Category: News Briefs

Orchestra Iowa’s taped radio broadcasts for National Public Radio’s “From the Top” program are set to air beginning the week of June 15. The programs were originally intended as part of a “From the Top” yearlong residency in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; following extensive flooding in Cedar Rapids in June 2008, they were nearly cancelled. Forced out of its regular venue, the Paramount Theatre, the orchestra rescheduled its 2008-09 season to various venues in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, and Cedar Falls. Orchestra Iowa Music Director Tim Hankewich renamed the orchestra (then Cedar Rapids Symphony) to Orchestra Iowa, to reflect a broader statewide focus; he also worked with From the Top Tour Producer David Balsom to tape programs split between two cities—Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. At the same time, Hankewich and Balsom also expanded the radio-orchestra partnership to encompass school visits led by Iowa teenagers, develop new curriculum with Iowa teachers, and train high school musicians as peer leaders to create their own community-outreach programs. From the Top and Orchestra Iowa will continue the project through the fall of 2010, and From the Top will bring the same model to Hawaii when its residency there begins in January.

Posted June 16, 2009

Photo of Timothy Hankewich courtesy Orchestra Iowa

Group photo: From the Top’s Laura Behrens (far left), Laura Breeden (far right), and Jenny Meyburg (second from right), with 14-year-old Iowa pianist Chelsea Wang and Joanne Tubbs (music coordinator for the Des Moines Public Schools). Photo courtesy Laura Breeden 

The winner of the 2009 Naumburg Chamber Music Competition is Trio Cavatina—violinist Harumi Rhodes, cellist Priscilla Lee, and pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute. The competition results were announced after finals that took place on June 11 at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. The prize will include a recital at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in 2010; a composition will also be written for them by Richard Danielpour. Trio Cavatina was one of four finalist chamber ensembles: the Manhattan Piano Trio, the Jasper String Quartet, and Puff Quintet. Each of four ensembles performed a 40-minute program for a jury comprising chamber musicians Robert Mann, Ursula Oppens, Carol Wincenc, Ronald Copes, Curtis Macomber, Anahid Ajemian, and Tom Sauer. The Naumburg Foundation’s annual competition rotates between instruments such as violin, viola, clarinet, cello, and piano, as well as categories in voice and chamber music. The June 2010 competition will be for piano.

Posted June 16, 2009 

Wisconsin’s Peninsula Music Festival has introduced several marketing and technology changes for its 57th season, which takes place at Door Community Auditorium in Fish Creek this August. A redesigned website features improved navigation from page to page, as well as concert information and artist biographies for all guest artists, new video commentaries by Music Director Victor Yampolsky and Associate Conductor Stephen Alltop, as well as interviews with guest conductor Andrew Sewell and violinist James Ehnes. Video topics include Yampolsky’s discussion of his immigration to the United States and his relationship with Leonard Bernstein, as well as a testimonial message from Henry Fogel, former president of the League of American Orchestras. Video commentaries can be accessed at the festival website as well as through iTunes and on YouTube; the festival also is offering them on a $15 DVD at its own site and at amazon.com. Other changes for 2009 include an email newsletter and updates via Twitter, such as late-breaking program details and guest-artist changes. The festival is in the process of creating a fan page on Facebook.

Posted June 16, 2009 

The acoustics/audio/video design firm JaffeHolden announced that it has opened an office in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. Heading up the new office is Jonathan Laney, who has held senior positions with Bridgewater Custom Sound, JaffeHolden, Talaske, and Shure Incorporated. The new office’s consulting business for performing-arts organizations will span the areas of acoustics, audio, and video; it will also provide services to clients in educational, commercial, and government markets. Among the firm’s many projects are the recently redesigned Alice Tully Hall in New York City; the Max M. Fisher Music Center in Detroit; Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas; and Cincinnati Music Hall in Ohio. Based in Norwalk, Connecticut and Santa Monica, California, the company was founded by Christopher Jaffe 40 years ago. JaffeHolden also owns the Metropolitan Technologies consulting firm, a Princeton-based company that designs technology infrastructure and network systems as well as security and telecommunications for clients in a wide range of business and nonprofit areas.

Posted June 16, 2009 

In the Sunday (6/14) edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer (Ohio), Janelle Gelfand speaks to Erich Kunzel, conductor of the Cincinnati Pops, about keeping up with multiple music engagements even as he undergoes chemotherapy treatments for cancer of the pancreas, liver and colon, diagnosed on April 29. The day after Kunzel conducts the Cincinnati Pops at Riverbend Music Center, on June 18, Gelfand writes, “He’ll fly to Boston for three concerts with the Boston Pops. On June 22, he’ll fly to Toronto to conduct three pops shows with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Between shows, Kunzel is squeezing in weekly cancer treatments in Bar Harbor, Maine and Cincinnati. So far, he has only felt a slight loss of pep. ‘I feel good,’ he says. ‘On the days I get the chemo, they’re very tiring, and I don’t have the stamina I used to. But I’m still going, as far as I’m concerned, 100 percent.’ … On July Fourth, Kunzel will be back in Washington to conduct ‘A Capitol Fourth,’ as he has for 20 years. The next day, he leaves for Beijing, his first trip back to China since he led the Cincinnati Pops at the 2008 Olympics,” where he will lead a Chinese orchestra in what he calls “a Kunzel type of show,” including Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings at Beijing’s National Center for the Performing Arts.

Posted June 15, 2009

Photo of Erich Kunzel by Mark Lyons 

In Sunday’s (6/14) New York Times, Dan Wakin profiles conductor Lorin Maazel on the eve of his retirement as music director of the New York Philharmonic. A prodigy who first conducted the Philharmonic at age nine, Maazel went on to excel as a violinist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and artistic leader of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, The Cleveland Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Bavarian Radio Symphony, and finally the New York Philharmonic. In Wakin’s view, Maazel “can be dismissive, censorious, attentive or engaging, attitudes also encountered by the musicians who play for him.… The leitmotif running through the maestro’s musings was that life had brought him to a new level of ‘mellow,’ a kind of gimlet-eyed distance from the follies of humanity.” Wakin quotes several Philharmonic musicians, noting that even those with less than complimentary things to say “praise Mr. Maazel’s musicianship and say he is capable of exciting, dynamic performances.” Maazel’s plans include guest conducting, “a return to composition,” and a festival to be held for the first time this summer (July 3-19) at Castleton Farms, the estate that he and his wife Dietlinde Turban-Maazel own in Virginia. It will focus on chamber operas by Benjamin Britten as well as master classes for conductors, instrumentalists, and singers. Maazel has engaged Philharmonic musicians as coaches, and he himself “will oversee the conducting students.” 

Posted June 15, 2009 

In the 6/13 and 6/15 editions of the Chicago Tribune, John von Rhein reviews concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in its Dvorak Festival directed by Mark Elder, a British conductor “who appears to have this music in his blood, if not by heritage then by artistic adoption.” On Thursday, Elder led “warmly sympathetic readings” of In Nature’s Realm, the Cello Concerto, and the Symphony No. 8. Making her CSO debut was cellist Alisa Weilerstein, of whom von Rhein writes, “Her tone is huge and deep, and she has a wonderfully pliable way of shaping the singing lyricism. The 27-year-old cellist spanned the full emotional range from poignancy to ebullience, bringing out an abundance of sentiment while avoiding sentimentality.” On Saturday, Elder was a “verbally astute tour guide” in a program including Dvorák’s late symphonic poem The Midday Witch, the CSO’s first performance of his Symphony No. 3, and the String Quintet in E-Flat (“American”), performed by the Emerson String Quartet and violist Paul Neubauer. The Dvorak Festival runs through June 20.

Posted June 15, 2009 

In Saturday’s (6/13) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Tom Strini writes about Andreas Delfs’s performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (“Symphony of a Thousand”) with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra on Saturday and Sunday, his last as the orchestra’s music director. Of the Saturday performance—with the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus, Master Singers of Milwaukee, and the Milwaukee Children’s Choir—Strini writes, “Delfs got a huge ovation before the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ began and a much larger one when it ended.… Everyone in the enormous cast, from Delfs down to the last kid in the choir, seemed intent on wringing every last drop of meaning out of every note, whether blazing or hushed. Delfs demands and gets that all the time. For 12 years, he fostered the idea that every note matters, and it has taken hold in the ranks. More than 400 performers merged in common purpose under his baton Friday, and their unity and unwavering intensity were palpable and a big part of a transcendent evening of music.”

Posted June 15, 2009 

In Sunday’s (6/14) Toronto Star, John Terauds covers the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming concerts at Roy Thomson Hall, led by Steven Reineke, with the Finnish group Rajaton, which will incorporate songs by ABBA. Terauds’s article, entitled “All-ABBA concert baffles classical and pop purists,” addresses the ongoing debate about crossover concerts by orchestra. “The TSO has been offering pops concerts for decades in an effort to get beyond the classical music-loving public and drag a fresh audience to its precincts. They’ve offered concerts featuring music from Star Trek films, video games, The Lord of the Rings. The original soundtracks were recorded by symphonic musicians, so why not try to bring the music to a live stage? It’s a crass, mercenary effort on the part of the symphony’s marketing department. Classical music lovers shake their heads as hard as pop purists at this crossover-ish sacrilege. But if it gets us singing together, where’s the harm? Maybe we can paraphrase some ABBA to make the point: ‘Gimme gimme gimme a song before midnight/ Won’t someone help me chase the shadows away.’”

Posted June 15, 2009 

In today’s (6/12) New York Times, Daniel Wakin reports that investment banker Gary W. Parr has been named as the New York Philharmonic’s next chairman, effective in September. “A slim, engaging businessman who dislikes golf, collects historical furnishings and has a beard, Mr. Parr brings an unusual level of financial expertise and prominence to the unpaid job of orchestra chairman. He also brings a worldwide network of business connections to the orchestra’s address book. ‘I think of this as the best job someone would pay to have,’ he said in an interview this week, alluding to the role board members have as financial supporters. Mr. Parr, a deputy chairman of Lazard, joined the board in March. A search for a successor to Mr. Guenther, who became chairman in 1996, began about three years ago, when he indicated he would step down after this season. … Mr. Parr is part of a circle of financial experts who have helped deal with collapsing companies in recent months. He served as an adviser for the sale of Lehman assets to Barclays; the sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan; the restructuring of Fannie Mae; and the sale of Mr. Madoff’s trading business.” Among the challenges Parr is expected to face on his arrival, the article mentions the orchestra’s $3 million deficit this year and the delayed renovation of Avery Fisher Hall, where the orchestra performs.

Posted June 12, 2009

Photo of Gary Parr by Chris Lee