Category: News Briefs

A news item posted 6/16 on counton2.com (WCBD-TV/DT, Charleston, South Carolina) reports that Kathleen G. Wilson has been named interim executive director of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra’s principal harpist for the last 22 seasons, Wilson has represented District 12 on the Charleston City Council since 2006 and was selected for a Liberty Fellowship, “a highly competitive program that seeks to inspire outstanding leadership in South Carolina.” The unbylined story also notes that Wilson is “an elite international marathon swimmer who has completed the swimming  triple crown (English Channel, Manhattan Island, San Pedro Channel)… ‘Kathleen has a deep knowledge of the CSO, a passion for the mission of the orchestra, proven performance as a community leader, and the proven ability to get things done,’ said Ted Legasey, President of the CSO.”

Posted June 17, 2009

In the Monday (6/15) edition of the Dallas Morning News, Scott Cantrell reviews the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s June 13 Latino Festival Concert, conducted by Alondra de la Parra. “She supplied clear and meaningful stick technique, and, apart from over-egging the brass, a very musical feeling for energy, shape and proportion. The most interesting piece on the program was Piazzolla’s Tangazo, mixing contrapuntal mystery, dreamy passages (David Heyde and Haley Hoops contributing beautiful horn solos) and toe-tapping dances. The Suite No. 2 from Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat got a performance alternatively seductive and dazzling. [Brazilian composer Camargo] Guarnieri’s Dansa brasileira was a cheerfully chugging overture, and Gismonti’s two-guitars-and-orchestra Sete Aneis, performed with the Brasil Guitar Duo (Joao Luiz and Douglas Lora), suggested some influence from minimalism.” Also on the program were Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 and pieces by Egberto Gismonti and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

Posted June 17, 2009

“The Chicago-based new music sextet eighth blackbird took over this year’s Ojai Music Festival in Libbey Bowl for four days and packed it full with more and more varied music (and music theater) than ever before in the quirky, famous festival’s 63-year history,” writes Mark Swed in Tuesday’s (6/16) Los Angeles Times. “The blackbirds are examples of a new breed of super-musicians. They perform the bulk of their new music from memory. They have no need of a conductor, no matter how complex the rhythms or balances.” Swed discusses repertoire including David Michael Gordon’s Quasi Sinfonia for 16 musicians, which “goes to town with 19th-century musical hymns…. programming contrasts such as Gordon with Schoenberg were common all weekend. [Jeremy] Denk paired Ives’ hard-edged sonata, which also uses 19th-cetury hymn tunes, with Bach’s celestial Goldberg Variations.” Among festival highlights, Swed singles out Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union “with all festival participants magnificently banging away,” QNG (a quartet of German recorder players who “chirped alluringly in music new and ancient”), and Steve Reich’s Double Sextet—winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in music, performed at the festival by twelve players.

Posted June 17, 2009

In the “Classical Beat” column of Tuesday’s (6/16) Washington Post, Anne Midgette reports on a conversation with National Symphony Orchestra Interim Chief Conductor Iván Fischer in the Chinese city of Xi’an, where a day earlier he had conducted the NSO in “a concert attended by the political elite…. ‘I am very concerned about the future of the symphony,’ he says…. Orchestras, Fischer says, are too inflexible. The instrumentation hasn’t fundamentally changed for 120 years. But in seeking a radical new model, he seems to be looking more to the old than the new. He doesn’t talk much about new music, though he observes that Daniel Kellogg’s piece ‘Western Skies,’ which the NSO is playing on several of its Asia programs, may have been a fitting piece to bring to China since it is about sound and color rather than narrative or dramatic development…. What he talks about with most animation are early-music ensembles, like the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, who will join him next season in New York for half of a Beethoven cycle.”

Posted June 17, 2009

In the June 12 edition of Dallas Business Journal, Joyce Tsai reports, “Symphony orchestras across the country have been among the arts organizations hardest hit by the current recession, but the Dallas Symphony Orchestra sold a record $11 million worth of tickets for its recently completed season thanks to a push that lured first-timers to fill more than 25% of the seats at the Meyerson [Symphony Center]. A huge part of that spike in new patron ticket sales came from the buzz surrounding its new musical director, Jaap van Zweden…. But another part of the past season’s success was due to a well-tuned repertoire of innovative business strategies.” The latter, writes Tsai, included commissioned works such as Steven Stucky’s tribute to President Lyndon B. Johnson; multimedia family-oriented concerts including “Blue Planet Live”; and inviting subscribers to “pick out their seats for the season and meet van Zweden and the musicians.” The DSO is “boosting its Pops series and ‘Dallas Symphony Presents’ events, which will bring pop artists … to perform with the orchestra. Those series have grown and become established as a way to bring in more people, [DSO President Douglas] Adams said.” 

Posted June 16, 2009

Photo of Jaap van Zweden conducting DSO by Jason Kindig 

In Monday’s (6/15) Columbus Dispatch, Kevin Joy writes, “The use of social media as a marketing tool is fast becoming a key means for cash-strapped organizations not only to spread the word about offerings but also to heighten their ‘cool’ quotients and attract Web-savvy patrons who might otherwise view the groups as stodgy or impersonal.” Joy cites strategies employing Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube by such groups as the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, Opera Columbus, and Wexner Center for the Arts. … Joy reports that a “recent study by a California consulting group found that 85 percent of nonprofits are relying on social media for marketing and fundraising,” but notes that “Traditional advertising (from print and radio ads to fliers, brochures and mailed postcards) will still be used, said all 12 organizations surveyed by The Dispatch…. ‘There are people who just want to read our print calendar,’ [Wexner Center Marketing Director Jerry] Danemiller said. ‘On the other end, you’ve got people who need to be updated every five minutes. We have to adapt to that.’ ”

Posted June 16, 2009 

Articles in today’s (6/16) New York Times and Washington Post report on two separate national surveys on arts participation. Of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the Arts, released by the federal Department of Education, the Times’s Sam Dillon writes, “Administrators at 260 public and private schools were asked how much time they devotee to art and music instruction, and 7,900 eighth-grade students were tested on art and music concepts.… 16 percent of students reported that they had gone with their class to an art museum, gallery or exhibit in the last year. That was down from 22 percent in 1997.” Both the Times and the Post articles mention that only half of eighth graders could identify the solo instrument in a passage from Rhapsody in Blue as a clarinet. Pianist Ellen Weiser, quoted in the Times, says, “While these results are mediocre, not dire, they are disturbing signs.” The Post’s Jacqueline Trescott writes that the National Endowment for the Arts’ survey on adult arts participation noted “double-digit rates of decline” between 1982 and 2008 for audience participation for classical music, jazz, opera, musical theater, ballet and dramatic plays. “The findings underscore the need for more arts education to foster the next generation of both artists and arts enthusiasts,” says acting NEA chairman Patrice Walker Powell in the Post.

Posted June 16, 2009

“At the launch of its 75th anniversary season, the Grant Park Music Festival is riding high,” writes Andrew Patner in Friday’s (6/12) Chicago Sun Times. Of the festival’s June 10 season-opening concert, at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Patner reports, “Carlos Kalmar has worked so closely with the Grant Park Orchestra for the last nine seasons that it really remains his home ensemble despite the plum position he added five years ago as music director of the Oregon Symphony. Closing Wednesday’s program with the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition … clearly demonstrated the uniform strength and quality that Kalmar and [former general and artistic director James] Palermo built up together across sections and principals’ chairs. New assistant concertmaster Ilana Setapen, just 26, made a memorable debut in the first chair Wednesday. In September, she also starts as associate concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra—a fine addition to Midwest rosters.” Pianist Stephen Hough, soloist in that concert’s Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, “gave the festival a standard that it will surely work diligently and happily to meet over the next ten weeks.”

Posted June 16, 2009 

“For the second time in eight years, the Colorado Symphony is in the hunt for a music director,” writes Kyle MacMillan in Sunday’s (6/14) Denver Post. Jeffrey Kahane announced in July 2008 that he would give up his conducting post to devote more time to the piano; he steps down at the end of the 2009-10 season. “The orchestra’s continuing improvement,” says MacMillan, demands a conductor “who is equal to its standing and capable of taking the ensemble even further.” Some of the possible candidates mentioned in the article are Douglas Boyd (the orchestra’s principal guest conductor), James Gaffigan, Julian Kuerti, Andrew Litton, and Edward Gardner. James Palermo, the orchestra’s executive director, emphasizes in the article that “We’re trying to be very, very discreet about the process. We don’t want to talk about it publicly, because the kind of people we’re interested in don’t want lots of speculation about their role with the symphony. Palermo did say that the person chosen will be someone who has conducted the orchestra, and he made it clear that some of the visiting maestros who appeared during the 2008-09 season and others coming up in 2009-10 or later might be considered.”

Posted June 16, 2009 

As Pro Musica Hebraica—a music series dedicated to the rediscovery of classical Jewish music—enters its second year, co-founder Charles Krauthammer speaks about the program with Hilary Leila Krieger in Thursday’s (6/11) Jerusalem Post. Explaining how he first became interested in the project, Krauthammer says, “It came from two thoughts. One is, when people hear ‘Jewish music,’ they think Israeli folk-dancing—Hava Negila—they think of liturgical music, they think of Kol Nidre, they might think of klezmer and that’s it. It turns out there’s a great, rich tradition of classical Jewish music people just don’t know about. … Though the first season focused on Eastern European 20th-century themes, Krauthammer would like to present a wide variety of works in coming concerts, including Ladino, Dutch cantorial and baroque Jewish pieces—the latter of which, he noted, ‘many people think is an oxymoron: baroque Jewish, what does that apply to, Jackie Mason?’” Pro Musica Hebraica’s inaugural concert took place in April 2008 at the Terrace Theater in Washington, D.C., with Itzhak Perlman and musicians from The Juilliard School in a program of works by Alexander Krein, Osvaldo Golijov, Joel Engel, Leo Zeitlin, Mikhail Gnesin, and Solomon Rosowsky.

Posted June 16, 2009