SLSO violinist Debbie Bloom made a visit to Hope Montessori of Creve Coeur to work with kindergarteners, age five and six, the other day. With such young children it is best to begin with basic concepts, such as feelings. Different music creates different moods. “How does this music make you feel?” asked Debbie, and she played a sprightly tune. “Happy!” said the children. Then she played a somber phrase. “Sad,” said the children.
Today the SLSO announced four new players who are joining the orchestra, as well as three musicians who will receive permanent status next season, and one longtime member who is moving to an associate principal position.
A fax came in the other day with about eight pages of reviews of David Robertson, a compilation of critical responses to his guest conductor gigs over the last few months in the United States and Europe. I spent some time sifting through these for future blurb fodder.
The Opera Theatre of St. Louis season must have just concluded since there was an Amy Oshiro sighting in Powell Hall. Amy is a charming, infectiously exuberant violinist with the orchestra, who stopped by this morning on her way to Chicago, where she will be playing at Grant Park, one of her many summer gigs. She doesn’t leave the soupy humidity of the Midwest until August, when she ventures to the clear, crisp air of Sun Valley and the summer music festival there.
An excellent website for keeping up with the daily news in the art world is www.artsjournal.com. I know a number of my colleagues visit this at least once during the day. Artsjournal offers articles from print media from the New York Times to Slate to Wired to the Guardian to the Sydney Morning Herald and more, offering news and ideas and profiles on the varied art disciplines and on the issues that constantly hover around the arts (censorship, funding, the impact of new technologies, what is it all worth, and so on).
A neighbor of mine asked me the other day, “So, are you writing Playbill articles for next season during your summer downtime?”
“Downtime? What is downtime?”
Monday evening a number of SLSO musicians played chamber music at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, the exquisite concrete box designed by Tadao Ando, a block or so from Powell. The program was far from run-of-the-mill fare, as this ongoing collaboration between the Pulitzer and the SLSO promises to continue to be. Ligeti, Kurtág, Bartók: three major composers of the last century, of whom only the latter has achieved core repertoire status. In 05/06 works by Ligeti and Kurtág will be performed in the subscription series, which means they will be part of programs that will lend context to what otherwise might prove to be problematic works. For example, György Kurtág’s Stele is part of a program that presents works of mourning (a piece from 500 years ago, Josquin’s Nymphes de bois mourns the loss of the composer’s musical mentor; Stele laments the loss of a fellow musician and countryman; Mozart’s Requiem is, you know, a requiem).
An advertisement for PBS’ Live from Lincoln Center shows violinist Gil Shaham looking appropriately intense for the Sibelius Violin Concerto, which he played with the New York Philharmonic and last-minute fill-in conductor David Robertson on June 15. New York Phil Music Director Lorin Maazel had fallen ill, so the entire program got rearranged on a dime. Except for Shaham’s Sibelius it all changed, with David exchanging Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite for what had been previously planned.
The real business of the American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL) conference is business. Slightly apart from the circus of exhibition tables and forums and roundtable discussions and conferees sharing coffee and muffins in between sessions, on the main floor of the Washington Hilton is a lounge area with tables and chairs, the lighting a bit dim, where artistic administrators and talent agents and prospective hires in twos and threes sit huddled over legal pads and resumes and calendars and figure out who are the artists available for seasons to come, or who they might want to join their staff, or whatever shoptalk people indulge themselves with in dimly lit hotel lounges. I am not privy to such things, but I can say that whenever I saw our artistic administration vp, Jeremy Geffen, he was always off to another meeting. By Friday morning, he was totally done.
Are the winds of change blowing through the orchestra biz? If I can label a theme to the American Symphony Orchestra League conference that just concluded in our nation's capitol, I would hesitantly say "Time's they are a-changin' (or they'd better)" might serve. Since I am a first-timer at this annual gathering, I emphasize my hesitancy. The veterans around me would probably say whatever they heard they'd heard before, and they'd be right as well. Even as one who viewed from the outside of the business for a number of years, the idea that symphony orchestras are 19th-century inventions finding themselves in a 21st century of ipods and tivo and celebrity cults is not exactly shocking news. But, from what I heard -- at least the best of what I heard -- orchestras are taking sometimes bold, sometimes tentative steps to take a place of greater significance in the expanded world of art, culture and entertainment.
I leave tomorrow for a brief vacation in western Maryland before attending my first American Symphony Orchestra League conference in Washington D.C., next week. If I can figure out the technology I’ll send a blog from the nation’s capitol. If I can’t, I’ll be back Monday, June 20, to tell you all about it.
Since I’ve been spending some time involved in research for next season, I’ll share a little of what I’ve found from time to time over the summer.
The composer Morton Feldman is featured in a David Robertson program next season, sandwiched between Mozart and Mahler. Nice company. Feldman died too young, in 1987, a composer who loved abstract expressionism, Beckett, and Oriental rugs. He was pals with the Cedar Tavern crowd (Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline among them). The great scholar Nicolas Slonimsky compares Feldman’s sense of composition with de Kooning’s. John Cage was a friend and mentor.
Feldman was extremely myopic, so when he was in the presence of beautiful rugs, he studied the weave as closely as his face could get to the fabric. He visited ancient Egyptian tapestries in the Louvre, and his Coptic Light, says David Robertson, “might be considered as the musical expression of light passing through these frail tapestries, as if it were passing through two millennia to the present.” For the concert in November, the images of such tapestries will be projected on a screen. Cool, huh?
Feldman was also excellent with a quote. “Compositionally,” he said, “I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire.”
In the middle of the stage there’s a hole, at least for now. The SLSO went without a functioning stage lift last season. Summer’s here and time to make amends.
Yellow caution tape surrounds the void. Down below burly guys have been hard at work in what looks like a deep concrete vault. No artifacts were found during the excavation.
Without the use of the lift the stage hands have had to grapple with an ongoing dilemma: where to put the pianos. Two pianos have been fitting snugly backstage, with a third in the Green Room, but when Mahler is to be performed you got to have room for cowbells and chorus and extra horns. It gets cramped back there.
If all goes well this summer, the lift will rise, a piano will fit onto it and descend safe and sound into its Tutankhamenesque resting place. Then, when the spirit moves, the piano will emerge from below. As with most things, the theory behind this is compelling.
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If you know your history, you know that the rise of fascism in Europe sent many of the greatest minds of the 20th century into exile in the United States: Einstein, Fermi, Duchamp, Mondrian and so on. They came and they changed us. In terms of art history, the inclination is to think of New York City as the stopping place for European artists who became the mentors of the next generation of American artists. But there was also a hugely influential émigré community on the West Coast in LA: Thomas Mann, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Brecht – all ended up around Tinsel Town.
Greg Sandow has been a music critic for the Village Voice and Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He teaches courses on music criticism and the future of classical music at Juilliard. In recent years he’s written less criticism and has taken on the role of consultant and doing projects with symphony orchestras, including the Pittsburgh Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra. He’s been writing the blurbs in the SLSO brochures for the last three years. He also keeps a couple of blogs: www.gregsandow.com and www.artsjournal.com/sandow. Most of his attention has gone toward the latter recently, where he explores the large topic of the future of classical music.
What with the recent revelation that former FBI official W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat, perhaps the best-kept secret in Washington ever, I wanted to find some sort of Watergate theme for today’s blog. As an additional challenge, I wanted something other than references to Barry White or Abba (disco was the groove at the time). So I searched the web for information on All the President’s Men, the terrific Alan J. Pakula film in which Hal Holbrook sinisterly portrays the secret informant in the trench coat, rasping in dark parking garages to Robert Redford, “Follow the money.”
I found two surprising music references. One: included in the score to the film is Vivaldi’s Concerto in C for Two Trumpets. The other: in a small walk-on part, playing the arresting officer at the Watergate break-in -- F. Murray Abraham, who would go on to play Salieri in his Academy Award-winning performance in Amadeus.
