Category: News Briefs

Wednesday (2/18) on ArtsBeat, the culture news website of the New York Times, Dave Itzkoff reports, “Several performances scheduled by the Concert Association of Florida, a longtime producer of classical music and dance events, will go forward as planned even though the company filed for bankruptcy. In a release, the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County said that it would host six of seven events scheduled for the coming weeks by the Concert Association of Florida, which filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection on Friday. The events include a concert by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Lorin Maazel, on Feb. 26, as well as performances by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Pinchas Zukerman (March 12), and the National Philharmonic of Russia (April 10).”

Try telling Barbary Day Turner about the economic crisis, writes Richard Scheinin in Thursday’s (2/19) San Jose Mercury News (California). “The founder and music director of the San Jose Chamber Orchestra has just announced her group’s 2009-10 season, and it’s larger than the last one. ‘We’re going to try this and see what happens,’ she says. The orchestra’s 19th season features nine performances, two more than the current season. It kicks off Aug. 29-30 at Le Petit Trianon with two nights featuring a popular top-tier piano soloist—Jon Nakamatsu—and closes in May 2010 with two pairing the orchestra with an exceptional jazz soloist, the young pianist Taylor Eigsti.” Day Turner hopes that by expanding beyond the orchestra’s traditional Sunday-night performance structure they can access a new audience. “The orchestra has seen a slight bump in private donations in recent months. (Go figure.) And Day Turner has managed to decrease next season’s operating budget to $247,000 from this season’s $259,000. The current budget was puffed up by the cost of a recording project, she explains.”

The Orchestras Feeding America National Food Drive, organized by the League of American Orchestras and Feeding America, has generated significant press coverage during the past week. An Associated Press report by Martin Steinberg published on February 11 appeared in more than 158 publications, including the Denver Post, Detroit Free Press, Star-Tribune (Minneapolis), and Washington Post. Other local press printed their own original stories, including the Philadelphia Bulletin, and the St. Petersburg Times (Florida), which reported that “For more than 15 seasons, the Florida Orchestra has tied some of its outdoor concerts to a food drive, raising awareness and filling the coffers of Tampa Bay Harvest. Next month, it will join in a national effort, inspired by a new movie called The Soloist, about a cellist who became homeless.” The League has signed up more than 200 orchestras in 49 states for the food drive, which comes to a head March 27 & 28 in anticipation of The Soloist’s April 24 release. For more on the food drive, click here.

North Carolina’s News 14 television station recently reported on the Winston-Salem Symphony’s food drive, which gathered food for those in need. The Winston-Salem food drive was part of the Orchestras Feeding America National Food Drive, organized in partnership between the League of American Orchestras and Feeding America and culminating on March 27 & 28. Hundreds of orchestras throughout the United States are participating in the Orchestras Feeding America. A video posted on New 14’s website on February 6 covers the Winston-Salem Symphony’s food drive, held in conjunction with that weekend’s performances. To watch the video, click here.

Photos from the Winston-Salem Symphony’s “Food for Body and Soul” Food Drive, Feb. 7, 8 and 10.
c/o Camille Jones

Tuesday (2/17) on the Playbill Arts website, Robert Simonson reports, “John McGlinn, a conductor and musical archivist who devoted himself to finding and recording the restored scores of early works of the American musical theatre, was found dead in his apartment on Feb. 14. It’s believed the cause of death was a heart attack. In 1987, he helped bring to the public’s attention the incredible discovery, in a Seacaucus, NJ, warehouse, of the original versions of the scores of many Broadway shows, written by the likes of Kern and Gershwin. Many of these original versions had been presumed lost. … Mr. McGlinn’s first album was a recording of Gershwin overtures and dance music using their original orchestrations. It was released by EMI in 1987. After that, he made recordings of the complete scores (with original orchestrations) for Show Boat, Anything Goes, Brigadoon, Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me, Kate and Sitting Pretty, an obscure show by Jerome Kern … The recordings were exhaustive; the Show Boat album was comprised of three discs and three-and-a-half hours of music (including cut songs, variants, revival music, film music and more). It is treasured by fans of the groundbreaking Kern-Hammerstein show, which is considered to be the launch of the modern American musical.”

In Sunday’s (2/15) Miami Herald, Daniel Chang reports, “Mounting financial pressure from the withering economy is taking a further toll on the Florida Grand Opera, whose administrators said this week that they will not renew the contract for Stewart Robertson, FGO music director since 1998 and conductor of more than 40 of the group’s productions. Robertson’s contract expires in May 2010, FGO director Robert Heuer said in a written statement, and ‘Maestro Robertson and I have agreed that this will complete his role’ with the organization. Robertson will conduct the opera’s remaining productions this season and those of the next, and there’s a chance he will return as a guest conductor, according to Heuer’s statement. News that Robertson’s contract would not be renewed follows the FGO’s January announcement that the organization would cut its budget next season by about 30 percent—to $10 million from $14 million—by presenting four operas instead of its usual five, freezing wages and discontinuing contributions to retirement plans for staff.”

In the February 23 issue of the New Yorker, Alex Ross writes, “Felix Mendelssohn, whose two-hundredth birthday fell on February 3rd, was the most amazing child prodigy in musical history. ‘What about Mozart?’ you may ask. Go talk to Goethe, who heard the child Mozart in 1763 and the child Mendelssohn almost sixty years later, and who gave the palm to young Felix. … Two of his adolescent works—the Octet for Strings and the Overture to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’—have won permanent places in the repertory. Mozart reached a comparable level only in his early twenties.” Ross claims there was no fall-off of inspiration or productivity as Mendelssohn moved into his adult years, but peers mocked him and critics dismissed him “as a relic of the Biedermeier and Victorian eras, of the bourgeois cult of comfort.” But Ross also mentions the Quartet in F Minor, “whose gruff rhythms and grinding chromatic lines suggest a creative departure. The composer’s beloved sister had just died, and, according to a tantalizing recent report in the British press, he may have been suffering from an infatuation with the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. Mendelssohn seemed, in other words, on the verge of losing control. If he had lived to harness those darker emotions, particularly in the realm of opera, he might have become the rival that Wagner obviously feared.” Ross also mentions several Mendelssohn performances in New York, including by the New York Philharmonic, the Met Orchestra, and the Lyric Chamber Music Society.

In Sunday’s (2/15) Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock), Eric E. Harrison reports, “Five conductors hoping to succeed David Itkin as music director of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra will guest-conduct the orchestra’s first five Masterworks concerts for 2009-10. One of the candidates, George Hanson, came in second to Itkin during the last conductor search in the 1992-93 season. Hanson, now music director and conductor of the Tucson (Ariz.) Symphony Orchestra, will be on the podium Nov. 7-8 for concerts that will feature cellist Joshua Roman playing Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto. … All 11 members of the search committee—eight board members, two orchestra musicians, and executive director Galen Wixson—came up with the same names when it came down to picking five finalists from a list of the 12 semifinalists, winnowed down from 175 applicants from around the world. … In addition to experience and musicality, the committee’s criteria stressed how the candidates would interact with orchestra patrons and whether they’d be willing to make their home in Little Rock, a contract provision.” Harrison goes on to highlight programs from the 2009-10 season, which the orchestra announced on Thursday.

In Monday’s (2/17) Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, New York), Anna Reguero reports that the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra “will collect non-perishable food items and donate them to Foodlink in March, part of the League of American Orchestras program ‘Orchestras Feeding America National Food Drive.’ Anyone dropping off 10 items will receive a voucher for a pair of free tickets, choosing from any of the concerts in the Classical, Pops, Casual Sundays, OrKIDStra and Symphony 101 series. In a related act of community outreach, any current subscribers who are laid-off by a regional employer starting in January 2009 will have their subscription seats for next season held until Sept. 15. If at that point they are still unemployed, they will receive their subscription at no cost. ‘This community has supported this orchestra so generously for so many years through purchases of tickets, subscribing and donations,’ said Charlie Owens, president and CEO of the RPO. ‘The fact that they themselves are personally supporting us, if they lose their jobs at any point during 2009, we want them to know that the organization they care about cares about them, too.’ ”

In Monday’s (2/16) Chicago Sun Times, Andrew Patner writes about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Beijing debut, which “closed a three-week, five-city, 10-concert tour of Far East Asia with two sold-out performances at the new National Centre for the Performing Arts in the Chinese capital. … The reputation and teaching experience that many non-Asian players have in the Far East meant that the orchestra as a whole had the classical equivalent of rock-star groupies grabbing up available tickets even when top prices reached almost $500 (U.S.) in Tokyo and $200 and more in Hong Kong and China. CSO principal conductor Bernard Haitink, who turns 80 next month, also was making his first visit to China (and Hong Kong as well, in his case), and he is revered here in a way normally reserved for legends.” At Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the audience demanded a solo bow from Haitink even after musicians had left the stage. Patner reports that the effort in setting up the tour was led by “Shanghai-born and -trained Li-kuo Chang, CSO assistant principal viola, [who] had been lobbying and working for a tour to China since joining the orchestra in 1988.”