Category: News Briefs

A report Tuesday (3/3) on the BBC News site states, “Video-sharing website YouTube has announced the players in the symphony orchestra it recruited online. Two UK-based winners will join musicians from 30 countries to participate in a three-day classical music summit in New York City. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra will then perform at Carnegie Hall on 15 April under San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas. All of the winners’ videos have been posted on YouTube. The effort began in December 2008, when YouTube solicited entries from musicians to submit their interpretations of a composition by Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun called Internet Symphony No 1, ‘Eroica.’ The YouTube Symphony Orchestra channel on the site received some 13 million views since then. A panel of members hailing from a number of world orchestras narrowed down the field of more than 3,000 entries from more than 200 countries. The shortlist of 200 entrants was published on 14 February, and the YouTube community then voted for its favourites to play in the world’s first online orchestra.” 

In Friday’s (2/27) Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), Bradley Bambarger writes, “Like his father, conductor Paavo Jarvi has an obsessive love of music-making. The eldest son of esteemed New Jersey Symphony Orchestra music director Neeme Jarvi, the 46-year-old Paavo is similarly driven, having cultivated deep relationships with multiple orchestras and a discography as extensive as any conductor of his generation. Paavo, who emigrated from Estonia with his family at age 17, is music director of the Cincinnati Symphony, Germany’s Frankfurt Radio Symphony and, as of fall 2010, the Orchestre de Paris. … Yet Paavo is his own man, and a modern one, as anyone who has experienced his conducting of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie-Bremen on record or, especially, in concert knows. He bolsters traditional values with the latest thinking on period style for Beethoven that is sinewy and visceral. … Järvi and the German chamber orchestra return with their Beethoven this weekend, playing the ‘Eroica’ along with the Symphony No. 8 and ‘Consecration of the House’ Overture at New Brunswick’s State Theatre on Sunday afternoon. As part of the inaugural festival for Lincoln Center’s wonderfully renovated Alice Tully Hall, they play two concerts there on Monday, the first performance repeating the ‘Eroica’ program and the second featuring Symphonies Nos. 1 and 7.” Bambarger interviews Järvi on his approach to Beethoven and traits inherited from his father.

In Saturday’s (2/28) Times-Picayune (New Orleans), Chris Waddington writes that the Louisiana Philharmonic is poised to complete a cycle of all of Beethoven’s symphonies, under the direction of Carlos Miguel Prieto. This season’s programming has also included many new works, however. “The next pairing sets Beethoven’s grand Symphony No. 7 in company with ‘The Oceanides’ of Sibelius and a new piano concerto from Lowell Liebermann, a 48-year-old New Yorker who burst into the limelight at age 16 when he performed his first piano sonata at Carnegie Hall. … Liebermann’s Piano Concerto No. 3 will be performed by pianist Jeffrey Biegel, a soloist who has taken an active, entrepreneurial interest in the commissioning of new works. Biegel assembled a consortium of orchestras, including the LPO, to commission the Liebermann piece. The LPO will be the 17th group to present the work with Biegel at the keyboard.” Biegel notes that a consortium commissioning model means most orchestras don’t get to “premiere” the work, but it addresses the problem that many new works don’t get repeat performances after the premiere.

Friday’s (2/27) Phoenix Business Journal reports, “Music lovers can bring the Phoenix Symphony into their cars and living rooms next month, when the CD of its program ‘Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio’ debuts on the Naxos label. The CD is the fifth recording for the symphony, and the organization’s first release since 1994. The live album captures the sold-out world premiere of the piece as it debuted Feb. 7, 2008, at Symphony Hall under the leadership of Virginia G. Piper Music Director Michael Christie. The oratorio, composed by [Music Alive] composer-in-residence Mark Grey, features baritone Scott Hendricks and the 120 voices of the Phoenix Symphony Chorus. The work, a contemporary retelling of an ancient Navajo epic story, incorporates both the Navajo and English languages. The CD will be formally released on March 31 on the Naxos label.” Music Alive is a partnership between the League of American Orchestras and Meet the Composer.

“Bernard Haitink hates birthdays. Especially his own,” writes John von Rhein in Sunday’s (3/1) Chicago Tribune. “In fact, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal conductor will be treating Wednesday, when he turns 80, just like any other day. Haitink will begin his ninth decade in his native Amsterdam, rehearsing and conducting Beethoven and Bruckner with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the great ensemble most indelibly associated with him during his 55-year career. … Haitink shows no signs of slowing down. CSO musicians report that the vigor he displayed on the podium during the orchestra’s recent Far East tour was undimmed from Yokohama to Beijing. You can hear it in his warm and luminous recording of the Mahler First Symphony, a May 2008 concert performance to be released next week on the CSO Resound label. … Meanwhile, Haitink’s Chicago docket is very full, including a three-week residency in April and May, with a tour to New York’s Carnegie Hall; his final European tour as principal conductor in the fall; two subscription weeks in November; and a Beethoven symphony cycle to conclude his tenure in June 2010.”

In Sunday’s (3/1) Plain Dealer (Cleveland), Zachary Lewis notes the difference between a typical Cleveland Orchestra tour and its Miami residency. “Unlike other cities that host the orchestra frequently, Miami is home to a dedicated network of staff and volunteers whose job it is to embed the ensemble in South Florida. What’s more, these people are active all year round, not just when the orchestra happens to be in town, as it will be next weekend to reprise the Beethoven program concluding Sunday at Severance Hall with conductor Kurt Masur and pianist Louis Lortie. … [Miami residency director Sandi] Macdonald is one of two full-time employees of the Cleveland Orchestra based in Miami. The other is Montserrat Balseiro, patron development associate, who was hired in part for her ability to speak Spanish in a city where 62 percent of the population is Hispanic.” The Miami team aims to make sure the orchestra’s $4 million budget for the residency is covered. “Sources affiliated with the residency proudly note that the project not only pays for itself but also benefits the institution as a whole. Indeed, in a recent strategy document, the orchestra states that it may be planning to ‘materially increase’ the amount of time it spends in Miami.”

Photo: Soprano Measha Brueggergosman with Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra at the Arsht Center in Miami.
Credit: Roger Mastroianni

The Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra has announced a partnership with WDPR, a public radio station based in Dayton, Ohio, to simultaneously stream previously recorded DPO concerts to the Internet as they are being aired on the radio. The first concert streamed at dpr.org under the arrangement, on February 21 at 10 a.m., was a concert recorded in December 2008, “Portrait: William Grant Still.” Streaming of broadcasts takes place in real time; it is not on-demand streaming and is not downloadable. However, because broadcasts are streamed through the Internet, they are available anywhere, far beyond the station’s usual range. “Web-streaming of concert broadcasts is the first step in our New Media Initiative,” said Executive Director Paul Helfrich in a statement earlier in February, adding that the orchestra hopes to “significantly expand” its online presence.

Rockwell, a short documentary film by Lisa Mills, a professor of film at the University of Central Florida, has won in the Outstanding Cultural Achievement category at the first-ever MOFILM mobile short film festival. The festival, which took place earlier this February at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, was hosted by actor/director Kevin Spacey. Rockwell focuses on composer Stella Sung’s composition Rockwell Reflections, which received its world premiere by the Orlando Philharmonic, with live projections of five Norman Rockwell paintings over the orchestra.  Each of the five movements of Sung’s work reflects a painting by Norman Rockwell; the film focuses on only one movement, The Peace Corps, featuring a painting portraying President John F. Kennedy with young volunteers. The festival awarded submissions from amateur and professional film-makers for movies no longer than five minutes in length. Winner of the festival’s grand prize was English as a Second Language, produced by Frank Chnindamo and directed by Jocelyn Stemat; other winners were in the categories of animation, drama, documentary, and science fiction.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra, which in December 2008 launched a music download service in MP3 and HD Surround formats, has released four new recordings at its website, bso.org. The recordings—Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé;  Brahms’s A German Requiem, with soprano Christine Schäfer and baritone Michael Volle; Bolcom’s Eighth Symphony; and Bolcom’s Lyric Concerto, with flutist James Galway—were recorded at Symphony Hall between 2006 and 2008. Music Director James Levine conducts all four performances; these are his first recordings with the BSO. Music can be purchased as individual tracks, full albums, or as complete multi-movement works, with HD Surround albums priced higher than MP3-formatted recordings. Beginning in mid-March, the Brahms and Ravel works will also be available on CD through online retailers Amazon, CDBaby, and iTunes. The BSO’s online music store also offers a three-month and twelve-month subscription service for unlimited downloads. “These recordings are the beginning of what we intend as an ongoing series of performances recorded in Symphony Hall during actual concerts in the presence of an audience. Today’s state-of-the-art advanced recording techniques make it possible to hear all the specific character of the orchestral sound, and the unique acoustic of this great, in a more vivid and detailed presence than ever before,” said Music Director James Levine in a statement.