured works will include London-based composer Roger Goula’s Pale Blue Dot, named for the photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe, and a four-movement called Void by composer RSM, inspired by Kurt Steger’s monumental sculpture Scribing the Void on view at Real Art Ways. Also on the program will be Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite and L’Histoire du Soldat.

Posted December 16, 2016

“The actual centennial of composer Lou Harrison isn’t due until May, but Michael Tilson Thomas and the members of the San Francisco Symphony aren’t about to sit around waiting,” writes Joshua Kosman in Saturday’s (12/9) San Francisco Chronicle. “Harrison’s distinctive brand of musical free-thinking—a blend of heartfelt expressivity, rhythmic vitality and radical openness to all the musical traditions and natural sounds the world has to offer—never really goes out of fashion. So the wonderful tribute that Thomas and the orchestra offered Friday, Dec. 9, to open the third season of the Symphony’s SoundBox series was at once an education and a reminder of the sheer joy that music can provide.” Works on the program included Canticle No. 3, “a superbly evasive work scored for ocarina, guitar and percussion,” and “the short but gripping Suite for Cello and Harp (beautifully rendered by harpist Jieyin Wu and cellist Sébastien Gingras), and two movements from the clattery Organ Concerto, with Michael Hey as soloist…. In the Flute Concerto No. 1 … Harrison … who had studied with Arnold Schoenberg … demonstrated how to use charm and guile to finesse the astringencies of his teacher’s 12-tone system.”

Posted December 16, 2016

In Wednesday’s (12/14) Citizen-Times (Asheville, North Carolina) Hayley Benton selects the top recordings from Asheville musicians in 2016, among them the Asheville Symphony’s Sessions: “In May, the Asheville Symphony released its yearlong project, Sessions, to the public, an album that the orchestra had collaborated on with eight local musicians and bands. The album begins with a jazzy world-beat from [the musical group] Rising Appalachia, soon escalated by a wave of strings that takes the track to another level. Next up is a number from pop-rock band Doc Aquatic, to which the symphony adds a bit of instrumental sunshine. In fact, though the album is full of solid pieces that could stand alone, the symphony’s additions provide a certain cinematic touch to each track, adding a dramatic quality that engages and captivates the listener. For the local orchestra, the project began as an idea: What if the symphony could expand its normal reach—appealing to regulars and rockers alike? What if the city—in all of its artistic diversity—could be reflected in a single soundtrack? And that’s what you get in Sessions, featuring artists like Lovett, Electric Owls, Free Planet Radio, Matt Townsend, Shannon Whitworth and the Steep Canyon Rangers.”

Posted December 16, 2016

Andrew Norman received Musical America’s 2017 Composer of the Year award on December 8 in New York City, and the text of his acceptance speech was reprinted in Friday’s (12/9) NewMusicBox. “I feel completely undeserving of this award, and of all the other attention I have received recently. I have been given so much over my lifetime…. I have been blessed with way more than my fair share of opportunities in this field…. I’ve also, and perhaps most importantly, been given the opportunity to fail, to fail repeatedly, and to fail in public…. This gift of failure also puts me in an incredibly privileged position. I think about all the composers who have not been granted the same good fortune that I have …. We are not just the inheritors and interpreters of a tradition, we are also the definers of that tradition…. I believe there are Mozarts and Beethovens born every day, and it is our foremost responsibility as musical citizens to find them, to cultivate them, to give them plenty of opportunities to succeed and to fail, and ultimately to let them take the art form to places we cannot yet imagine.”

Posted December 15, 2016