June 2006 Archives

Place this under the “Not that We’re Complaining” Department. It comes from Alex Ross’ blog, therestisnoise.com:

Last night a contingent of SLSO musicians, staff, family and friends filled a few rows of the upper deck near the left-field corner of Busch Stadium to encourage the Cardinals to end their seven-game losing streak.

A couple years ago the SLSO implemented a new software system called Tessitura, which is special to performing arts organizations, offering improved ticketing, marketing, development and fundraising capabilities. I think Tessitura sounds like a 1950s Japanese monster movie.

The view out the east windows of Powell Symphony Hall is greatly diminished as Circus Flora is taking the big top down today. A general state of ennui pervades throughout the SLSO staff, especially those with windows.

From Greg Sandow’s blog comes a recommendation to try MUSO (www.muso-online.com/uk/index.php), a classical music magazine from the UK for the younger crowd. I haven’t read the magazine but its site is lively and tempting, with synopses of articles from back issues such as “Look out for our experiment sending punks and goths to the concert hall to see what reactions they get…” and “Prudes cover your ears – our feature on famous rock and pop tunes based on classical music proves the gap between classical and pop is not as wide as many would like to believe.”

In preparation for the upcoming season I have been gathering texts of the vocal works that the SLSO will be performing to include in the Playbill. All the better for you to follow along as Salome (Deborah Voigt) sings up an ecstatic storm as she prepares to kiss the head of John the Baptist, and such.

The July issue of St. Louis magazine just arrived, the special “A-List” issue, which includes, and I quote:

I feel the need to preface this post by saying that I love my job. I think I have one of the best gigs in St. Louis. The SLSO musicians are always teaching me new things, opening up a complex and fascinating world to a musical novice. The staff I work with are some of the smartest and most talented people I’ve ever been around.

I sent out a request to David Robertson to see if he cared to comment on the passing of Gyorgy Ligeti. He called me yesterday from New York, where he and Orli were enjoying a brief bit of down time before their summer schedules filled with festivals and travel and family. Here is some of what he said:

I liberated a copy of the BBC Proms guide from someone’s desk the other day as it didn’t seem that it was being put to use. The BBC Proms is an enormous summer music festival in London (July 14-September 9) that brings in just about everybody who is anybody or on their way to becoming somebody in the classical music world. This summer there will be lots of Mozart (250th birthday year) and Shostakovich (100th birthday year), lots of BBC commissioned works by contemporary composers (including George Benjamin and Osvaldo Golijov, you can hear works by both of them performed by the SLSO this season, and Magnus Lindberg, whose Chorale was played in the season finale last month), David Robertson conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra for the first time at the Proms as the BBC SO’s Principal Guest Conductor (Haydn “Surprise” Symphony, George Benjamin Dance Figures and Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 with Pierre-Laurent Aimard – you know, a David Robertson program), and an evening of John Adams conducting his own work (the SLSO plays the world premiere of his Doctor Atomic Symphony at Powell in March, and then takes it to Carnegie Hall).

John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune has been writing a series of articles on Daniel Barenboim, who gives his final performances as music director of the Chicago Symphony – a post he’s held for 15 years -- this weekend. You can find these on the Trib’s website. Von Rhein’s summing up of Barenboim’s tenure has been as unsentimental as its subject. The articles make for a thoughtful examination of a controversial artist.

The Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti died yesterday in Vienna at the age of 83. As Tim Page notes in his appreciation in the Washington Post today (see artsjournal.com or washingtonpost.com), “Millions of people have heard the music of Gyorgy Ligeti, although most wouldn't recognize -- or know how to pronounce -- his name.”

Anthony Tommasini, music critic for the New York Times, has a habit of inserting praise for David Robertson and the SLSO into his articles. Sunday, in a piece on the challenges the New York Philharmonic faces as it seeks a new music director, he turns to the Midwest for an example of what needs to be done:

The following comes from the second and final volume of Stephen Walsh’s biography of Igor Stravinsky, The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971, which I have taken from Terry Teachout’s review in Commentary. You can locate and read the full review on artsjournal.com, where Teachout’s lively blog is titled About Last Night:

The other day one of my colleagues asked me, “Have you heard anything about some Beatle concert the orchestra is going to play?” She had a look on her face that said, “This is a joke, right?”

Back in 1967 Bob Dylan and The Band holed up in a house -- known as Big Pink for its paint job -- in Woodstock, New York and changed the direction of rock & roll. Those sessions eventually emerged as The Basement Tapes, which was released in 1975. The metaphor of the basement is suggestive, for what Dylan and The Band found as they removed themselves from the hubbub and chaos of the time was not a new, less-traveled path, but rather the foundations and deep roots of American music and culture. Greil Marcus wrote about this exquisite moment in the history of rock & roll in his ingenious -- and at times raving mad – book Invisible Republic.

I have heard wonderful things about Peter Henderson’s sold-out performance of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes at the Pulitzer last night. And more than that, check out these photos taken during rehearsal by our friend Rachel Gagnon on the entertaining and informative www.contemporary-pulitzer.blogs.com. A lovely slice of afternoon light over Peter in front of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Black.”

The big red tent went up in the parking lot east of Powell Hall this morning, which means Circus Flora is in town. Over the next few weeks we get to catch the occasional glimpse from office windows of circus folk and animals practicing all sorts of nifty tricks. As e. e. cummings said: “Damn everything but the circus!”

With Peter Henderson’s performance of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes coming to the Pulitzer on Monday, June 5 at 7:30pm, I thought I’d supply some thoughts on the work from James Pritchett, author of The Music of John Cage:

The following exchange was overheard during an orchestra rehearsal held before the full dress rehearsal for Jane Eyre. Composer Michael Berkeley was in attendance. Jane Eyre receives its United States premiere at Opera Theatre of St. Louis Sunday, June 4.