2008 Archives

Mitchell Lurie dies at 86
world-renowned clarinetist taught at USC

By Dennis McLellan

Mitchell Lurie, a world-renowned clarinetist and clarinet teacher who taught for many years at USC and the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, has died. He was 86.

Lurie, who had been in ill health in recent years, died of pneumonia Monday at his home in West Los Angeles, said his son, Dr. Alan Lurie.

A Brooklyn native who grew up in Los Angeles, Lurie was the principal clarinetist for the Pittsburgh Symphony and then the Chicago Symphony in the late 1940s.

He then launched a long career in Hollywood as a top clarinetist for film studios and became a distinguished chamber musician, who may have been best known for his numerous performances with the Budapest String Quartet and the Muir String Quartet.

Read more about this at the Los Angeles Times website:

   www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-lurie30-2008nov30,0,7400048,full.story

Dudamel's baton entices a new wave of classical music lovers

By Roxana Popescu

The high-energy Gustavo Dudamel will replace Esa-Pekka Salonen as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic next year.

The hardest part about preparing for a 10-minute telephone interview with Gustavo Dudamel is figuring out what to do with all that energy.

Not with it, actually, but without it: What if his legendary pep didn't come across in a chat crammed between six other interviews? What if he was worn out, or distracted? Because if there's one thing that pops out from all of Dudamel's five-star YouTube clips ? the one attribute both fans and skeptics say defines him ? it's that indomitable energy.

The second hardest part was getting a hold of the man. At 27, Dudamel is arguably the greatest conductor of his generation, considered by many to represent the future of classical music and the hope for its reinvigoration. This fall, he's on a national tour with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, which the La Jolla Music Society presents at the Civic Theatre tomorrow. Next spring, he'll take over as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Read more about this at the Union-Tribune website:

   www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2008/nov/21/1c21israelm104347-no-headline/?zIndex=14907

Miffed at BSO, famed maestro backs out

By Jeremy Eichler

There is an eminent Russian conductor encamped at a private home in Brookline, and he is fuming.

In an extremely rare public flare-up in the outwardly genteel world of major symphony orchestras, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, the 77-year-old maestro who is one of the last living links to a golden era of Russian music, has pulled out of the entire run of four concerts he was scheduled to conduct with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which began on Thursday.

He is outraged, he said yesterday, at how disrespectfully, in his view, the BSO administration had marketed his appearances to the public.

In an emotional 40-minute interview at the home of a friend, Rozhdestvensky and his wife, Viktoria Postnikova, explained the maestro's abrupt decision to withdraw from the performances, including concerts scheduled for tonight and Tuesday, and to return today to Moscow. He began with a pointed clarification.

"The BSO told its audiences I was 'unable to conduct this performance as planned,' " he said, referring to an announcement that appeared in a program insert and on the BSO's website. "I must say that I was able to conduct." Full stop. "And how."

Read more about this at the Boston Globe website:

   www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2008/11/22/miffed_at_bso_famed_maestro_backs_out/

Fiery Finale for Guarneri

By Joshua Kosman

There may be no classier way to exit the public stage than by handing off the baton to a young successor - and the Guarneri String Quartet has always been the classiest of acts.

For at least part of its current farewell tour, the Guarneri is being accompanied by the Johannes Quartet, a young and – to judge from Thursday's performance – splendidly dynamic ensemble that needs to come back again soon as a headliner. In the potent performance of the Mendelssohn Octet that occupied the second half of the program, a listener could witness the mantle of chamber-music greatness being passed along.

The venerable ensemble made its final visit to San Francisco on Thursday night, playing to an enthusiastic crowd in Herbst Theatre under the auspices of San Francisco Performances. But the players weren't there alone.

Read more about this at the S.F. Gate website:

   sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/22/DDGF149J4R.DTL

Sheng work lets symphony tap into Class of '78

By Janice Steinberg

Chinese melodies meet Stravinsky in the music of Bright Sheng, recipient of a 2001 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Sheng's first harp concerto, "Never Far Away," will be given its world premiere by the San Diego Symphony with harpist Yolanda Kondonassis next weekend.

For the symphony's music director, Jahja Ling, "The wonderful thing about his compositions (is) he is able to fuse the Western and Chinese musical language."

What could be more appropriate, in the age of the Beijing Olympics and global Internet culture, than musical dialogues between East and West? In fact, Sheng is one of several prominent Chinese-American composers – along with Tan Dun, Chen Yi and Zhou Long – who mix elements of Chinese and Western music.

Read more about this at the Union-Tribune website:

   http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/features/20081019-9999-1a19sheng.html

Juilliard String Quartet announces a new violinist for 2009/2010

On October 20, 2008 Juilliard President Joseph W. Polisi announced that 36-year-old violinist and Juilliard alumnus Nick Eanet will join the Juilliard String Quartet as first violinist in July 2009. He also becomes a member of the Juilliard violin faculty beginning with the fall 2009 semester. A Brooklyn native, Nick is concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, former first violinist of the Mendelssohn Quartet, a former student of founding first violinist Robert Mann – a very natural fit for the Juilliard String Quartet Family.

Mr. Eanet follows violinist Joel Smirnoff as first violin; Mr. Smirnoff has become President of the Cleveland Institute of Music and performs with the Quartet through the 2008-2009 season, finishing his stellar tenure at Tanglewood on June 28, 2009.

Click to read the full press release and for the New York Times piece by Daniel Wakin that broke the story.

Mauricio Kagel, 76, Writer of Avant-Garde Music, Is Dead

By William Grimes

Mauricio Kagel, an avant-garde composer whose often absurdist works blurred the boundaries between music, theater and film, died on Wednesday in Cologne, Germany. He was 76.

His death was announced by his music publishing house, C.F. Peters Musikverlag. No cause was given.

By temperament a dadaist and provocateur, Mr. Kagel drew on the musical examples of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In "Anagrama," a work from the 1950s, singers and instrumentalists were called on to emit notes, squeaks, whispers and shouts corresponding to an elaborate system derived from the letters in a Latin palindrome.

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/arts/music/20kagel.html

The exiles who wowed America

How exiled European artists reacted to the energy and freedom of the US

By Clive James

Imagine Balanchine watching a bunch of cheerleaders and you've got this book in a flash. Vignettes are its basic strength, as was bound to be true. The subject of the twentieth-century European artists in exile is too big for one book. Jean-Michel Palmier proved it by publishing his pioneering compendium Weimar en exil (1988) as two books, one of them called Exil en Europe and the other Exil en Amérique. Since there could easily have been others – Exil en Australie would have been interesting – it will be appreciated that Palmier himself felt obliged to limit his purview.

Joseph Horowitz gets the story into a single volume, Artists in Exile, by concentrating on a single destination, America, and even then he trims the field. His subtitle "How refugees from twentieth-century war and revolution transformed the American performing arts" leaves out the writers, painters, photographers and architects, which means we aren't going to hear much about any of the Mann clan, and nothing at all about Mondrian, Ernst, Léger, Moholy-Nagy, Mies, Gropius, Andreas Feininger, Lyonel Feininger … but let's stop. Horowitz gives us mainly those exiles who worked in music, theatre and film. Even then, there are more than enough names to be going on with: Balanchine, Stravinsky, Koussevitsky, Toscanini, Stokowski, Kurt Weill and Rouben Mamoulian are only the most prominent.

Read the complete review at The Times website:

   http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4618457.ece

Vernon Handley

Conductor who ignored orchestral fashions in order to champion British composers, and was adored by musicians.

8:17PM BST 10 Sep 2008

Vernon Handley, who died yesterday aged 77, was one of the best-loved of conductors and a great champion of British orchestral music; a protégé of Sir Adrian Boult, he was renowned for holding fast to two principles – an undemonstrative technique and an unfashionable repertoire.

While he was by no means alone in promoting the underdogs of British music, no one did more than 'Tod' Handley to bring them to the attention of the mainstream. His aim was to include at least one British work in all his concerts. Nevertheless, he would acknowledge that "One man can't put it right," adding: "But I've done as much as I could, and I'm going to keep trying."

Read more about this at the Telegraph website:

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2778592/Vernon-Handley.html

Why So Serious?

How the classical concert took shape.

By Alex Ross

The modern classical-music performance, as audiences have come to know it and sometimes to love it, adheres to a fairly rigid format. The music usually begins a few minutes after eight, listeners having taken their seats beforehand to peruse program notes or chat with neighbors. The evening falls into two halves, each lasting around forty-five or fifty minutes. An orchestral concert often proceeds from overture or short tone poem to solo concerto, and then to a symphony or some other major statement; a solo recital builds up to a big sonata or a virtuoso showpiece. The audience is expected to remain quiet for the duration of each work, and those who applaud between movements may face embarrassment. Around ten o'clock, the audience claps for two or three minutes, the performers bow two or three times, and all go home. Opera has a slightly looser code – the length of the evening depends on the composer's whims, and the audience makes its feelings known with sporadic applause and very occasional boos – but there, too, an atmosphere of high seriousness prevails.

Read more about this at the New Yorker website:

   http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2008/09/08/080908crmu_music_ross

Classical download store launches

DRM-free tracks mean music
can be transferred to other audio devices

Classical music lovers in the UK will now be able to download their favourite works from the web, thanks to a new resource launched today.

Passionato is providing the world's biggest collection of high-quality classical downloads, first in the UK and later worldwide. The company says more than 18,000 recordings are available. Many fans of classical music have previously shunned MP3 downloads because of disappointing quality. Passionato offers its downloads – single tracks, works or albums – at high-quality 320kbps MP3 or lossless FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec).

Read more about this at the BBC News website:

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7608442.stm

Pressler Bids Adieu To Beaux Arts Trio

By Tom Huizenga

If they had an Olympic medal for "Long-Distance Chamber Music," the gold would surely go to the Beaux Arts Trio. After a 53-year run, the ensemble – made up of one piano, one violin and one cello – takes the stage Thursday night at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts, to give its final U.S. performance before calling it quits.

There is something Olympian about the Beaux Arts Trio. The group performed at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, just one of thousands of venues the ensemble has played during the last five decades.

It's fitting that the Beaux Arts Trio is returning to Tanglewood, because that's where it all began. The group gave its first public concert there on July 13, 1955. And for 53 years, one member of the Trio has remained constant: pianist Menahem Pressler. He's 84 now, but he still vividly recalls how that first concert launched a career for three separate musicians who quickly grew into a single musical unit.

Read more about this at the NPR website:

   http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93734452

Opera – the Sun loves it

Hats off to the tabloid – their spread on opera is virtuoso stuff

Today's the day for Sun readers – and first-time, sheepish Sun readers who normally read the Guardian – to apply for cheap tickets to the first night of the Royal Opera House's new season on September 8, which I wrote about last week. And I have to say, hats off to the Sun – what a fabulous job they have done. On the front page the headlines read: "Amy was 'spiked with e'"; "Honeymoon Groom Ben Brain Dead"... and "A night at the Opera from £7.50... OPERA WE LOVE IIIIIIT!"

Inside comes the headline: "Sex, death, booze, bribery, revenge, ghosts... who said opera is boring?" The story explains that "The truth is, most operas are dirtier than Amy Winehouse's beehive, riper than a full-on effing rant by Gordon Ramsay and more violent than a Tarantino bloodfest."

This is virtuoso stuff. What's brilliant – and important and true -about the Sun's take on opera is that they see no reason to pretend that it's a polite, elegant, decorative artform – they are determined to communicate that it is dirty, dangerous, sexy and nasty. Which in my view, is spot on. Good for them. I even forgive them their rather hilarious attack on "elitist broadsheet the Guardian ... blow them. They can have a night in with thier mung bean sandwiches and discuss existentialist feminism. We'll be down at the opera having a knees-up".

Read more about this at the Guardian website:

   http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2008/07/opera_the_sun_loves_it.html

Compassion, Not Revenge, After a Rape in a War Zone

By Anthony Tommasini

SANTA FE, N.M. – Contemporary composers looking for an easy way to create a big effect often turn to what could be called the orchestral pileup technique. Want to wallop your audience? Just add pummeling percussion, thick chords and more to create a barrage of noise. Or if the desired effect is ruminative, then lay on hazy harmonies and doodling melodic bits, though the result can sound like the mindless music a massage therapist employs to get clients to relax.

Something like the pileup technique is a basic component in the music of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. But Ms. Saariaho uses it with ravishing subtlety and to haunting effect, as was clear from Wednesday night's performance of "Adriana Mater" here at the Santa Fe Opera. The production is the American premiere of this 2006 work, directed by Peter Sellars.

Ms. Saariaho is not a mere purveyor of coloristic orchestral effects. She spent formative years working at Ircam, the center for experimental music in Paris, where she has lived since 1992. She immersed herself in the school of French composers who practice spectralism, which isolates the higher overtones of pitch to create sonorities at once amorphous yet elemental. She has one of the most acute ears in contemporary music. And during long stretches of this bleakly humane opera, elegiac vocal lines spin out over the thick-textured, nervously undulant orchestra. Striking details in this multilayered music come through with uncanny clarity.

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/arts/music/01adri.html?

Vibrato wars whip up a musical storm over last night of the Proms

Voices are raised in anger after a famous conductor decides to give a controversial performance of Elgar's classic crowd-pleaser

By Amelia Hill & David Smith

When this year's BBC Proms climax with the traditional chorus of Elgar's 'Land of Hope and Glory', prommers expecting the traditional rousing sing-along could feel distinctly disappointed. For the first time in the Proms' 113-year history, the march – also known as Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 – is likely to be played without vibrato, an obscure and extreme performance style that lends an icy tone to music and divides classical music fans into opposing camps.

Vibrato, a musical effect produced by a regular pulsating change of pitch, is used to add expression and vocal-like qualities to instrumental music. On string instruments, the effect is created by the controlled vibration of the finger holding down the string.

'If the orchestra agree, as I hope and think they will, to my suggestion that we play one of Britain's most patriotic pieces as its composer intended, then the last night of the Proms will sound strikingly different to ever before,' said Sir Roger Norrington, one of Europe's leading conductors and founder of the London Classical Players.

Read more about this at the The Observer website:

   http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/aug/03/proms.classicalmusicandopera1

A Computer-Music Man Unplugs

By Daniel J. Wakin

After 35 years immersed in the world of computer music, the composer Paul Lansky talks with wonder about the enormous capacities of primitive objects carved from trees or stamped from metal sheets: violins, cellos, trumpets, pianos.

"To create the sound of a violin – wow!" he said in a recent interview. "I can't do that on a computer."

Mr. Lansky has written a new chapter, or at least a fat footnote, in the annals of artistic reinvention. A professor at Princeton, he was a pioneering figure in the computer music field and wrote one of its important programs, Cmix. (He also earned a place of honor with Radiohead fans when the band used an excerpt from an early piece.) But Mr. Lansky has abandoned the art form that made his name and has turned to more traditional composition.

"I hate to say this, but I think I'm done," Mr. Lansky said. "Basically I've said what I've had to say. Here I am, 64, and I find myself at what feels like the beginning of a career. I'm interested in writing for real people at this point."

Read more about this at the New York Time website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/arts/music/03waki.html

Taking a Dip in The Online Stream

Classical Music Makes A Play for Web Crowd

By Anne Midgette

Of all European summer music festivals, the Bayreuth Festival may be the hardest ticket. Devoted to the operas of Richard Wagner, presented in the theater that he built, it receives so many requests for its two-month season that people wait for years to get in. Last Sunday saw the first performance this year of "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" as produced by Katharina Wagner, the composer's great-granddaughter.

Last year, it was the talk of the season among those who had managed to see it. This year, it could be experienced live on your home computer.

For if you don't travel to Europe's festivals this summer, some of them will come to you. If the 49 euros (almost $80) that Bayreuth charged to log on to its first-ever live video transmission was too steep, you could go to the Web site Medici.tv, which this summer has featured live broadcasts from three festivals: Aix-en-Provence, Aspen and Verbier. That same afternoon, free of charge, it was offering a live webcast from Verbier of a chamber concert with violinist Julian Rachlin, cellist Mischa Maïsky and pianists Piotr Anderszewski and Nikolai Lugansky, among others.

Does anybody actually want to watch classical concerts on their computer screens? Evidently, yes. Last year, Medici.tv reached 150,000 unique viewers with its broadcasts from Verbier, according to Medici.tv's founder and director, Hervé Boissière. This year, he says, the numbers are even better. (Check the Medici.tv website for information on web cast availability.)

Read more about this at the Washington Post website:

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/31/AR2008073101848.html

Once-Shy Pianist Tells, Um, Not Quite All

By Vivien Schweitzer

When the reclusive Argentine pianist Martha Argerich performs, her long, thick hair cascades over her shoulders, often entirely obscuring her face from the audience and affording a glimmer of privacy even onstage.

Ms. Argerich, who for almost two decades gave very few solo recitals, has always felt uneasy in the spotlight offstage as well. "I just saw a program called 'Big Brother,' " she says at the beginning of "Martha Argerich: Evening Talks," a 2002 film by Georges Gachot newly released on DVD by the Medici Arts label. "All those exhibitionists who like their private lives filmed. Not me."

But Ms. Argerich, a brilliant musician whose playing combines prodigious technique with uncanny musicality, overcame her shyness and granted Mr. Gachot a three-hour interview. It was shot one evening in 2001 between a rehearsal and a performance of Schumann's Piano Concerto with the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra in Heilbronn, Germany.

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/arts/television/03schw.html

Mahler triumphant

A great composer nears the end of a great biographical voyage

By Hugh Wood

The long voyage is nearly over, and the great ship is at last approaching land. But we are not quite yet in harbour; for Henry-Louis de La Grange's revision of Gustav Mahler: Volume One still awaits translation into English. Then the labours of a dedicated lifetime may be at an end. Meanwhile, we have here, at over 1,750 pages, the longest of the four volumes, and in every way the climactic one. So much in it is new, or newly re-explored, or freshly and radically re-interpreted. The portrait that emerges is surprising because it is so straightforward: that of a great conductor at the height of his powers and a great composer striking out boldly into new territory. What has previously been obscured and diminished by mythmaking, melodrama and malice is now at last given its full stature. That this new depiction is the underlying intention of the author is made quite clear from the first page: to realize how well he has succeeded, it is necessary to read the whole book. But this is not just a biography: it is more of a Mahler-Lexicon, almost a history of the age. De La Grange has found himself irresistibly drawn down every avenue that offers itself, and his interests are wide. By the time one has read through all thirty-three of the Appendices, and has discovered in the last one the recipe for Mahler's favourite dessert (Marillonknödel – and it sounds delicious), one feels not only triumphant but replete.

Read more about this at the Times Online website:

   http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4429303.ece

Rediscovering a Norwegian Master

By Jeff Dunn

Last month I witnessed an unusual spectacle: the Bergen Music Festival in Norway. After three or four curtain calls, clapping in unison began and, as if by prearranged signal, everyone stood at once in enthusiastic acknowledgement. The orchestra that did the playing was the visiting Stavanger Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ole Kristian Ruud. The music that did the arousing was a new "reconstruction" of the Julekvelden (Yule Eve) Symphony No. 1 by Geirr Tveitt.

Who?

Geirr Tveitt (1908-1981, rhymes with "fire fight") is virtually unknown in this country, but the hundredth anniversary of his birth was being celebrated by the concert I attended, and other concerts elsewhere, for good reason. His music, in its stark power, speaks to the overwhelming influence of nature on those living among the deep fjords. His technique, superbly developed at the Leipzig Conservatory and subsequent studies in Paris and Vienna, was second to none of his generation of Norwegian composers. The range of expression found in his Hundred Hardanger Folk Tunes suites, and the instantly recognizable originality of his sound, makes him an artist of international significance.

Read more about this at the San Francisco Classical Voice website:

   http://www.sfcv.org/2008/07/22/rediscovering-a-norweigan-master/

Norman Dello Joio, Prolific and Popular Composer, Is Dead at 95

Norman Dello Joio, a composer who achieved wide popularity in the mid-20th century with a proliferation of essentially tonal, lyrical works, died on Thursday at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 95.

By Daniel J. Wakin

Mr. Dello Joio wrote dozens of pieces each for chorus, orchestra, solo voice, chamber groups and piano, as well as scores for television and three operas. Church music, the popular tunes of the jazz age and 19th-century Italian opera were all influences on his style, which could be both austere and colorful.

In defining his musical approach, Mr. Dello Joio cited the advice of a teacher, the composer Paul Hindemith, that he should never forget that his music was "lyrical by nature."

That meant, "Don't sacrifice necessarily to a system," Mr. Dello Joio said on his Web site. "If it's valid, and it's good, put it down in your mind. Don't say, 'I have to do this because the system tells me to.' No, that's a mistake." He said he took the advice to heart, and jokingly called himself an "arch-conservative."

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/nyregion/27dellojoio.html

Linux-powered clarinet playing robot wins international prize

Entire computer-driven orchestras not too far away, says NICTA's chief technology officer

By Andrew Hendry

A team of experts and students from NICTA and the University of NSW have won first place in a major international technology competition for developing a robotically operated, computer-driven clarinet running Linux.

Developed over the last eight months, the automated clarinetist beat a Dutch developed guitar playing robot to the top gong in the Artemis Orchestra competition, thanks to its playing ability and the high level of complexity in its mouthpiece design.

Head of the project, NICTA's Dr John Judge, described the robot as an embedded computer system connected via specially constructed electronics to actuators – brass plungers with rubber nylon feet – that control the keys and mouthpiece of the clarinet.

Read more about this at the ComputerWorld website:

   http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;277215722

Classical music: A fair wage – but those in bigger cities make more

By Kyle MacMillan

With bachelor and master of music performance degrees under her belt, Tamara Meredith envisioned a life as a college professor, focusing on her specialization in early music. But things didn't quite work out that way.

Instead, she is the full-time director of the Eaton Public Library, and the flutist and violist performs on the side with the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado and the Dallas Bach Society, and substitutes as needed in a few area modern orchestras. She couldn't be happier. "I have a day job in a place that I really enjoy," Meredith said. "I get to help a lot of people with the work that I do, so that's very fulfulling. And my evenings and weekends, I'm free to perform whenever and wherever I want."

Read more about this at the Denver Post website:

   http://www.denverpost.com/ci_9843953

Estonian factory major player in piano production

By Shelley Emling for Cox News Service

Tallinn, Estonia – Buying a grand piano from Estonia might seem as absurd as looking for fine champagne at McDonald's. But what were once Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's favorite pianos are now in hot demand at dealerships across the United States.

Last year the Estonia Piano Factory exported 300 pianos, both grands and baby grands, with 90 percent headed to the United States. In quality and reputation, Estonia pianos are giving Steinway & Sons a serious challenge. And many discerning musicians say that owning an Estonia piano – almost completely made by hand – is akin to owning a Stradivarius, the iconic violin famous for the high quality of its sound.

Read more about this at the Columbus Dispatch website:

   http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/arts/stories/2008/07/13/2_ESTONIA_PIANOS.ART_ART_07-13-08_E7_IKAMMNE.html

Panned by reviewer, then told to go bankrupt

By Amol Rajan

A British composer was told to go bankrupt yesterday after he unsuccessfully tried to sue the London Evening Standard for libel. Keith Burstein ran up legal costs of £67,000 defending a test-case libel action against Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Standard, over a critical review of one of his operas.

He told Chief Registrar Stephen Baister in the Royal Courts of Justice that he was taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights. The registrar said Mr Burstein was entitled to take the case in Europe but he was required to pay the legal costs already run up. This would entail complying with a court order against him by paying the £67,000.

When Mr Burstein told the registrar he could not pay, Mr Baister replied: "Then you go bankrupt." He added that, in balancing the rights of Associated Newspapers against the speculative nature of what Mr Burstein was hoping to do, it was proper to rule on the side of the newspaper group, which also publishes the Daily Mail, in forcing him to pay legal costs.

Mr Burstein, 51, confirmed that he would not be able to pay. He is working on a new symphony for the South Bank Symphonia and on an opera with Ben Okri, the Booker Prize winner. "I lead a rather simple life and don't have many material possessions," he said later.

Read more about this at the Independent website:

   http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/panned-by-reviewer-then-bankrupted-by-libel-action-867640.html

Music 'can enhance wine taste'

Playing a certain type of music can enhance the way wine tastes, research by psychologists suggests.

The Heriot Watt University study found people rated the change in taste by up to 60% depending on the melody heard. The researchers said cabernet sauvignon was most affected by "powerful and heavy" music, and chardonnay by "zingy and refreshing" sounds. Professor Adrian North said the study could lead retailers to put music recommendations on their wine bottles. The research involved 250 students at the university who were offered a free glass of wine in exchange for their views.

Brain theory

Four types of music were played - Carmina Burana by Orff ("powerful and heavy"), Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky ("subtle and refined"), Just Can't Get Enough by Nouvelle Vague ("zingy and refreshing") and Slow Breakdown by Michael Brook ("mellow and soft"). The white wine was rated 40% more zingy and refreshing when that music was played, but only 26% more mellow and soft when music in that category was heard.

Read more about this at the BBC News website:

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7400109.stm

Adventures in Concert Programming

By Anthony Tommasini

Thomas W. Morris, a former executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra and now a consultant to orchestras, is hardly naïve about the tradition-bound field of classical music. He realizes that conductors of American orchestras face many pressures to play it safe in choosing programs.

Still, it exasperates him that so many conductors seem so wary of taking chances with unconventional or challenging programs.

"When I'm on a consulting project and I encounter a boring program," he said in a telephone interview, "inevitably I'm told, 'The marketing department made us do it.'" But to him hewing to the timeworn three-part program (an overture, a concerto, a popular symphony) makes as little sense financially as it does artistically.

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/arts/music/20tomm.html

China says it will ban performers

Steven Spielberg, Bjork among offending artists

By Alex S. Dai

Shanghai – China is tightening the screws on political expression, saying it will ban foreign artists and entertainers who have ever engaged in activities deemed to "threaten national sovereignty."

The notice, posted Thursday on the Ministry of Culture's Web site, follows a March incident in which Icelandic singer Bjork yelled, "Tibet, Tibet, Tibet" after performing her song "Declare Independence" live in Shanghai.

Under the new mandate, Chinese event organizers will be expected to scrutinize acts and material and ban any performance that might threaten national unity, stir ethnic hatred or violate Beijing's strict policy on state-approved religions and "cultural norms."

[ Editors note: It is quite likely that by simply carrying this story and providing these links this article, and possibly all of Classical Net, will be blocked by Chinese censors. ]

Read more about this at The Hollywood Reporter website:

   http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3ifcadec3fe426ce3c7520bfd16cebd716

Can't get it out of my head

A father's yearlong quest to grasp the infant musical mind

By Jeremy Eichler

I've never felt so paralyzed standing before my CD collection as the day I brought my newborn son home from the hospital and decided to play him his very first music. So much was at stake. Should it be modern or Baroque? Orchestral or opera? Would Mozart make him smarter? Would Schoenberg instill in him revolutionary tendencies? Would Wagner make him loathe his Jewish roots?

I settled on Bach's "Art of Fugue" in an arrangement for string quartet. Why not begin at the summit, and what's more, I imagined, all that searching counterpoint would be like honey for the infant brain. He responded with aplomb, conveying his wise, wordless mastery of the material by slipping into an eyes-closed, meditative state. OK, he fell asleep.

But my yearlong quest to understand the infant musical mind had begun. As it turns out, my timing was good, as the cognitive and neuroscience research on music has been exploding these days, driven by techno logical breakthroughs in brain imaging and a newly widespread openness toward music as a legitimate field of scientific study. It's hard to miss the reverberations. Keith Lockhart has been outfitted with sensors on the podium of Symphony Hall; Oliver Sacks's "Musicophilia" has brought strange tales of musical obsession to the bestseller list; the journal Nature has been running a nine-part essay series on the science of music; and a conference this weekend at Tufts University is convening more than 100 researchers from 13 countries to discuss the subject of "Music, Language, and the Mind." The art form that Claude Lévi-Strauss once dubbed "the supreme mystery of the science of man" is, one note at a time, becoming less mysterious.

Read more about this at The Boston Globe website:

   http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2008/07/12/cant_get_it_out_of_my_head/

Scandalissimo! Puccini's sex life exposed

The private life of Giacomo Puccini was famously as colourful as his operas, but only now has the truth emerged about the scandal that almost undid him. It's an extraordinary tale of infidelity, jealousy and vengeance that continues to haunt the lives of his descendants to this day

By Adrian Mourby

This year, the many celebrations marking the 150^th anniversary of Puccini's birth are set to include the unveiling of a new al fresco opera house on the shores of the lake where many of his masterpieces were composed. Giacomo Puccini was the most commercially successful opera composer there has ever been. At his death in 1924 he was worth well over £130m by today's standards.

Much of this wealth came from the wonder years (1895-1904) when the Tuscan maestro turned out in rapid succession three of the most widely performed operas in the world, La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly, while living in idyllic surroundings in Torre del Lago on the shores of Lake Massaciuccoli. Then he seemed to run out of steam, not finishing his next work, La Fanciulla del West, until 1910. While accomplished, La Fanciulla isn't in the same league as Bohème, Tosca and Butterfly. So what went wrong?

Read more about this at The Independent website:

   http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/scandalissimo-puccinis-sex-life-laid-bare-859666.html

Christopher Rouse: Going to Eleven

By Frank J. Oteri

When most people think of the music of Christopher Rouse, the first thing they probably think of is how loud it is. Some years back there was even a notorious story about an orchestra musician who threatened to sue Rouse for subjecting him to such high decibel levels on stage. Ear-splitting volume is more commonly associated with hard rock than classical music. Rock was a formative influence on this Baltimore native, who as a child was immediately drawn to early rock and roll before his mother turned him on to symphonies, but he quickly grew most fond of raucous 20th-century fare, from Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Once he found his own voice as a composer, the visceral power of rock influenced an over-the-top compositional sensibility which has manifested itself in his two powerful symphonies, numerous concertos, and a massive Requiem which finally received its world premiere last year. His brand new Concerto for Orchestra, which Marin Alsop will premiere at Cabrillo this summer, also promises to pack a wallop.

But not everything Chris writes is completely in-your-face. At the 2007 Chamber Music America conference, the Calder Quartet played haunting strains of music sometimes at the threshold of audibility. In that crowded hotel conference suite you could hear a pin drop. Everyone stood still, including me. I came in late but had to stay until the end to find out what they were playing. When I learned that it was from the Second String Quartet by Chris Rouse, I was mildly stunned. That a composer I had known for years and had come to admire for his raucous percussion pieces such as Odoun Badagris and Bonham and the intense Second Symphony could also write music as subtle and fragile as this completely made me rethink his music. I pored over scores and was startled by how meticulously detailed they were – even the most cataclysmic passages.

Read the complete interview at the New Music Box website:

   http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5619

CT scans may explain Stradivarius violins' sweet sound

By Greg Gilbert

Growth rings in the wood used to make Stradivarius violins in the 1700s may hold the explanation for their unparalleled sound, say Dutch scientists.

Researchers at the Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, who put the instruments through a computed tomographic (CT) scanner, published their research Wednesday in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Many music lovers believe the classical violins made in Cremona, Italy, by famous masters such as Antonio Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu, produce unique tonal expressiveness and projection. Despite three centuries of technological advancement, modern violin makers have been unable to duplicate the sound.

The scientists, who tweaked a computer program used to analyze scans measuring lung density in patients with emphysema, said that may be because of important differences in wood from the 1600s and wood today.

Read more about this at the CBC News website:

   http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2008/07/02/violin.html

"The Fly" opera is buzz of Paris season

By Angela Doland

Be afraid, be very afraid: David Cronenberg's 1986 horror flick, "The Fly," has undergone a bizarre metamorphosis. It's now an opera.

The new incarnation, with tenor Placido Domingo conducting a score by Oscar-winning composer Howard Shore ("The Lord of the Rings"), isn't as gory as the movie. Audiences will be spared close-ups of the title character's fingernails falling off as he makes the transition from mild-mannered scientist to giant insect.

Still, for an opera, it's pretty scary – even if there are touches of dark humor. Giggles broke out among those invited to Monday's dress rehearsal when a mezzo-soprano belted out the film's catchphrase: "Be afraid. Be very afraid."

Cronenberg, who is directing the opera, wasn't sure what effect it would have.

"Someone's 6-year-old said, after seeing one of our rehearsals, that she thought she would have to sleep with her parents for a while," he told reporters. "So I guess it's working."

Read more about this at the Yahoo News website:

   http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080701/ap_en_ot/opera_the_fly

Washington Post Hires Full-time Music Critic

By Susan Elliott

Amid the current trend to the contrary among newspapers, The Washington Post last week hired a permanent staff music critic to succeed Tim Page. Anne Midgette, who has been in the job on an interim basis since January, when Page took a leave of absence, has been hired officially as The Post's classical music critic.

"In light of all the lay-offs around the country, they're really bucking the trend in committing to serious arts journalism," said a delighted Midgette in a brief telephone conversation.

Read more about this at the Musical America website:

   http://www.musicalamerica.com/news/newsstory.cfm?archived=0&storyid=18457

Symphony Orchestra 2.0

By David Bratman

San José, as its boosters like to point out, is now the largest city in Northern California. But if it's the leader in population, it has a ways to go to catch up to San Francisco in cultural influence. Still, San José is far from the cultural desert that its flat sprawling landscape might suggest to residents of hillier, more congested parts of the Bay Area. The lively downtown has a flavor to it that you could find, perhaps to your equal surprise, in places like Sacramento and Santa Rosa. And there are musical performances well worth hearing here, enough to enthuse the locals and perhaps even draw audiences from outside the city and its suburbs.

San José's leading concert ensemble is Symphony Silicon Valley. Born in 2002 out of the ashes of the old San José Symphony (see a story recounted by SFCV here), it has grown cautiously over the years, with surprising and gratifying success. The orchestra was artistically mature from the beginning, drawing most of its personnel from its predecessor. Where SSV has really grown is in scheduling.

Read more about this at the San Francisco Classical Voice website:

   http://www.sfcv.org/2008/07/01/symphony-orchestra-20/

Conductor Comes to A Coda

NSO's Leonard Slatkin Leaves on a Note of Regret

By Anne Midgette

Leonard Slatkin is temperamentally nervous. When he takes the stage to conduct, he walks out rapidly, slightly hunched, his head thrust forward, as if moving through a gauntlet and trying to protect himself from the needling arrows of thousands of watching eyes. In person, in his office at the Kennedy Center, he sits back in a pose of assumed relaxation, his soft Muppet face marked with thick white eyebrows and a sharp line of a mouth, and chats.

But he skitters across topics, anticipating the criticism that may be lurking behind every question, mentioning it, steering away from it, then returning to it to show that he is not steering away from it, until one is left with the impression that outside criticism, despite his protests to the contrary, matters to him very much indeed.

The general impression is that conducting is a difficult metier for a man who describes himself as having been chronically shy in his youth. The particular impression, as Slatkin talks about his 12-year tenure at the head of the National Symphony Orchestra, is of encountering someone in the final throes of a failing marriage, going over ground that has been trodden many times before, prodding the scars of old wounds that still have a tired ache.

Read more about this at the Washington Post website:

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/26/AR2008062603240.html

Composing behind closed doors

Philadelphia's Harry Hewitt, prolific, gentlemanly and unknown, is getting a hearing five years after his death.

By David Patrick Stearns

Were it possible to completely live the life of one's imagination, Harry Hewitt would have succeeded in doing so.

The Philadelphia composer created 3,000 works over 60 years – 32 symphonies, an opera, songs inspired by Lord of the Rings – but was barely known to artistic colleagues living only blocks from his apartment at 19th and Pine. His concerts were off the grid, his recordings few, his recognition level nothing remotely resembling what composers crave – and need, in order to grow.

Gentlemanly, idealistic and possessed of a smiling, Buddha-like manner, Hewitt died in such obscurity at age 82 five years ago that fellow composer Jan Krzywicki made a point of speaking at a memorial service he feared would be sparsely attended. "Harry was kind to me; I wanted to support him," he recalled. Hewitt wasn't necessarily ignored; he simply never came to the attention of many Philadelphia musicians.

Read more about this at the Philiadelphia Inquirer website:

   http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment/20080629_Composing_behind_closed_doors.html

Leonard Pennario, 83, Classical Pianist, Dies

By James Barron

Leonard Pennario, a popular classical pianist known for his enthusiastic public performances and recordings of the more melodic modern composers, died on Friday in La Jolla, Calif. He was 83.

The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, said Mary Kunz Goldman, who is writing his biography.

Mr. Pennario, who also became a life master in tournament bridge, was listed in both the New Grove's Dictionary of Music and The Official Encyclopedia of Bridge. As a pianist, he made many recordings in the days of long-playing records, notably of works by Gershwin and Rachmaninoff, and appeared with well-known orchestras and conductors. Beginning in the 1960s, he also played in trios with the violinist Jascha Heifetz and the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.

Mr. Pennario made more than 60 recordings in all, of music by composers as diverse as Bela Bartok and Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Ms. Goldman said he was the first pianist after Rachmaninoff himself to record all four Rachmaninoff concertos and the "Variations on a Theme of Paganini."

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/arts/music/28pennario.html

An Argument for Music

Critic Alex Ross keeps "classical" music current.

by Paul Gleason

The first movement of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto ended, and Carnegie Hall erupted in applause. Joshua Bell, whose dazzling solos and severe good looks had fired the crowd, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped it theatrically across his brow. The audience remained enthralled, but Alex Ross '90, sitting in the critic's traditional perch halfway up the left aisle, jotted down his thoughts in a small black notebook.

Ross was less interested in Bell than in how conductor Kent Nagano was molding his new group, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Already, Ross heard hints of Nagano's signature sound: a cool, elegant balance. But the concerto itself, he noted during the intermission, wasn't quite together. "Bell performed very brilliantly. But I didn't feel he and Nagano and the orchestra were totally in sync," Ross said. "Bell seemed to be in his own world a bit, and the orchestra was a little eeeehhh…" He made a nervous motion with his hands, as if someone were trying to hand him a small, rambunctious animal.

Ross wasn't planning to review the concert for the New Yorker, where he is a staff critic. He simply wanted to keep up with a favorite conductor and hear the American premiere of a piece by Unsuk Chin, a Korean composer whose opera he had reviewed favorably the previous summer. "Absolutely essential to my mission as a critic is talking about living composers," he said. "It wouldn't be interesting to me to spend all my time evaluating the right way to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. I enjoy writing that kind of column, but the greatest excitement is when works come into being."

Read more about this at the Harvard Magazine website:

   http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/07/an-argument-for-music.html

The hunt for the perfect instrument

[Glenn Gould adored his Steinway concert grand No. 318 – then the movers smashed it…]

By John Terauds

Katie Hafner's suggestively titled book – A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano – is like an executive summary for which someone has condensed all the need-to-know information into a tidy package. In this case, the perplexing eccentricities of Glenn Gould, both man and artist, are wrapped around one of his chief obsessions: finding the right piano.

To get into the spirit, try to imagine how a favourite paintbrush or garden spade feels in your hand. Or consider how your bicycle or car responds to your body's inputs.

Tactile memory is our window on the intimate sensual relationship that a musician has with his or her instrument. Because they're made from wood and other climate-sensitive materials, most instruments end up with a unique touch, sound and personality.

Read more about this at the Toronto Star website:

   http://www.thestar.com/article/447016

Amid Despair in a Venezuelan Prison, Strains of Hope From a Music Program

By Scott Dalton

Los Teques, Venezuela – When Nurul Asyiqin Ahmad was taken seven months ago to her cell at the National Institute of Feminine Orientation, a prison perched on a hill in this city of slums on the outskirts of Caracas, learning how to play Beethoven was one of the last things on her mind.

"The despair gripped me, like a nightmare had become my life," said Ms. Ahmad, 26, a shy law student from Malaysia who claims she is innocent of charges of trying to smuggle cocaine on a flight from Caracas to Paris. "But when the music begins, I am lifted away from this place." Ms. Ahmad plays violin and sings in the prison's orchestra.

In a project extending Venezuela's renowned system of youth orchestras to some of the country's most hardened prisons, Ms. Ahmad and hundreds of other prisoners are learning a repertory that includes Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and folk songs from the Venezuelan plains.

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/world/americas/23venezuela.html

Keyboard moment in China's cultural evolution

By Petroc Trelawny

As my plane makes its final approach into the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, the mountains give way briefly to green paddy fields, and then industry takes over.

Beneath are hundreds of vast blue-roofed sheds and smoking red-brick chimney stacks. The landscape is mapped with rail yards and lorry parks; heavily laden barges crawl along the creeks of the Pearl River. With a vast economy that's now larger than that of nearby Hong Kong, Guangdong Province deserves its title as the factory of China. …

I've come to visit a company that last year made 100,000 pianos. The Pearl River Piano Company says it's now the world's largest: 3000 staff work on eight production lines, and it feels more like a car factory than a place making things as delicate and tactile as pianos.

A basic Pearl River piano costs about $1600, a fortune to many Chinese, but well within the budget of the country's burgeoning urban middle class. Their new wealth, combined with a desire to give their offspring a better childhood than they experienced, has led to an obsession with the piano in China. Conservative estimates suggest that 30 million Chinese children are learning the instrument; many reckon the figure is much higher. One academic told me the country was in the grip of piano fever.

Read more about this at The Australian website:

   http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23910488-16947,00.html

Gabriel Prokofiev's Nonclassical club night breaks with tradition

Club nights are taking the starch out of live classical music

By Femke Colborne

The girl taking tickets on the door is wearing odd stockings. It's the middle of June, but one of the bar staff is sporting a woolly hat, complete with a strategically draped bobble. It's 9.30pm on a Wednesday night at the Macbeth on Hoxton Street, and this is exactly the kind of crowd you'd expect to find in this terrifyingly trendy corner of East London. It's not what you'd expect at a classical music concert, though.

But this is no ordinary classical music concert. Nonclassical, run by Gabriel Prokofiev, DJ, producer, composer and grandson of the great Sergei, is a monthly classical club night that mixes live performances from instrumentalists and singers with sets from electronica DJs. Talking during the performances is not frowned upon – in fact, it's positively encouraged – and drinks are served at the bar throughout the night.

The event is just one of a host of classical club nights springing up in cities across the country, aimed at younger punters who are open to classical music but deterred by the formality of the traditional concert hall. According to Prokofiev, young people are put off going to formal concerts because they don't know what to wear or when to clap, and hate being forced to sit in silence throughout a performance.

Read more about this at the Times Online website:

   http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article4121930.ece

Met's cinema shows hit high note

High-def transmissions sparks new interest

By Pamela McClintock

The Metropolitan Opera's live high-def theatrical transmissions – seen worldwide by more than 920,000 people during the 2007-08 season – are creating new fans and sparking renewed interest among existing opera fans. Findings were included in a poll conducted by trade org Opera America in cooperation with National CineMedia, the Met's distribution partner.

The digital theatrical transmissions have been hugely popular over the past two Met seasons. That's good news for Hollywood studios and exhibs as they begin to look to alternative digital content to fill theater seats, particularly since they can charge more per ticket for special events.

The Met's program, whereby select operas are beamed live into theaters on Saturdays, were the brainchild of Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb, who was seeking ways to boost opera's profile, particularly in the post-9/11 period, when Met attendance dropped off.

Read more about this at the Variety website:

   http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117987241.html

Qatar, land of oil and excess, gives us the first Arabian Gulf symphony

The United Arab Emirates are embracing classical music, but is this anything more than the acquisition of cultural bling

By John Evans

Last week the Arabian Gulf, land of oil and excess, got its first symphony. The Qatar Symphony is a four-movement piece lasting almost one hour and is scored for full symphony orchestra. If I tell you that it's written by an Iraqi composer who once laboured under Saddam's regime, you won't be surprised to hear that it's a patriotic affair of whimsical folk tunes and strident marches. But if I then tell you that it's the first step on a journey to making the Gulf the new capital of high art and of classical music, you may fall off your seat.

Earlier, before the work's premiere at the Ritz Carlton in Doha, I'd watched a gang of bulldozers digging a hole for the planned skyscraper next to my hotel. Their ceaseless, subterranean activity seemed to me an analogy for the Gulf's classical-music scene. Bit by bit, it's taking shape – a conservatoire here, a concert hall there. By the time this new skyscraper is built, the foundations for a classical-music scene will have been laid. But is the Gulf really hungry for the arts, or is it building a cultural theme park?

Read more about this at the Times Online website:

   http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article4098647.ece

KUSC is making classical music relevant

The return of Rich Capparela and Dennis Bartel, and the demise of K-Mozart, boost the station in the ratings.

By Sean Mitchell

In the last year, listeners to classical music radio in Los Angeles have noticed something different about segments of the weekday sound of KUSC-FM (91.5) – evidence of human beings talking to them live between the symphonies and concertos of Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms. It's a change from the public station's deliberately generic classical programming that for the last nine years was prerecorded for distribution to more than 50 other outlets across the country with as little trace of Los Angeles or the announcers' personalities as possible.

Now, in afternoon drive-time, host Rich Capparela serves up irreverent observations about Los Angeles and traffic, along with bits of news he has gleaned that day about the classical world – in addition to selections from the classical canon. In the mornings, another KUSC alumnus returned home: Dennis Bartel shares his quietly ironic views of just about everything alongside the music, indicative of his background as a published author of fiction and nonfiction.

Apparently reflecting public approval of these changes and combined with the demise of its only significant rival, KMZT-FM, KUSC's audience has boomed to an average weekly listenership of 525,800…

Read more about this at the Los Angeles Times website:

   http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-kusc7-2008jun07,0,4571580.story

Istanbul Music Festival seeks to expand audience with new projects

By Ali Pektas

The Istanbul International Music Festival got under way yesterday with a concert by the Vienna Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra, featuring violinist Benyamin Sönmez as soloist, at the historic Hagia Eirene Museum.

The festival has a packed schedule in its 36^th year and will bring more than 500 musicians from around the world together with classical music lovers through June 30. Organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) with support from Borusan Holding, the festival will realize a first this year by bringing together the musicians with the audience, students and young musicians outside concert halls as part of a new project.

Read more about this at the Today's Zaman website:

   http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=144098

Are Digital Orchestras a Sign of the Times?

By David Pogue

This past weekend, I attended an astonishing performance of "Les Misérables" performed by 13- to 17-year olds at a local theater program. Two things made it memorable: first, that this program's director was able to find such amazing voices in this age group, especially for a show where most of the characters are men. (In my experience, more teenage girls than boys are interested in theater.)

Second, the production came breathtakingly close to simulating a full professional production – on a church rec-room stage that measures about 30 feet across and 12 feet deep. We're talking tiny. "Les Minirables."

And yet it worked, partly because the carefully built, minimal sets and props were just enough to suggest their big-budget Broadway equivalents – and partly because of a digital orchestra that accompanied the cast.

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/technology/05pogue-email.html

Concert musicians "Brahms and Liszt" with stage fright

By Roger Boyes in Berlin

Doping is not just the preserve of suspiciously muscular Tour de France cyclists and incredibly swift sprinters but also, it seems, earnest frock-coated musicians playing Brahms and Liszt on the world's best concert podiums.

"Between 25 and 30 per cent of musicians regularly take tablets or alcohol to combat performance anxiety," says Helmut Möller, head of Berlin's Kurt Singer Institute for Musical Health. Almost paralysed by stage fright, many musicians – and Professor Möller is not talking about Amy Winehouse or the usual suspects from the rock scene – guzzle beta-blockers, medication usually prescribed for heart problems.

Read more about this at the Times Online website:

   http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4062427.ece

The Manager as Double Agent

By Matthew Gurewitsch

Last fall, the Universal Music Group, owners of the premier classical labels Decca and Deutsche Grammophon, sent shock waves through the industry when they launched, without warning, the Universal Music Artist Agency, offering the company's glamorous roster of recording artists – we are talking the likes of Renée Fleming and Lang Lang – for galas, corporate events, promotional campaigns and even Christmas parties. Mind you, these stars were not Universal's clients.

Under the contracts the world of classical music is used to, the person who negotiates an artist's services for performances, personal appearances, endorsements, recording deals and any other activities is the artist's manager. The historic role of the recording company – whether Universal or a competitor like Sony Classical or EMI Classics – has been to finance recordings and handle manufacturing, distribution, press and promotion, while retaining copyright in perpetuity.

Read more about this at the Wall Street Journal website:

   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121244733967139457.html

Music directors' salaries are definitely on the upswing

By Charles Storch

At events scheduled here Monday, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is to officially introduce Riccardo Muti as its music director-designate. Should Muti be asked why he chose to commit here instead of, say, New York, it's likely he will cite the chance to lead our world-class orchestra and reside in our congenial city.

Don't expect him or the CSO to reveal how much he will be paid when he begins a five-year term as music director in September 2010.

Most symphony orchestras are loath to reveal up-to-date compensation (pay and benefits) for top executives and contractors. Like other U.S. not-for-profits, it can expect two or more years to pass before its tax filings, containing pay details, are readily accessible…

Read more about this at the Chicago Tribune website:

   http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-music-salaries-0601jun01,0,6092832.story

Songs in the key of death

Edward Wickham on how modern tastes in funeral music owe it all to a medieval composer who went out in style

Even if it is an urban myth, it deserves retelling. A bereaved family requested Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody for their loved one's funeral service. A CD was duly played, but the organist allowed it to run on to the next track: Another One Bites the Dust. This is up there with another, perhaps mythical, occasion when an organist misinterpreted a couple's request for "the theme tune from Robin Hood" and, instead of playing Bryan Adams's (Everything I Do) I Do It for You from the Kevin Costner film, launched into this bracing lyric from another era: "Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen."

Choice of funeral music dates us just as surely as clothes or what children's programmes you remember with affection. One of the UK's current favourites, according to a recent survey, is Monty Python's Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. The well-balanced funeral or memorial service will, of course, provide an opportunity for both celebration and seriousness: there is a place for Monty Python and Monteverdi. And the best composers of funeral music can turn on a sixpence. Purcell's apparently simple Funeral Sentences masterfully moves from melancholy to hope in just a couple of chord changes.

Read more about this at The Guardian website:

   http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2282432,00.html

Study: Prefrontal Cortex In Jazz Musicians Winds Down When Improvising

Scientists funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) have found that, when jazz musicians are engaged in the highly creative and spontaneous activity known as improvisation, a large region of the brain involved in monitoring one's performance is shut down, while a small region involved in organizing self-initiated thoughts and behaviors is highly activated.

The researchers propose that this and several related patterns are likely to be key indicators of a brain that is engaged in highly creative thought.

During the study, six highly trained jazz musicians played the keyboard under two scenarios while in the functional MRI scanner. Functional MRI (fMRI) is an imaging tool that measures the amount of blood traveling to various regions of the brain as a means of assessing the amount of neural activity in those areas.

Read more about this at the AllViolin.com website:

   http://www.allviolin.com/content/%5Buser%5D-study-prefrontal-cortex-in-jazz-musicians-winds-down-when-improvising

Blood Pressure High – Turn To Classical Music For Relief

Suffering from high blood pressure? Well then all you need to do is listen to just 30 minutes of rhythmically homogeneous music every day. Researchers at the American Society of Hypertension's Twenty Third Annual Scientific Meeting and Exposition (ASH 2008) reported that patients with mild hypertension who listened to just half an hour of classical, Celtic or raga music a day for four weeks experienced significant reductions in 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure (ABP).

Read more about this at The Link website:

   http://www.thelinkpaper.ca/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1211820926&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2&cat=2

Unknown Mozart's compositions in Poland?

Experts from famous Mazarteum in Salzburg in Austria will probably examine wheather compositions, which were found in musical collection in Jasna Góra, signed by Wolfgang Amadeusz Mozart, are really the famous composer works of art. On 24^th April Polish Press Agency (Polska Agencja Prasowa) informed that in collection in Jasna Góra, unknown Mozart's compositions may be found. On 2^th May, during International Festival of Sacred Music "Gaude Mater" (Miedzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Sakralnej) in Czestochowa, one of the composition, an aria, was peformed.

Read more about this at the New Poland website:

   http://news.poland.com/result/news/id/442

How to be a classic snob

Learning the tricks behind having a snotty attitude about orchestral music.

By Joel Stein

Afew years ago, I began working toward my retirement goal of being an intolerable old man. I'm way ahead of schedule on knowing enough about wine to bore anyone, but classical music has proved much more difficult, largely because no matter how much you listen, it does not get you drunk.

But because my cultural 401(k) depends on being able to cite conductors, orchestras and recording years, I called David Moore, a bassist for the L.A. Philharmonic, and asked him to get me on the road to insufferability. Moore met me at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and said that, like me, he got into classical music late – in his case at USC, where he started out majoring in jazz, which he discovered by getting into guitar solos in Rush and Iron Maiden songs. New York is the center of high culture because its orchestra members keep these kinds of things secret.

Read more about this at the L.A. Times website:

   http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-stein23-2008may23,0,1045111.column

Ghost in the machine

They make the sound of aliens, magic and the cosmic unknown. But just how do you get music out of the theremin and the ondes Martenot?

By Pascal Wyse

In Pamelia Kurstin's Vienna apartment, I have my back up against the wall and am attempting not to breathe. My hands are stuck in mid-air like a neglected shop dummy, and I am told to imagine I'm in a tub of "very thick fluid". Before me is what could be a little robot with two antennae. I carefully reach out towards it and it makes a seasick whooping sound.

Kurstin lets out the first of many enormous giggles. She is giving me a lesson on the theremin: an early electronic instrument that became the universal sound of aliens, ghosts and other voices from the B-movie ether.

Read more about this at the Guardian UK website:

   http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2281481,00.html

Making noise

Misunderstood and underappreciated, percussion players step forward to tell their story.

By Graydon Royce

For three hours, Joe Nathan sits and watches the Minnesota Twins play ball. Then, the relief pitcher is asked to get three quick outs in the ninth inning. In 2007, the Twins played 1,458 innings. Nathan pitched in 72. Yet if he fails, a victory is lost. He is indispensable to the club.

Imagine now the percussionist perched at the back of the Minnesota Orchestra. He waits in fretful anticipation as the instruments around him furiously exhaust themselves, playing Mahler's Ninth Symphony. Finally, Osmo Vänskä fixes his eyes on the percussion section and gestures for the cymbals.

Read more about this at the Star Tribune website:

   http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/music/19101244.html

Classical Musicians Learn to Improvise

By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

Bach employed it at the request of kings, Beethoven used it as a weapon in duels, and women swooned when Liszt got carried away. But at some point in the early 20^th century, improvisation disappeared from classical-music performance. Now a new generation of composers and performers is rediscovering it as a central part of the creative process – and, quite possibly, as a remedy for the shrinking of classical-music audiences.

For Preston Stahly, a composer and 1982 winner of the Charles Ives Prize, it's one of the most important issues in music today. He uses the term "avant-pop" to describe his own music and that of a heterogeneous group of other composers who grew up playing rock and jazz while studying counterpoint and 12-tone music in college. The wall separating the two worlds turned many composers away from academia and into an alternative music scene that is driven by composer-performers and chamber-music ensembles capable of playing and improvising in a number of styles.

Read more about this at the Wall Street Journal website:

   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121133866811609667.html

New Era Brings Buzz (and Big Budgets) to the Met

By Anthony Tommasini

In his mission to reinvigorate the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, who completed his second season as general manager on Saturday night, has inaugurated outreach campaigns and digital-media ventures that are the envy of the opera world. There have been the enormously popular live high-definition transmissions of broadcasts to movie theaters worldwide, and the Met's lively 24-hour station on Sirius satellite radio. Mr. Gelb has proved a master of marketing and drawn high-profile directors from film and theater into the house.

It has all been exciting. It has also been expensive. As The Wall Street Journal reported last month, the Met's operating budget has grown more than 21 percent in two years, to a projected $268.3 million, and the company is drawing down nearly 6.5 percent yearly on its endowment. Mr. Gelb confirmed on Tuesday that this year's deficit will be $6 million to possibly $10 million. He added, though, that last year the Met had a break-even budget, and he anticipates another for next year.

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/arts/music/21met.html

The best meals and the best music make up a menu for the senses

By Paul Horsley

It's the night before Dubravka Tomsic's recital on the Friends of Chamber Music's piano series, and dinner is served.

The guests have worked up a sharp hunger in the living room with appetizers of Cognac-cured salmon on cocktail loaf, spread with butter-horseradish mustard.

Hosts Cynthia Siebert and Larry Hicks have spent the day preparing a gourmet meal for their guests, among them the Slovenian pianist who the next night would deliver two hours of stellar pianism to a Folly Theater audience.

Such dinners are an integral part of the Friends series, Siebert said, engendering a relationship that nourishes body and soul.

Read more about this at the Kansas City Star website:

   http://www.kansascity.com/654/story/621942.html

Vänskä sets down the baton and takes up the pen

The famed music conductor makes his second foray into the world of composition with a nine-minute work that reflects the 35W bridge collapse.

By Graydon Royce

Osmo Vänskä, composer, has struck again. The music director of the Minnesota Orchestra has knocked out a new work titled "Bridges" that will have its premiere on Sunday with the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. The nine-minute piece was inspired by the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge last summer.

Bill Schrickel, principal bass with the Minnesota Orchestra and conductor of the Metropolitan Symphony, had been nagging Vänskä to write something since 2006, when the Minnesota Orchestra performed his composition "Here!...Beyond?"

Read more about this at the Star Tribune website:

   http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/music/18976034.html

Ensemble brings music of Mexico to concert series

By Jennifer K. Mahal

Classical music and mariachi have always gone hand-in-hand for Southwestern College music professor Jeff Nevin.

Advertisement As a teenager in Tucson, the trumpet player joined the symphony orchestra the same year he became a member of Los Changuitos Feos de Tucson, a youth mariachi group whose name translates to the Ugly Little Monkeys of Tucson. For his undergraduate audition at the University of Illinois, Nevin began playing classical music, but changed to mariachi when nerves made him flub the notes.

And for his doctorate in music theory and composition, one of the three topics for his qualifying exams at the University of California San Diego was on mariachi trumpet styles. The research turned into his first book, "Virtuoso Mariachi."

Read more about this at the San Diego Union-Tribune website:

   http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20080517-9999-1sz17mozart.html

Lend Me a Pick Ax: The Slow Dismantling of the Compositional Gender Divide

By Lisa Hirsch

In the world of classical music, as elsewhere, women have made tremendous progress over the last 30 years. Following the introduction of blind auditions in the 1970s, which greatly reduce bias, women now make up about half of the string and woodwind players in American orchestras. Women occupy prominent administrative positions in major musical institutions. Women direct and design productions at important opera houses.

Women also make up about 30 percent of composition students in American colleges and conservatories. While this is a vast and positive change, it's still not easy for women to get their works performed, especially by symphony orchestras. During the 2004-05 concert season, works by women accounted for only one percent of all pieces performed by the 300 or so member orchestras who responded to the repertory survey of the American Symphony Orchestra League (now the League of American Orchestras, or LAO). The following year, with a boost from Joan Tower's widely-performed Made in America, the number rose to two percent.

Read more about this at the NewMusicBox website:

   http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5576

DSO led by robot maestro

Asimo nails waltz with lifelike skill

By Mark Stryker

If this keeps up Leonard Slatkin, the new music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, might be out of a job before he starts his tenure.

Asimo, Honda's humanoid robot, made its conducting debut Tuesday at Orchestra Hall, leading the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in "The Impossible Dream" of Broadway fame.

Let's say right away that the display was a technological marvel and as cool as all get-out. But it was conducting in only the most limited definition. In other words, Slatkin's job is safe, and Asimo shouldn't quit its day gig.

Which is not to pooh-pooh the achievement. Asimo – which stands 4-foot-3, weighs 119 pounds and favors a white jump suit rather than black tie – walked confidently on stage, waved and said in a high chirp, "Hello, everyone!"

An engineer cued Asimo wirelessly. It lifted its arms and gave the downbeat, conducting waltz time with fluid, lifelike gestures. It deliberately slowed down for the big finish, shifting into 6/8 time and ending with a dramatic held note. Bravo!

Read more about this at the Detroit Free Press website:

   http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008805140432

NEA Launches National Opera Awards

By Anne Midgette

Think of American art forms, and opera doesn't typically spring to mind. But now the federal government is setting out to change that.

Yesterday the National Endowment for the Arts announced the four winners of the first annual NEA Opera Honors, the first new program of national arts awards since the Jazz Masters awards were established in 1982. The first opera honorees are the great soprano Leontyne Price, conductor James Levine (who has led the Metropolitan Opera for 32 years), composer Carlisle Floyd ("Susannah") and administrator Richard Gaddes, who will retire this year from the Santa Fe Opera. Each will receive $25,000 in a ceremony on Oct. 31 at the Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, since the Washington National Opera is the NEA's partner for this first presentation.

Read more about this at the Washington Post website:

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/13/AR2008051302755.html

Music transforms kids and towns in remote area of Bolivia

Inspired by a biannual baroque festival and the legacy of missionaries, young people join choirs and take up the violin and Vivaldi in parishes across the country's eastern lowlands

By Sara Miller Llana

San Ignacio de Velasco, Bolivia – Life moves slowly in this town deep in the jungle of Bolivia, 280 miles from the nearest city, where most streets are swaths of red earth, money is made off the land, and TV, for those who own one, is not an after-dinner ritual.

It is not the kind of place one would normally seek out high culture.

But on a recent evening, off the neatly manicured central plaza, the sonatas of Vivaldi and Haydn pour from the town's imposing cathedral. Even more unusual is who is crowding many of the pews: sneaker-clad youths. They are not here under the duress of some imperious teacher. They're eagerly absorbing the sounds of string and wind instruments redounding through the wood-beamed church.

Their rapt attention is one of the most visible legacies of the International Festival of Renaissance and American Baroque Music, which may be leaving as big a mark on the small towns of eastern Bolivia as anything since the Jesuit missionaries 300 years ago. Perhaps in few places on earth is music transforming the lives of a new generation more than in this remote low-land section of South America.

Read more about this at The Christian Science Monitor website:

   http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0512/p20s01-woam.html

Under Analysis: The Psychology of Tudor's Ballets

By Alastair Macaulay

When the choreographer Antony Tudor, whose centenary is being celebrated this year, moved to America in 1939, the moment could not have been more right. He was known as the psychological choreographer, and he arrived when psychology entered American popular culture. In 1938 Fred Astaire played Ginger Rogers's psychoanalyst in "Carefree"; in 1942 Claude Rains steered Bette Davis back from a nervous breakdown in "Now, Voyager." Later Martha Graham would become yet more famous for the Greek myths she turned into modern-dance psychodramas, but that phase – like Hitchcock's (notably in "Spellbound," 1945) – had not yet arrived.

Back in 1936, however, in none-too-psychology-friendly London, Tudor created "Jardin aux Lilas" (sometimes called "Lilac Garden"), often labeled the first psychological ballet. Nobody played a psychiatrist in it, but its steps, gestures and phrases showed flickering aspects of repression, denial, private longing, heartbreak, personal conflict and hypocrisy, all against a setting both romantic (a garden with lilacs in full bloom at twilight) and conformist (with characters in Edwardian dress, middle-class and formal).

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/dance/11maca.html

Staatsoper Taps Woman Concertmaster

By Susan Elliott

Thursday, May 8, 2008 may go down in history as a major milestone in classical music. The Wiener Staatsoper, most of whose orchestra members comprise the Vienna Philharmonic, appointed a woman as its concertmaster. Albena Danailova, of Sofia, takes first chair in September. According to custom, if all goes well for two years, she will then move into the position permanently.

Her appointment is significant for two reasons: One, she is the first woman to have the post at the Staatsoper, and two, in her new job she will oversee a core of instrumentalists – the Vienna Philharmonic – that has long deemed women musicians to be inferior to men.

Read more about this at the MusicalAmerica.com website:

   http://www.musicalamerica.com/news/newsstory.cfm?archived=0&storyid=18154

Symphony will shut down for summer with future in doubt

Picnic with the Pops series canceled

By Jeffrey Sheban

After 57 years of music making, including a triumphant concert in New York's Carnegie Hall, the Columbus Symphony says it will shut down June 1.

Out of money and having failed to reach a new labor agreement with the musicians, the orchestra's board of trustees said today that it is canceling the summer Picnic With the Pops and Popcorn Pops series and most likely its 2008-09 season, scheduled to begin in October.

Columbus would become one of the nation's largest cities without a full-time professional orchestra.

Read more about this at The Columbus Dispatch website:

   http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/05/08/picnic.html

Cabdriver Thanked for Returning a Stradivarius

By Richard G. Jones

Newark, New Jersey – The violinist stood on a makeshift stage between two lampposts crowned with a patina of bird droppings, under a weathered vinyl canopy hastily erected outside Newark Liberty International Airport in the taxicab holding area. The audience watched him in awe, about 50 drivers in three rows, their yellow cabs a few feet behind, some lined up neatly, others askew.

As Philippe Quint spent half an hour playing five selections, the cabbies clapped and whistled. They danced in the aisles, hips gyrating like tipsy belly dancers. "Magic fingers, magic fingers," one called out. Another grabbed the hand of Mr. Quint's publicist and did what looked like a merengue across the front of the "stage."

Afterward, the virtuoso was mobbed by drivers seeking his autograph on dollar bills, napkins and cab receipts.

"It was so pleasing to see people dancing – that never happens," said Mr. Quint, 34, a Grammy-nominated classical violinist. "These people, they work so hard, I doubt they get a chance to get out to Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center."

So Mr. Quint took Carnegie Hall to them, in a miniconcert that was his way of expressing a simple sentiment: Thank you.

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/nyregion/07violin.html

Vivaldi's long-lost opera returns to Prague after 278 years

After hunting the missing manuscript down in a German archive, Czech conductor revives "Argippo"

By David Randall

A long-lost opera by Antonio Vivaldi was to have its first performance in centuries last night. Argippo, discovered by a Czech musician as he rummaged through an old archive of anonymous scores, was being staged at a castle in Prague, the city where it had its premiere in 1730. Fittingly, it will be conducted by Ondrej Macek, the man who found the manuscript, and played by his Baroque Music Ensemble Hofmusici.

Vivaldi, called by contemporaries "the Red Priest" for the colour of his hair, is known these days, to all but serious lovers of Baroque music, for a single work: The Four Seasons. However, he was a prolific composer who produced more than 500 concertos, 73 sonatas, numerous pieces of sacred music and 46 operas. One of them, Argippo, opened in the Palace of Count Spork in the centre of Prague 278 years ago. The Czech capital was then a city of arts with some of the best music of the time, often performed by the continent's most prominent singers and musicians.

Read more about this at The Independent website:

   http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/820860.html

Saudis mix genders at 1^st public classical concert

By Donna Abu-Nasr (AP)

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – It's probably as revolutionary and groundbreaking as Mozart gets these days. A German-based quartet staged Saudi Arabia's first-ever performance of European classical music in a public venue before a mixed-gender audience.

The concert, held at a government-run cultural center Friday night, broke many taboos in a country where public music is banned and the sexes are segregated even in lines at fast-food outlets.

Friday's concert of works by works by Mozart, Brahms and Paul Juon was the first classical performance held in public in Saudi Arabia, said German press attaché Georg Klussmann.

Read more about this at the Seattle Times website:

   http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2004391176_mozart04.html

Muti to be Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director

By F.N. d'Alessio (AP)

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association named maestro Riccardo Muti on Monday as the next music director of the CSO, the 10^th conductor to hold the prestigious post.

CSO Association President Deborah Card announced that Muti, 66, had signed a five-year contract to serve as music director beginning in September of the 2010-2011 season. The post has been vacant since Daniel Barenboim retired in 2006.

Under the terms of the contract, Muti will conduct a minimum of 10 weeks of CSO subscription concerts each season, plus lead the orchestra in domestic and international tours.

Read more about this at the San Jose Mercury News website:

   http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_9157903

Is ballet's future in America?

San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival has been warmly received by an eager public. It makes English ballet look secretive and cautious

By Judith Mackrell

I was in San Francisco last week for the launch of San Francisco Ballet Company's New Works Festival. The levels of adrenaline and enthusiasm that were buzzing around put British ballet culture to shame.

It wasn't just that SFB were premiering an astonishing 10 new ballets over three successive days (compared to the two being offered by the Royal Ballet during their entire next season). It was that the city as a whole appeared to embrace ballet so energetically. This ambitious and expansive festival included choreography by Mark Morris, Paul Taylor and Christopher Wheeldon and a newly commissioned score from John Adams – yet most of the funding had been raised from local sponsors.

Read more about this at the Guardian website:

   http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/theatre/2008/05/ballets_future_is_in_america.html

More power to the performer

By Matthew Westwood

Classical music, as it grew progressively more complex through the romantic period onwards, evolved into a mind game where the composer always had the psychological lead.

Musical scores came to be written as if dogma, down to the last pedantic detail; performers, even brilliant ones, became mere instruments to the composer's vision.

That may be a bleak view of the concert hall. But Kristjan Jarvi, the energetic Estonian-born conductor, is disdainful of the pseudo-intellectualism of some contemporary music and the "academic blackmail" to which it subjects performers.

The pianist and conductor is doing his bit to address the perceived imbalance between composer and musician. It's not so much a contest of wills as a spectator sport in which music as well as audiences should benefit.

"It is really important to make the performers feel that they have freedom, that they can express music rather than just play the notes," Jarvi says on the phone from Hanover, Germany.

Read more about this at The Australian website:

   http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23624489-16947,00.html

Gramophone to put 85 years of classical music articles online

By Mark Brown

Gramophone magazine has always had an impressive list of contributors, from Rachmaninov to Barbirolli to Rattle – but the problem has been reading them all. Yesterday the 85-year-old magazine announced it is putting its entire archive online as well as entering the commercial download market. The magazine has never missed a month's publication since Compton Mackenzie founded it in 1923, even during the war years.

After 18 months' planning, editors said yesterday that, by early September, every word ever printed in the magazine will be available free in its searchable online archive. It also believes the classical music recording industry has been slow when it comes to digital downloads, so by January 2009 the archive will be linked to a download and mail order service.

Read more about this at the Guardian website:

   http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2277562,00.html

Wanted: 18,000 classical music fans for O2 big, brash gig

By Ben Hoyle

There will be naked dancing girls, bungee ropes, a four-storey tower wreathed in fireworks and the theme from the Old Spice adverts amplified so that 18,000 people can hear it.

Puritannical music lovers should probably run for the hills: the stadium classical music gig is coming to Britain. O2 , the concert venue in the former Millennium Dome, announced yesterday that it will stage a monumental production of Carmina Burana next January.

It plans to follow Carl Orff’s frenetic and instantly recognisable work with productions of Carmen, Aida and The Nutcracker. A musical adaptation of Ben-Hur has also been mooted.

Read more about this at The Times Online website:

   http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article3842732.ece

Wagner's grandson steps down as Bayreuth director

Richard Wagner's grandson is resigning after 57 years as director of the Bayreuth Festival, officials said Tuesday, but the long-running family feuds over who will succeed him are set to continue.

"Wolfgang Wagner has announced his resignation," Markus Gnad, spokesman for the Bavarian culture ministry, told AFP.

Officially, it was not yet known who will succeed Wagner as director of the prestigious annual festival nor when he would formally step down, Gnad said.

However, observers see it as a done-deal that his two daughters, Eva, 63, and Katharina, 29, will run Bayreuth jointly.

Wolfgang has always insisted that his appointment was for life, and stubbornly refused to step aside, despite pressure from the festival's decision-making body, the Stiftungsrat. But earlier this month he indicated that he might compromise and allow Eva and Katharina to take over.

Read more about this at the AFP website:

   http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5j9lG09KwMWhBh9zLKmDBD5EZyMwg

Bold approach breathes new life into classical music

There's nothing so off-the-wall that somebody hasn't thought of it

By Nigel Hannaford

Mitzi's Sister is a small club in the Parkdale area of Toronto. Home cooking, a stage, it holds 150 people. Small as these things go. But, it was there just over three years ago, that Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra first took the stage.

Big moment in the history of music? Too early to say.

However, a few weeks ago, this space dealt with the sort of music that can pay its own way, with no top-ups from the Canada Council. I jested that if classical music was to rescue itself from its socio-economic isolation – its audience shrinks, as it ages – it would have to rebrand itself as something risque, to be enjoyed in seedy little rock-clubs where it's best to sit near an exit, with one's back to the wall. Only when it could make it without a grant, could it once more be considered an expression of contemporary culture.

But, irony is hard these days. There's nothing so off-the-wall that somebody else hasn't thought of it, or done it.

Read more about this at the Calgary Herald website:

http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/theeditorialpage/story.html?id=73bb2c7e-5843-4d53-a99e-119ea7fd7546

The mind of a critic

To judge, educate or entertain? In his final column for Review, Sebastian Smee reflects on the qualities and pleasures of good criticism

Professional critics perform a role that, in most aspects, is impossible to defend. Where does one start? With the arrogance of setting oneself up as a public judge of other people's creative endeavours? With the inevitable superficiality of one's responses, as one lurches from one subject to the next? Or with one's repeated failure to get the tone right, to find the right combination of sympathy and discrimination, enthusiasm and intolerance?

The psychodynamics of criticism are easy enough to nail down. Just as children attracted to the police force are, naturally, weaklings desperate to wield power and exact revenge, critics are bookish nerds with bullying instincts.

"Just doing the job," we tell ourselves as we pontificate from the safety of small, book-lined studies in the suburbs where no one can disturb us, let alone take issue with us.

And, of course, we're hobbled by jealousy. Don't doubt it for a second: critics envy artists. Inside every critic is a painter, photographer or sculptor fantasising about the opening of their own sell-out show.

In light of this, no one should be surprised that critics are rumoured to be losing their clout. Entertainment has ousted serious writing about the arts in all but a handful of newspapers and magazines. Criticism has given way to profiles, interviews and all the vapid paraphernalia of publicity.

Read more about this at The Australian website:

   http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23580386-16947,00.html

A Big-Screen Test for Opera

Simulcasting Has Put A Song in the Hearts of Met Execs. Others Are Holding Their Applause.

By Anne Midgette

When "The Daughter of the Regiment," one of the Metropolitan Opera's most-anticipated premieres this season, comes live to a movie house near you on Saturday, it's a good bet that the theater will be mobbed. Met General Manager Peter Gelb's vision for high-definition cinema transmissions of operas has proved so successful after two seasons that the company is adding more of them every year: 11 have just been announced for 2008-09. And other opera companies are scrambling to catch up.

This spring, productions from the San Francisco Opera, La Scala in Milan and London's Royal Opera House began appearing in North American movie theaters. But the response has not been quite the same. On April 5, 170,000 people around the world saw the Met's "La Bohème." A week later, however, when a taped performance of the San Francisco Opera's "Don Giovanni" played in selected theaters around the country, the Pavilion Park Slope movie house in Brooklyn had all of 13 people in the audience.

Read more about this at the Washington Post website:

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/23/AR2008042303689.html

Local premiere, first recording of the elusive Hindemith

By David Patrick Stearns

Piano concertos by major composers don't disappear quietly and aren't easily hidden.

Though Paul Hindemith's Klaviermusik mit Orchester was silenced for more than eight decades by the illustrious Austrian family that paid for its creation, it dangled just out of reach of those who knew of its existence, locked up in a Bucks County farmhouse, with access blocked intractably and repeatedly whenever anyone – whether Hindemith's estate or Philadelphia conductor Jonathan Sternberg – came close.

Finally discovered in 2002, Klaviermusik had an acclaimed 2004 world premiere in Berlin, and will be recorded for the first time, live in concert, at 8 p.m. Sunday at the Kimmel Center with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra.

Not just another Hindemith work, Klaviermusik quickly has become one of the composer's most-played concertos, performed by the New York Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony, and garnering musical satisfaction that almost justifies the exasperating Viennese intrigue surrounding it.

Read more about this at the Philadelphia Inquirer website:

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20080424_Local_premiere__first_recording_of_the_elusive_Hindemith.html

'Ugly' Barbican Arts Center in London Gets Stripe-Clad New Boss

By Farah Nayeri

Nicholas Kenyon brightens his wardrobe in unexpected ways.

The 57-year-old director of London's Barbican Centre – Europe's largest multidisciplinary arts complex – pairs a gray Paul Smith suit with socks bearing a red, green, blue and black grid design.

"I like a flash of color now and again," he says with a chuckle, flipping over his jacket sleeve to reveal similar lining. "I just like not to be totally drab."

Six months into the job, Kenyon is making sure the Barbican isn't totally drab, either. After 11 years running the BBC Proms – the world's largest classical-concert festival, where 272,000 tickets sold last year for as little as 5 pounds ($10) – he hopes to lure a similar broad-based audience to the cavernous Barbican, where conductor Valery Gergiev, musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson and sitar master Ravi Shankar are on the slate.

Read the Interview at the Bloomberg website:

   http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=ahe5G6Jfq.dA

Music schools seeing influx of funds

By Howard Reich

The numbers alone are staggering:

$90 million
for Northwestern University's new music school building in Evanston;

$120 million
for the recently completed Colburn School conservatory in Los Angeles;

$193 million
for the physical expansion of the Juilliard School in New York.

And that's not all. Tens of millions of dollars more are pouring into other music schools across the country – in an era when professional symphony orchestras are struggling to survive and jazz clubs are an increasingly endangered species (outside urban centers such as Chicago, New York and New Orleans).

Which raises the question: Why is so much money from foundations, individuals and universities funneling into institutions that train ultra-sophisticated musicians? Performance opportunities for classical and jazz artists – primary beneficiaries of higher education in music – would seem limited in a pop culture world.

Read more about this at the Chicago Tribune website:

   http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0420_musicapr20,1,6305410.story

A Departure Sadly Noted

Seldom shown for lack of funding, the Claremont Colleges' rare musical instrument collection is sold.

By Larry Gordon

For lovers of rare musical instruments, the Fiske Museum at the Claremont Colleges long has been an astonishing if somewhat mysterious collection.

Its 1,200 instruments from around the world include an 18^th-century Italian mandolin, unusual over-the-shoulder military brasses from the Civil War era, a gourd fiddle from Africa and a 9-foot-long temple trumpet from Tibet.

The museum had limited visiting hours at its home in the windowless basement of Bridges Auditorium for three decades, and then it closed altogether 16 months ago, partly because of a lack of upkeep funds. Now, almost the entire batch – harpsichords, pianos, clarinets, banjos and cymbals – will leave its home in Claremont and be sold for an undisclosed price to a music museum under construction in Arizona.

The move is triggering strong protests from some music faculty members, who say Claremont is losing a cultural treasure. But other officials are expressing relief that the collection will have a better-funded steward and a lot more public exposure at the new Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, an ambitious project financially backed by Robert Ulrich, chairman of Target Corp.

Read more about this at the Los Angeles Times website:

   http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fiske21apr21,0,4155195.story

Let classical music take you on vacation

By Maren Kasulke

In the doldrums? Overwhelmed by the daily grind? Same old, same old?

Many of us can't afford exotic vacations to get away from it all.

But the benefits of a quick trip that extracts you from your complicated web of work worries, family obligations and never-ending chores and appointments can be obtained on a smaller scale right here in our community.

Sometimes, all you need is some mental down time, something that will take you away, give you glimpses at a new perspective and provide you with true mental recreation.

My favourite way to regroup mentally to clear all the buzz and clutter out of my head is to attend a classical concert – something that until a few years ago would have been a pretty alien concept to me. I have always enjoyed music, but found myself drawn toward contemporary music events promising carefree, noisy fun and a roaring good time. I will admit that they fulfilled this promise and I'm still up for that, too.

Read more about this at the Guelph Mercury website:

   http://news.guelphmercury.com/Opinions/article/319233

Bach's music could be key to speaking with aliens

By Kim Skornogoski

No offense to John Williams, Chester composer Philip Aaberg has his own ideas for what Yoda's theme music would be.

Earlier this month, Aaberg shared his theory with scientists, anthropologists, computer illustrators and science fiction writers as the keynote speaker at three-day conference at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Bay Area.

Should a giant, glowing space ship create a real-life close encounter with a third kind, Aaberg thinks our best chances to communicate with aliens is to play Bach.

"It transcends what a human being can do in terms of the brilliance of it," he said.

Read more about this at the Great Falls Tribune website:

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080429/NEWS01/804290311/1002

Record Stores Fight to Be Long-Playing

By Ben Sisario

Now added to the endangered species list in New York City, along with independent booksellers and shoe repair: the neighborhood record store.

The hole-in-the-wall specialty shops that have long made Lower Manhattan a destination for a particular kind of shopper have never made a great deal of money. But in recent years they have been hit hard by the usual music-industry woes – piracy, downloading – as well as rising real estate prices, leading to the sad but familiar scene of the emptied store with a note taped to the door.

Some 3,100 record stores around the country have closed since 2003, according to the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a market research firm. And that's not just the big boxes like the 89 Tower Records outlets that closed at the end of 2006; nearly half were independent shops. In Manhattan and Brooklyn at least 80 stores have shut down in the last five years.

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/arts/music/18reco.html

Classical tribute to the planets

By Michael Cameron

It is a conundrum often faced by passionate music lovers. How does one proselytize on behalf of a noble obsession without dumbing down the subject for the sake of the uninitiated?

Chicago Symphony Orchestra's "Beyond the Score" series has been an exemplar of musical outreach, moving past the eat-your-vegetables lectures that can leave a bitter aftertaste on the palate of would-be enthusiasts.

Sunday the series continued with Gustav Holst's "The Planets," a work of grand cinematic scope and arguably a better channel for aural-to-ocular sensation than the touchstones of French Impressionism.

Led by conductor Charles Dutoit, the multimedia spectacle included images from ancient astrological documents, Holst's handwritten score and photographs from the Hubble space telescope. Series director Gerard McBurney wove elements from a number of disciplines into his captivating narrative, with astronomical, astrological and historical references, served up with expert timing even a theater critic would admire.

Read more about this at the Chicago Tribune website:

   http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/chi-ovn_0401csoapr01,1,631528.story

Milk-treated watermelon to quench thirst

Ever think about eating a cool, refreshing slice of sweet watermelon with the delicious flavor of milk on a hot summer day?

Beijingers will be able to get their fill when milk-treated watermelons hit local markets in early summer, according to a report in the Beijing Morning Post.

Wang Hanliang, dubbed the "Melon King" of Panggezhuang village in the Daxing district of Beijing, has discovered a new way to grow watermelons by irrigating them with fresh milk and playing the music of Beethoven, the report said.

Read more about this at the China Internet Information Center website:

   http://www.china.org.cn/environment/news/2008-04/14/content_14948410.htm

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra: A Sex Appeal

By Eddie Silva

Let's talk about sex – and classical music.

A couple of years ago the writer Greg Sandow, who discusses the state and fate of classical music on artsjournal.com, alerted his readers to the emergence of an audacious new feature in MUSO, a magazine based in the UK that writes about the classical music world the way Spin writes about rock & roll. In MUSO's online version, Sandow heralded, is a section called "G Spot," which features a list of fans picks for sexiest soloists, with pictures and commentary.

For example, violinist Joshua Bell is described to be "As American as apple pie and just as tasty." Pianist Hélène Grimaud is praised for her "gamine gaze." Room is left for praise of the artists' musicianship, "supreme skills across an extraordinary range of repertoire" and "steely pianistic strength," but the message MUSO spreads is that having one gift does not belie the other. And, more importantly, classical can be hot.

Classical music is declared dead, usually with deep regret, by some astute and erudite critic on a regular basis. And just as it is declared dead, it is passionately declared alive and well by another astute and erudite critic – usually the next day. Death and resurrection is a great theme of religion and literature, but a steady dose of it can be emotionally depleting, especially if it happens to be your art form being compared to Lazarus. Within the chronicling of the death-life continuum of classical music, at least one fact is inarguable: classical music's presence near the center of popular culture has diminished considerably over (at least) the last two decades.

Read more about this at the Playbill Arts website:

   http://www.playbillarts.com/features/article/7621.html

The secret diaries of Sergey Prokofiev

Russia's revolution coincided with a blossoming of musical talent. Sergey Prokofiev's extraordinary diaries, to be published next week, show the composer at the centre of both

It's 16 December 1922. Sergey Prokofiev receives a letter informing him that the trunk of precious papers and manuscripts he had packed up for safekeeping in the vaults of a publishing company upon his rushed departure from Russia in May 1918 has been lost. In it were the score of the Second Piano Concerto, a sheaf of childhood compositions, the notebook containing his diary between September 1916 and February 1917, photographs, letters to his father and records of his beloved chess tournaments. "But most of all I mourn the loss of the Diary," writes the composer. "The loss of the Diary is a tragedy, as there was so much of interest in it: it was my last winter in Petrograd which saw the production of The Gambler and a general flowering of my talent." He goes on to recall the professional tribulations, love affairs and squabbles contained in its pages, raging against the "scoundrels" who failed to ensure its safekeeping.

As it turns out, Prokofiev's rage was misplaced and, though he would not discover it until 1927 when he returned to the USSR, the diary had been preserved. And now it is published for the first time in English translation. The diaries were seized by the Soviet government on the composer's death and hidden in the state archives for years until Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav and grandson Serge were granted permission to transcribe them – no easy task, as the thousands of pages were almost all written in the composer's vowel-less shorthand.

Read the complete extract from from Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1915-1923: Behind the Mask, edited by Anthony Phillips at The Independent website:

   http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/804351.html

Joffrey carries on steps of change

By Sid Smith

The Joffrey Ballet of late seems simultaneously blessed and besieged, an organization in transition or trouble, depending on the day or the headline.

In September, the company moves into gleaming, new $23 million headquarters, with third- and fourth-floor studio glass walls overlooking the corner of State and Randolph Streets. Not only will this facility finally unite administrators and artists under one roof, but the skyscraper will trumpet the company's name – the Joffrey Tower – and offer daily views of the dancers at work.

The tricky hunt for a successor to octogenarian co-founder Gerald Arpino went off smoothly last fall, a process that ripped apart top dance troupes elsewhere. Ashley Wheater emerged as the board's unanimous choice, welcomed by Arpino with a warm public salute.

But in February came news that Maia Wilkins, 38, the fluid, soulful lead ballerina, won't be back next season, her contract not renewed, a move that struck some as abrupt.

Read more about this at the Chicago Tribune website:

   http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0413_joffreyapr13,1,4799307.story

Europe's top classical music festivals

By Alexandra Ferguson

Time your holiday to tie in with one of Europe's classical music festivals. Alexandra Ferguson picks 10 of the best.

The final notes of a Bach partita reverberate in the still air of the Thomaskirche. A string quartet plays beneath flamboyant frescoes in an Austrian palace. And in Bayreuth, Brünnhilde charges once more into the flames.

Soon the summer music festival season will be upon us, and the world's top orchestras and conductors, soloists and chamber groups will converge on the towns and cities where the great composers lived and worked, to perform in palaces and churches, town halls and theatres.

From obscure suites played on period instruments to familiar orchestral works, there is music to suit the casual listener as well as the connoisseur. And with ticket offices open for advance bookings, if you are thinking of combining a holiday with some of the best classical concerts in Europe, you should be making plans already.

Read more about this at the The Telegraph website:

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/artsandculture/1308162/Europe's-top-classical-music-festivals.html

Home from Japan

By Barry Davis

Even in an era where cultural and ethnic boundaries are leapfrogged with ever increasing frequency, the idea of a Western classically trained Japanese woman immersing herself in Eastern Jewish liturgical texts and music takes some getting used to.

Today, Kumiko Yayama Bar-Yossef knows more than a thing or two about piyutim (liturgical poems) and, in fact, can enlighten most native Israelis about the subject.

Yayama – who is married to musicology professor Amatzia Bar-Yossef – first came to Jerusalem in 1992 to pursue a PhD in musicology, but her music education began much earlier. "I studied ballet from the age of four and I took up Western classical piano from the age of six," she explains in fluent Hebrew.

While Yayama didn't exactly come from a family of musicians, there was always something interesting to listen to at home. "My father was just a taxi driver. He didn't have a lot of money but he was crazy about stereo technology and we always had the best system going at home. We listened mostly to Western classical music and, at some stage, my father also taught himself to play guitar."

Read more about this at the Jerusalem Post website:

   http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1207649979802&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Pianist-arranger Christopher O'Riley has redefined the possibilities of classical music

By Diane Peterson

It's been a dozen years since pianist Christopher O'Riley last performed with the Santa Rosa Symphony.

In the interim, the multitalented Midwesterner has continued to evolve, using his early experience in jazz and rock as a springboard to new heights as a classical artist.

From his high-profile role as the host of "From the Top" – a public radio show centered on young musicians – to his groundbreaking arrangements of songs by the Brit alt-rock band Radiohead, O'Riley, 51, has earned a reputation for innovation coupled with a refreshing lack of pretense.

This weekend, he will tackle Béla Bartók's Concerto No. 1 with the Santa Rosa Symphony. The concerto looks back to the Viennese School and to Brahms, whose Symphony No. 1 will round out the second half of the program conducted by Music Director Bruno Ferrandis.

O'Riley likes to perform pieces he feels passionate about. Under his nimble fingers and carefully crafted arrangements, an eclectic stream of pop music has migrated to the classical music stage over the years.

"It's really sort of a selfish enterprise," he said in a phone interview from northeast Ohio, where he spends most of his time. "It's always been about the song … a couple of Cocteau Twin songs, a Stephen Sondheim song. Things just take me over."

At the same time, the virtuoso has championed new music from within the classical world, premiering eclectic works by Richard Danielpour and Aaron Jay Kernis while recording well-known gems by Beethoven, Ravel and Scriabin.

Read more about this, including an interview, at the The Press Democrat website:

   http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/article/20080410/LIFESTYLE/804100308/

Instrument was owned by first woman to play in Royal Philharmonic strings

A Stradivari owned by the first woman to play in the strings section of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has sold for $1.2 million.

Christie's auction house said Friday that the 1700s violin, known as The Penny, was purchased for $1,273,000 by a buyer who did not wish to be identified. It had been estimated to sell for up to $1.5 million.

The violin's owner, Barbara Penny, died last year. She was the first woman accepted in the strings section of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. She performed as a soloist and chamber musician throughout Europe.

Read more about this at the MSNBC website:

   http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23959579/

By Anne Midgette

Just what is "Jewish music," anyway? In some cases the answer is clear: liturgical music and Yiddish operetta; klezmer and Israeli pop. But in this realm of classical or art music, you run into all kinds of semantic debates. Is "Jewish music" music written by Jewish composers, including Bernstein's "West Side Story"? What about pieces written by non-Jewish composers, such as Bruch's "Kol Nidrei" or Ravel's "Kaddisch" or Dave Brubeck's oratorio "The Gates of Justice," recorded and released as part of the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music's initial offering of 50 CDs?

Stop asking already and just put it on. Operating on this principle, the new concert series Pro Musica Hebraica is presenting its first performance at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater tomorrow night, with musicians from the Juilliard School and Itzhak Perlman as a special guest. The series's ambitious and loosely defined goal is to present "Jewish music" – until the first concert is over, the organizers are not going to commit definitely to anything more specific than that.

Read more about this at the Washington Post website:

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/08/AR2008040802916.html

How acoustic instruments torment their players

By Jan Swafford

Years ago, I heard a lovely evening of South Indian music that involved a double-headed drum called a mridangam. Afterward, somebody asked its player what the stuff he'd been smearing on one of his drum heads throughout the performance was.

"Cream of Rice," he replied.

"You mean, like in the supermarket?"

"Indeed, yes."

Turns out, breakfast cereal is just the thing to keep the head of your mridangam smooth and supple. While pop musicians and classical composers alike are always going on about computer software, acoustic instruments and the people who play them are a far more cultish affair. They're still doing things by hand in traditional, sometimes outlandish, sometimes messy ways.

I spent some years of supposedly being a musician, but the beginning of my education in the low-tech and faintly mystical endeavor of creating acoustic instruments came when I interviewed a well-known stringed-instrument maker. When he told me his instruments were based on close study of Strads, I asked, Why not use modern technology to duplicate every millimeter of, say, a Stradivarius violin, chemically analyze the varnish and duplicate it, et voilà: great violin. He sighed, having heard that one before. "You know, every piece of wood is different," he said. Every piece of the six kinds of aged wood in a violin has to be shaped according to its particular resonance, elasticity, and function. And the varnish? "Don't get me started," he said.

Read more about this at the Slate website:

   http://www.slate.com/id/2188507/

David Lang Wins Music Pulitzer

By Tom Huizenga

David Lang, a New York-based composer, has won the Pulitzer Prize for music with his piece, The Little Match Girl Passion, based on the children's story by Hans Christian Andersen.

Lang's music makes a big impact with small forces. The piece is scored for only four voices and a few percussion instruments, played by the singers. They sing the sad story of a little girl who freezes to death selling matches on the street during a cold winter's night.

In notes Lang wrote to accompany the Carnegie Hall premiere last October, he says he was drawn to Andersen's story because of how opposite aspects of the plot played off each other.

"The girl's bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories," Lang says. "Her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There's a kind of naïve equilibrium between suffering and hope."

Lang was also intrigued by the religious allegory he saw beneath the surface of the story, and he found inspiration in the music of his favorite composer, J.S. Bach.

Read more about this, including an audio excerpt, at the NPR website:

   http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89442735

The New York Canon: Classical Music

By Justin Davidson

From Laurie Anderson's magnum opus to the definitive Beethoven marathon.

Classical music is global and ephemeral and often aspires to a state of universality: Tonight's Carnegie Hall recitalist may have just flown in from Germany and will be in Hong Kong next week. Even native New Yorkers hone their acts elsewhere before hoping to return. Which makes an awkward fit for a canon of works linked by their inherent New Yorkiness. I've had to wrestle this list into its frame, omitting many memorable musical experiences because they had no special connection to the city, and tying live events to recordings. The New York Philharmonic's performance of the Brahms Requiem in the days after 9/11 was far too magnificent an event to skip. But I left out Philip Glass's 1976 Einstein on the Beach; although the premiere seared itself into the memory of those who saw it, the recording tells only half a story. New York creates as much music as it imports, and some of it is imbued with local qualities that materialize only later. In the mid-nineties, Steve Reich walked around Manhattan recording sounds that he later wove into City Life. It's more explicitly urban than his other works, yet the sense of overlapping rhythms competing in a crowd – the essential sidewalk experience – is equally evident in Drumming, which he wrote more than 30 years earlier. In music, New York sometimes does something supremely un-New Yorky: It hides.

Read about the complete N.Y. canon at the New York Magazine website:

   http://nymag.com/anniversary/40th/culture/45764/

Conductor, composer Gerhard Samuel dies at 83

By Joshua Kosman

Gerhard Samuel, an innovative conductor and composer who played a pre-eminent role in the musical life of the Bay Area throughout the 1960s, died Tuesday at his home in Seattle. He was 83.

During his 12-year sojourn in the Bay Area, Mr. Samuel served as music director of both the Oakland Symphony (1959-71) and the San Francisco Ballet (1961-71) and was the first music director of the Cabrillo Music Festival. He also founded and led the Oakland Chamber Orchestra and made a few guest appearances with the San Francisco Opera.

Although he was steeped in the traditional symphonic and ballet repertoire, Mr. Samuel was known chiefly for his deep engagement with contemporary music. Under his leadership, the Oakland Symphony increased its audience and acquired a national reputation for artistic daring.

Over the course of a decade, nearly one-third of the orchestra's repertoire consisted of music by 20th century composers, and in some seasons nearly every program included at least one premiere. The stylistic range was broad enough to encompass such European masters as Lutoslawski and Stockhausen and California composers like Terry Riley and Henry Brant.

Read the obituary at the SFGate website:

   http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/29/BA1LVSDJO.DTL

Osvaldo Golijov: a mission of creative anarchy

By John Lewis

Composer Osvaldo Golijov is bent on breaking the rules

The Argentine Osvaldo Golijov is a "classical" composer whose work embraces a fascination with world music and electronica in a way that is similar to the artier end of pop. For pop, he firmly believes, is the most influential music these days.

"These are sad times for classical music," he explains. "Once classical musicians influenced popular culture. Duke Ellington learnt from Debussy, Miles Davis learnt from Stravinsky, the Beatles learnt from Stockhausen. Nowadays we learn from them. The music of Radiohead, or Björk, or OutKast – it is so much more relevant and meaningful. And often it is so much more interesting than what goes under the name of 'serious music'. It affects the culture in a way we don't."

We are in Chicago, where a recent concert performance of his flamenco-themed, Grammy-winning opera Ainadamar (Fountain of Tears), which will be performed in the UK next week, has received a ten-minute standing ovation. American critics have been breathless in their praise. And this endearingly nerdy maverick has become a cult idol to many of the world's biggest pop stars. David Bowie has described him as "the greatest living composer"; Jonny Greenwood, of Radiohead, is a fan; Paul Simon and David Byrne turn up to his concerts.

Read more about this at the Times Online website:

   http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article3675992.ece

Anna Nicole Smith: The Opera at the ROH

By Laura Clout

The life of the late Playboy centrefold Anna Nicole Smith is to be turned into an opera by the co-creator of the cult musical Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Composer Richard Thomas is writing the libretto for a contemporary piece, to be staged at the Royal Opera House in 2010.

He said the tragic life story of Ms Smith, a former stripper who died from an overdose of prescription drugs a year ago, was "a classic American tale about celebrity" which was "intrinsically operatic".

The production, still in the early stages of development, is intended to be shown on the main stage at the Royal Opera House, accompanied by a 90-piece orchestra.

Mr Thomas admitted that he was fascinated by stories which might seem "trashy". He told The Independent newspaper: "It's an incredible story. It's very operatic and sad. "She was quite a smart lady with the tragic flaw that she could not seem to get through life without a vat of prescription painkillers."

However, his choice of subject, a woman labelled "the queen of trailer trash" by American tabloids, is unlikely to appeal to diehard fans of classical opera, some of whom have accused the Royal Opera House of dumbing down.

Read more about this at the Telegraph website:

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/04/nsmith404.xml

Supercharged Solo Followed by a Cosmic Energy Riot

By Anthony Tommasini

That the Montreal Symphony Orchestra sounded so terrific at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night should reassure longtime admirers of this top-tier ensemble. The orchestra has had a rough few years.

In 2002 Charles Dutoit, the music director who had taken the orchestra to new realms of excellence, abruptly resigned over what he asserted were challenges to his artistic authority. In response, many players went public with stories of longstanding animosity between Mr. Dutoit and orchestra members. In 2003 it was announced that Kent Nagano would become the new music director, but not until 2006. Then in 2005, for the second time in a decade, the players went on strike, staging a five-month work stoppage.

But the musicians seem very content with Mr. Nagano, who began Saturday's program with a glowing, refined yet urgent performance of symphonic fragments from Debussy's "Martyre de St. Sébastien." This 20-minute, four-movement suite was drawn by the composer André Caplet from an elaborate score, including choruses and dance music, that Debussy composed for a play by Gabriele d'Annunzio in 1911.

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/arts/music/10naga.html

The quiet revolution:
musicians' exposure to noise
New EU regulations aimed at protecting workers from noise will affect orchestras dramatically

By Debra Craine

As a professional dance critic, and a self-confessed ballet nut, I have spent my life in thrall to Tchaikovsky. I love the sound of a big orchestra in a big lyric theatre blasting out one of his big ballet scores. The louder the better, and The Sleeping Beauty best of all. So when I had the chance to sit in the orchestra pit during a performance of Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House it was a fantasy come true. How better to experience the lustrous wonder of that majestic music than to sit beside the musicians who play it?

I knew the sound was going to be fantastic, and it was – Valeriy Ovsyanikov and 75 musicians of the Royal Opera House Orchestra saw to that – and it was indeed thrilling to be down there in the middle of it. But as the Rose Adagio unfolded, and Tchaikovsky's writing grew ever grander, another sensation began to worm its way into my consciousness – pain. My ears started to hurt, thanks to the short sharp shrieks of the flutes, the crash of the cymbals and the blare of the French horns.

Imagine, therefore, how you would feel if you were a professional musician and you were playing Sleeping Beauty every night, or indeed Strauss's Salome or any part of Wagner's Ring cycle? A wall of sound may be exciting for audiences, but it can also mean exposure to damaging levels of noise for musicians trapped in a pit like goldfish in a bowl.

Read more about this at the Times Online website:

   http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article3676238.ece

CBC needs to be saved from its supporters

By Kelly McParland

The CBC is going through one of its regular bouts of self-induced angst as it struggles to rationalize the money it spends with its inability to attract an audience significant enough to justify those expenditures.

This time the argument is taking place on two fronts, one the decision to shuffle the programming on Radio 2 to reduce the emphasis on classical music, the other to kill off the CBC radio orchestra, the last radio orchestra in North America.

The resistance to both moves has been both predictable and fierce. True believers in the CBC may be few in numbers – and becoming fewer, it seems, with each passing year – but they're passionate. And they don't keep their opinions to themselves.

Read the complete article at the National Post website:

   http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/posted/archive/2008/03/31/cbc-needs-to-be-saved-from-its-supporters.aspx

The Tao of Early Musical Success

By Barbara Jepson

The stereotypical musical prodigy has remarkable musical memory, brilliant technique, and a prematurely shortened career. Pianist Conrad Tao, who gave a winning performance with the Russian National Orchestra here recently at the Festival of the Arts BOCA, possesses the first two characteristics in good measure. One hopes he will avoid the third, joining the ranks of such successful former prodigies as the 52-year-old cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the 65-year-old conductor-pianist Daniel Barenboim.

But who knows? The 13-year-old Mr. Tao, a student at the Pre-College Division of The Juilliard School in New York, may decide to chuck music altogether. Or he may become overexposed by the age of 25 – one of the risks of turning "pro" earlier than most. By that time, later-blooming peers will have come into their own artistically, providing new faces for concert presenters to book, and the next wave of precocious youngsters will be nipping at his heels.

So why expose young musical phenoms to the marketplace just as they enter the more vulnerable adolescent years? In a field overcrowded with keyboard players, says his teacher, Yoheved ("Veda") Kaplinsky, head of the piano department at Juilliard, there are two ways for artists to stand out. "One is to win an international competition," she says. "It doesn't guarantee anything, but it gives you an entrée. The other is to start out as a prodigy and make your name that way."

Read more about this at the Wall Street Journal website:

   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120700353888078451.html

A breath of fresh air for the classical tradition

By Harriet Cunningham

The Sydney Symphony is learning a new work. The rhythms are complex, and notes fly out in all directions. Conductor Richard Gill, in his best headmaster voice, stops the musicians, points out the key underlying beats, barks out a bar number and raises his baton. And there, almost miraculously, the music starts to emerge from the morass, the opposing riffs meshing into a fascinating wall of sound.

Alongside the conductor, looking remarkably unflappable, sits soloist and joint composer William Barton. The work, Kalkadungu, was commissioned for the orchestra by Maggie Gray and Roger Allen; scored for orchestra with didgeridoo, electric guitar and vocals (all three performed by Barton).

Most significantly, Kalkadungu is a collaboration between two musicians, the Mount Isa-born Barton and the white Australian composer Matthew Hindson, bringing ancient Australian culture face to face with the Western classical tradition.

Hindson, who lectures in composition at the University of Sydney, is an old hand at writing for orchestra, which is why this project presented such a tantalising challenge.

Read more about this at the Sydney Morning Herald website:

   http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/a-breath-of-fresh-air-for-the-classical-tradition/

Ballet in Naples

By Jeff Matthews

The season program always reads "Opera and Ballet at San Carlo (year)," which reflects the fact that in Naples, as in most places in Italy, the ballet company is part of the same organization that provides opera – in this case, the San Varlo Theater. As elsewhere, dancers in Naples serve two ends: (1) to provide incidental dancing called for in many operas, and (2) to perform independent ballet. In Naples, there is both a ballet school and a ballet company. You start as a child in the former and hope to get good enough to move up to the latter.

Dance has always had a place at San Carlo. On opening night, November 4th, 1737, together with Achille in Sciro by Domenico Sarro, the first-ever opera at the splendid new theater, there were three short ballets (one before, one between acts one and two, and one after the opera) composed and choreographed by Gaetano Grossatesta. He worked at San Carlo for 30 years and was replaced by one of the most important names in the history of classical ballet: Salvatore Vigano (1769-1821), a Neapolitan dancer and choreographer who also studied and worked in France and Germany and who even collaborated with Beethoven on the ballet, Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus. (And wouldn't that look good on your résumé!) Vigano is considered the father of a new kind of performance called "coreodrama" about which I know nothing except that dance tells a story and is not simply moving around to music.

Read more about this at the Napoli.com website:

   http://www.napoli.com/viewarticolo.php?articolo=20982

Pianist shines for new generation of classical music fans

By Chris Shull

Lang Lang may be known for his pyrotechnic performances of the great piano pieces of the 19^th century, but he is truly a musician of today.

The 25-year-old is as at home on the Internet as he is in the world's great concert halls. He's appeared as a cartoon "avatar" in the online virtual world Second Life, and he's serenaded the Muppets on Sesame Street. He's a regular on YouTube, and he soloed with Herbie Hancock on George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue during the recent Grammy Awards telecast.

Although Lang says he embraces TV and the Internet as tools to attract his generation to classical music, some critics argue that his fame has interfered with his development as an artist and a performer.

Read more about this including an interview with Lang Lang at the Star-Telegram website:

   http://www.star-telegram.com/performing_arts/story/552534.html

Klaus Heymann profile

Klaus Heymann may not know how to read music or play a musical instrument, but he has been attending classical concerts with his parents since he was 9 years old. Today he is best known as a successful entrepreneur, who is a classical music amateur.

Heymann began his career in his native city of Frankfurt, as an export advertising and promotion manager for Max Braun AG, a manufacturer of audio equipment, household appliances and electric shavers.

After working for an American newspaper, The Overseas Weekly, for five years in Germany, he came to Asia in 1967 to start up its Hong Kong office, and subsequently started his own business.

Heymann's Pacific Mail Order System began as a direct-mail advertising company, which later evolved into a mail-order firm for members of the U.S. Armed Forces serving in Vietnam. It provided cameras, watches and audio equipment, including Bose loudspeakers and Revox tape recorders.

Read more about this at the CNN website:

   http://www.cnn.com/2008/BUSINESS/03/31/heymann.profile/

The quiet master behind the masterpiece

By Dr. David MacKenzie
The Sentinel

Franz Joseph Haydn's great oratorio The Creation is acknowledged as one of the greatest musical achievements of Western Civilization. It is certainly the crowning glory of a composer whose creative output was immense – more than 1,000 works – and who is credited as the creator of the Classical-era symphony and string quartet.

The Creation will be performed at 8 p.m., Friday, April 4 at the Fireman Center for the Performing Arts at Tabor Academy in Marion, and will feature as soloists soprano Rebecca Grimes, tenor Thomas Oesterling, and Baritone, John Murelle. There will be a pre-concert prelude for ticket holders, which will take place one hour prior to each concert. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased by calling 508-999-6276, or in person at the Marion General Store, Seaport Village Ice Cream and Coffee, Sail Away Studio, and Bev Loves Books.

Haydn's life spanned a period of enormous changes in the world, in the arts, and especially in music, and most musical trends during the 18^th Century were pioneered and perfected by him. Born in 1732, he was 18 years old when J. S. Bach died. He outlived Mozart and was still a revered musical figure in Vienna when Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, a work considered by many as ushering in the Romantic era, was performed in 1805. Both Mozart and Haydn owed great debts to Haydn. Indeed, Haydn was the only contemporary composer for whom Mozart held any regard, acknowledging that it was from Haydn he had learned how to write string quartets, and commenting at one point "Haydn alone has the secret both of making me smile and of touching my innermost soul."

For all of that, most concert-goers today can more readily name and recognize works by Haydn's older contemporaries Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederick Handel, or his much younger colleague and friend W. A. Mozart or his student Ludwig van Beethoven. Why is this?

Read more about this at the The Sentinel website:

   http://www.wickedlocal.com/mattapoisett/fun/entertainment/arts/x325168322

In glorious discord over Stravinsky

Few things are more fun to savour than a good old artistic feud, says Rupert Christiansen

The fallout can take several forms, from the vitriolic spat (Vidal v Capote, Oasis v Blur) to a purely intellectual combat (Wilson v Nabokov), to the serious lawsuit (Ruskin v Whistler), to the soured friendship (Lennon v McCartney, Vargas Llosa v Márquez, Theroux v Naipaul).

But the most interesting variety is the one that pitches competing conceptions of the truth, as when Mary McCarthy denounced "every word" of Lillian Hellman's account of her communist fellow-travelling as "a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."

Stephen Walsh and Robert Craft haven't gone quite that far over the matter of Igor Stravinsky, but they've come pretty close.

There's something of All About Eve to the story of Craft's attachment to the great Russian composer, and something of Boswell's relationship to Dr Johnson. A brilliant American music student, Craft latched on to Stravinsky in the late 1940s, becoming his secretary, minder, gatekeeper, amanuensis, conducting assistant and surrogate son.

Read more about this at the Telegraph website:

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/26/bmarts126.xml

Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

By Jody Rosen

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words "Mary had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable – converted from squiggles on paper to sound – by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

"This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound," said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.

Read more about this, including audio excerpts, at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html

Florida Orchestra struggles to create balanced program

By John Fleming

The Florida Orchestra is in a terrible bind. On the one hand, music director Stefan Sanderling and the orchestra want to – need to – play contemporary classical music. An endless stream of standards by Beethoven, Brahms and the Russians is a programming strategy that leads to artistic oblivion.

But whenever the orchestra sprinkles some relatively new music into its concerts, such as a couple of 20th century French works heard in masterworks programs this season, it turns off a significant number of audience members. These usually are subscribers, the most loyal listeners the orchestra has.

This season, I have received quite a few letters from concertgoers complaining about mildly adventurous works by the likes of Messiaen, Dutilleux, Harbison and Helps, and I expect the orchestra has, too.

"We truly were not impressed with this display of contemporary music,'' wrote Carol Enters of Clearwater after hearing the Helps Symphony No. 2. "If, indeed, maestro Sanderling is impressed, let him mount a series all his own, so that those who appreciate such presentations can enjoy them .?.?. and those who do not will not have to suffer through them.''

This sort of response undoubtedly has something to do with the 2008-09 season's masterworks schedule, which includes just two works by living American composers, John Corigliano and Samuel Adler, and not a single premiere.

Read more about this at the St. Petersburg Times website:

   http://www.tampabay.com/features/music/article432549.ece

In Iraq, the Symphony Orchestra Plays On

By Melik Kaylan

Karim Wasfi, age 36, arrives driving a white Range Rover and dressed in a blazer, vest and ascot. Sporting aviator shades, his ample form topped by lush black hair, he could be one of the Three Tenors – or a staunchly civilized orchestra director, which is, in fact, what he is. When orchestra directors go around the streets of Baghdad looking exactly as they should, you know that things are bucking up. Except that Mr. Wasfi has held that post at the Iraq National Symphony Orchestra since 2004, through the darkest of times, and he has always looked like this. We set off at speed out of Mansour toward downtown Baghdad listening to Wagner. "The Ride of the Valkyries" to be precise.

"In the car, I also listen to the Saint-Saëns requiem and the Mozart requiem – that's usually the right mood for Baghdad," says Mr. Wasfi, in his cultivated English, as the checkpoint militias gape incredulously and wave us on. He has lost count of the times he has just missed being caught in a bomb blast or a firefight. "I vary my route to work – which I think may be more dangerous. In '06 I had to leave town and disappear for six months for my safety, but we still kept going – I organized two concerts from afar. . . . At one point, I had to tactfully get a formal religious proclamation from a top cleric that music was not profane. That took care of one group only. Still, these days, it's certainly better than it was – I'm trying to up the concerts to twice a month, but that includes a lot of chamber performances which I initiated some months ago," he says.

"At the very least, the audience must know for sure that somewhere in the city there will be a concert on the last Saturday of every month," says Mr. Wasfi, who is also co-conductor with Mohammed Amin Ezzat. "Then we give out the location in the last moment, for security. We do it by email, word-of-mouth, phone calls – I tell everyone I know. Even then, many hundreds turn up, depending on the place. That's our problem: We don't have a regular home. Well . . . one of our problems."

Read more about this at the Wall Street Journal website:

   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120658471242267747.html

Prized violin plays again for Moscow's elite

By Helen Womack in Moscow

The most expensive musical instrument in the world was played in public for the first time for more than 70 years to 160 guests in Moscow on Saturday in a demonstration of Russia's growing economic and cultural status.

Lawyer Maxim Viktorov invited the cream of Moscow society to the private concert at Pashkov House to show off the Guarneri del Gesù violin he bought at Sotheby's in February for a record-breaking $3.9m (nearly £2m).

The Israeli virtuoso Pinchas Zukerman performed a programme of Bach, Mozart and Bruch with the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre. "I tried out the instrument a little in London before I bought it," said Viktorov, 35, a violin collector who likes to play to the piano accompaniment of his wife, Anastasia. "But since then, I haven't been able to touch it. This instrument cannot bear any agitation. I want the maestro, who lives by his art, to be the first to play it so that the violin feels it is receiving the respect it deserves. Then I might find the strength to play it myself because it's a great source of energy."

Read more about this at the Guardian website:

   http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2267686,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=39

Williams top of Classic FM vote

Ralph Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending has been voted best classical piece of music by radio listeners for the second year running. The piece, a musical version of an English landscape, came top in the Classic FM Hall of Fame poll, which attracted more than 100,000 votes.

His Fantasies on a Theme of Thomas Tallis also came third behind Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto no 2.

Pieces by Beethoven took fourth and fifth place in the survey.

The accolade comes half a century after the composer's death – he was born in Gloucestershire in 1872.

Read more about this at the BBC website:

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7311173.stm

Hear how music history rolled out: Cellist, pianist play Beethoven cycle

By Celia R. Baker

Music history's march from Classicism to Romanticism followed the life story of one man: Ludwig van Beethoven. The whole journey – from innocent exuberance to heroic passion to profound introspection – unfolds in microcosm this week in Salt Lake City: English cellist Colin Carr will perform all of Beethoven's works for cello and piano with American pianist Tom Sauer during two concerts at Libby Gardner Concert Hall.

Carr, 50, is best – known in Utah for his three appearances here with the Golub–Kaplan–Carr trio, with whom he toured and recorded for more than two decades.

After 20 years of playing trios, Carr was ready for new challenges. Performing Beethoven's entire oeuvre for cello and piano, spread over two concerts, has proven to be "simply the best chamber music project that a cellist could ever wish to do," he said.

Amy Leung, director of the Virtuoso Series, studied cello with Carr at New York's Eastman School of Music and remembers him as "a phenomenal musician of the highest order." To Leung, the Beethoven sonatas are the mainstay of classical cello repertoire. She's thrilled that an agreement between her series and the Chamber Music Society of Salt Lake City is making it possible for Carr to give two concerts here – enough time to play all of them.

Audiences at both concerts will hear every note Beethoven wrote for cello and piano, but could trace the trajectory of Beethoven's musical development by attending either one, Carr said. Each evening includes music from the composer's early, middle and late periods, allowing listeners to make comparisons.

Although Carr has played Beethoven's cello sonatas and themes – and – variations for much of his life, juxtaposing them in this way brought fresh insights.

"When I hear all these pieces together, I see such stark contrasts that I'd never been aware of. It's fascinating," he said.

Read more about this at the Salt Lake City Tribune website:

   http://www.sltrib.com/ci_8662142

Sound of a hundred violins

By Warren D'Mello

Marat Bisengaliev, from Kazakhstan, is putting together India's first symphonic orchestra, in collaboration with the National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai. He talks about the challenges…

Besides creating a new orchestra from scratch, Bisengaliev's biggest challenge is to create an audience for Western classical music.

"The people of Mumbai love the opera," declares Marat Bisengaliev. "The storyline is something like Bollywood." The virtuoso Kazakh violinist is the founding music director of the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI), the first professional orchestra in India. He has been assigned the mammoth task of building a symphony orchestra from the ground up, in a city where Western classical music is confined to a tiny section of the elite who frequent the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) at Nariman Point, the uptown part of Mumbai. It is, seemingly, quite a formidable task for anyone to pull off, but Bisengaliev brims with optimism. This is not the first orchestra he's put together – he is the founder of the Kazakh Chamber Orchestra and the West Kazakhstan Philharmonic Orchestra (WKPO). Besides, judging from the sold-out performances of the Puccini opera "Madama Butterfly", Mumbai's audience certainly looks hungry for more song and dance.

There is no escaping from music at the NCPA. The rooms at the guest house are all occupied by the SOI's musicians, deep into their daily riyaaz. As we sit in a dark, empty corridor of one the NCPA theatres, low notes from a tuba reverberate in the distance, creating an evocative backdrop for the interview.

So how did the SOI come together? Bisengaliev points out that the orchestra is still in the process of coming together. The SOI was born in 2006, the result of a collaboration between the NCPA and Marat Bisengaliev, and now in its fourth season, is in a dynamic phase of growth. Bisengaliev's job is by no means easy, with sections of the orchestra to be perfected, new players to be auditioned and groomed, and the orchestral repertoire to be worked on. "We are discussing which direction to go. Should we go with operas which people love or should we have more symphony or chamber music or should we have the ballet? I think we should be diverse and do it all," says Bisengaliev.

Read the interview at The Hindu website:

   http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/03/23/stories/2008032350210700.htm

The Swift Boating of Audiophiles

By Michael Fremer

The "Want to make an easy $1,000,000?" e-mail wasn't a scam from Nigeria but an alert from Paul DiComo, late of Polk Audio and now of Definitive Technology, about a double-blind cable-identification challenge made by The Annoying Randi, a magician and debunker of paranormal events who goes by the name of "The Amazing Randi."

I should have hit Delete and resumed my vacation. But a few months earlier, Randi, without the slightest provocation, had attacked me on his website and the revenge fantasy of relieving him of a million of his bucks filled my head.

...

At deadline time, yet another anti-audiophile piece appeared, this time in The New York Times' Arts & Leisure section, written by opera critic Anthony Tommasini, titled "Hard Being an Audiophile in an iPod World." Here's an excerpt from yet another letter to the editor that I felt obligated to write:

"The iPod is no more responsible for 'thinning the ranks of audiophiles' over the last decade than cheap, fast food has depleted the ranks of gourmets, or cheap wine has 'thinned the ranks' of oenophiles....Consumers are demanding higher quality food and seeking out better wine. Why? Because gourmet food and fine wine continue to receive enthusiastic coverage in the mainstream press and people who appreciate them are respected, while quality sound gets ignored, or worse, gets the kind of treatment you've chosen to give it this week – a perverse, gleeful dismissal – and audiophiles are looked upon as either 'odd' or 'deluded' for paying the same attention to sound that others pay to food or wine, or clothes, or cars, or you name it, except for sound. ..."

Read the complete account at the Stereophile website:

   http://www.stereophile.com/thinkpieces/021708swiftboat/

The brilliant classical ensemble Kronos Quartet searches the world over for new music and ideas

By Barbara Rose Shuler

Kronos! For countless music lovers, this word makes a full declarative sentence, complete with a scintillating noun, a virtuoso verb and a fountain of superlative adjectives. It's a word that means brilliant artistry, revolutionary ideas and fearless exploration of new frontiers in music.

The extraordinary Kronos Quartet has radically altered the perception of the scope of string quartet playing in the world today. Its mythic name is synonymous with the best of the newest in contemporary classical music. Kronos' players have flourished at the creative edge of the art form for more than three decades, reveling in the exploration of unchartered musical territory.

The ensemble has commissioned and inspired hundreds of new works, recorded more than 40 remarkable albums, performed thousands of concerts around the globe, engaged in many imaginative artistic collaborations and received numerous awards, including a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance and "Musicians of the Year" from Musical America.

Kronos, in short, ranks among the most influential groups of our time. Happily for us, Kronos resides in San Francisco and tours regularly to our region. Several years ago, audiences here enjoyed two especially dramatic and memorable multi-media spectacles produced by Kronos. One of these inventive masterpieces, "Visual Music," premiered at CSU-Monterey Bay's World Theater. The other, "Sun Rings" – performed early on in its run at Sunset Theater in Carmel – wove actual sounds of space as recorded by scientist Donald Gurnett with a score by Terry Riley accompanied by visual images.

Read more about this at the Monterey Herald website:

   http://www.montereyherald.com/entertainment/ci_8635691

Cleveland label releases its first CD of classical music by an American Indian composer

by Donald Rosenberg
Cleveland Plain Dealer Music Critic

Cleveland recording producer Alan Bise stands amid boxes filled with the first compact disc on his new label, Thunderbird Records, which is devoted to music by American Indian composers. Like aspiring writers who dream of their first novel being published, composers submit music to orchestras in the hope that a performance will ensue. The usual response: silence.

But a project that Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate, a native of the Chickasaw Nation and graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, proposed to the San Francisco Symphony was too intriguing to ignore.

Last week, a recording by the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus of two Tate works with roots in American Indian soil became reality. The compact disc is the first release by Thunderbird Records, a Cleveland-based company founded by audio producer Alan Bise, who studied at CIM when Tate was taking baby steps as a composer.

The recording was made in June in the orchestra's home, Davies Symphony Hall, with former resident conductor Edwin Outwater on the podium. The flute soloists are Christine Bailey Davis, principal flute of New York's Buffalo Philharmonic and a CIM graduate, and Thomas Robertello, a former member of the Cleveland Orchestra.

Bise vowed to create a recording company devoted to classical music by American Indian composers in 2004 after hearing "Worth of the Soul," Tate's celebration of Indian warriors. Another year passed before circumstances leading to the first Thunderbird recording came up.

Read more about this and listen to audio samples at the Plain Dealer website:

   http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2008/03/cleveland_label_releases_its_f.html

Inglese, Per Favore?

Mencken called opera in English "about as sensible as baseball in Italian." But it does have its charms.

By Justin Davidson

Despite all the words that are sung in English every day, on every quadrant of the Earth, our language skulks around the edges of opera. Eighteenth-century Londoners believed it self-evident that the finest sung dramas should be unintelligible by design, which is how Handel, a German, came to pen operas in Italian for monoglot British society. Even now, arias in English seem to be a cultural error, like Finnish hip-hop or salsa from Dubai. The current Met season incorporates one opera by an American in Sanskrit (Philip Glass's Satyagraha), another that mixes English with Chinese (Tan Dun's The First Emperor), and Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, sung in English translation for the benefit of the kids. Only Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, the work that brought British opera back to life after World War II, makes an irrefutable case for the language's singable power and lyrical efficiency. You can pack a lot of sense into a very few English words; set those words to music, and pellets of plain speech bloom. Britten made the title character a taciturn Suffolk fisherman, and also a figure of overpowering eloquence.

Read more about this at the New York Magazine website:

   http://nymag.com/arts/classicaldance/classical/reviews/45098/

Education is the future of classical music

By Melinda Bargreen

During the past decade, reports about the impending death of classical music have arrived with such regularity that doom-saying is practically a full-time activity for several arts journalists.

Today's pop culture, they say, with the idol-of-the-moment TV spectaculars and the cult of celebrity – combined with the serious decline of music education in many school districts – has built a society in which classical music is terra incognita to most people. Concert activity, buoyed up by a handful of aging donors, is confined mainly to blue-haired dowagers who make their increasingly decrepit way to the halls in order to hear the same stale pieces performed by the same bored musicians.

Or so they say.

Attendees at a national classical-music summit held at Seattle University last month, however, had a whole span of quite different views. Presented jointly by Seattle U. and Bellevue Philharmonic CEO Jennifer McCausland, the summit brought in representatives from coast to coast – Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, The Washington Post, and several others – and described a classical-music industry that is doing considerably more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Most of them, in fact, took a line pretty close to that of moderator and Seattle Symphony music director Gerard Schwarz, whose introductory remarks included this observation: "This is the most positive time in my career for classical music. When I came to Seattle 25 years ago, the Symphony had 4,000 subscribers; now we have more than 35,000." And when you count education and community programs, the Symphony reaches 315,000 people a year.

Read more about this at the Seattle Times website:

   http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2004280030_classical160.html

Classical music is enjoying mini-comeback thanks to the Internet

by John Pitcher

William Wolcott's violin studio is about the size of a large broom closet, yet it's often the site of amazing master classes.

Virtuoso Itzhak Perlman has held court there. Pinchas Zukerman, Sarah Chang and other fabulous fiddlers also have squeezed into the room.

They all fit because of a miraculous little invention: the Internet.

"There's an incredible amount of classical music now on the Internet, and it's really helping me teach my students," said Wolcott, an instructor at the Omaha Conservatory of Music. "We can sign on to YouTube right here in my studio and watch the world's greatest violinists perform and give master classes."

Visit the Web and you'll find thousands of classical musicians, critics and fans chattering away in a rapidly expanding classical blogosphere. Internet radio also is streaming performances from major opera companies, orchestras and concert halls. And perhaps most surprising, the Web is fueling a mini-boom in the classical recording industry.

Sales at ArkivMusic, an online classical CD emporium, rose 30 percent in 2007, an astounding figure considering that CD sales in general were down more than 15 percent in the United States last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Classical downloads likewise have been brisk. At eMusic, the world's second-largest digital music service after iTunes, classical music now represents 12 percent of its overall European sales, and its business in the U.S. is not far behind. That's a big increase for a genre that rarely made up more than 2 or 3 percent of total sales in record stores.

Read more about this at the Omaha World-Herald website:

   http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2620&u_sid=10284362

Classical music: Focusing on genius

The only Mozart Festival in the world which presents all the composer's operas has launched ticket sales

by Anna Kalembasiak

While summer remains a long way off, some entertainments require seriously advanced booking, and the 18th Mozart Festival in Warsaw is one of them. Tickets for the event, which will take place between June 15-July 26 at the Warsaw Chamber Opera, have just gone on sale.

During the festival, concerts and operas will be performed by the best musicians from Poland and abroad. Concerts will take place on the premises of the Warsaw Chamber Opera as well as at the Palace on the Water in the Royal Lazienki Park, in the Royal Castle and in Warsaw's churches.

"Our Mozart Festival is the only one in the world which presents all 20-plus operatic works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Even the festival in Austria, the homeland of Mozart, does not present all his works [at one time]," said Jan Bokszczanin, the spokesperson for the Warsaw Chamber Opera. "There has never been another festival which fully covers the stage operas of this genius composer," said musicologist Janusz Ekiert.

Read more about this at the Warsaw Business Journal website:

   http://www.wbj.pl/?command=article&id=40493&type=wbj

Pianos hit the streets

by Maev Kennedy

On the eve of his 19^th birthday, Marvin Forbes did something which completely shocked his mates: he sat down at the piano which had appeared overnight on the corner of Orphanage and Mason roads, and played a few bars of Offenbach. "I never knew you could do that!" Thasawar Iqbal said, stunned.

"I knew," muttered another friend, Anthony Murrain. When the group had first walked past the piano on their lunch break, glancing at it out of the corners of their eyes with studied lack of interest, Forbes had insisted he could not play, never had played, and would not know what to do with a piano if it suddenly popped up outside the library with a spray-painted sign reading: "Play me, I'm yours."

This was not strictly true. Forbes is now a trainee mechanical engineer, but he got a C in music at GCSE. "Go on then," Iqbal said, incredulously, "play it!"

Forbes sat on the green plastic chair with reluctance, played a few random notes, a few chords, and finally, his fingers almost visibly remembering, a tune. Iqbal could not have been more astounded if his friend had sprouted wings and flown away over the war memorial.

The piano in the Erdington suburb of Birmingham is one of 15 which have just appeared, unguarded, across the city. There is one in the Rag Market, and one outside Cadbury World. There is another at Colmore junior school, where a teacher was persuaded into an impromptu recital dressed in white gown with veil fluttering in the icy wind. She had been on her way to her wedding.

Some of the pianos are under cover, others have been placed outside. All were professionally tuned, but some appear to already be suffering from exposure: Forbes brushed off praise for his playing, muttering that the keys of the piano were starting to stick.

The pianos are the brainchild of the artist Luke Jerram, and are a project for the Fierce arts organisation, a collaboration renowned for getting odd things into odder places. Jerram previously has floated an orchestra in hot air balloons to awaken the sleeping city, and created a ghostly installation in an abandoned railway tunnel.

The pianos have been installed in public places allowing anyone to sit down and play: some were already in enthusiastic use yesterday, others barely noticed. They will remain in situ until after Easter - if they survive that long - those outliving the experiment given a permanent home. Some of the instruments were bought, others were donated: one man rang from Glasgow pleading for a baby grand to be taken on.

Read more about this at the The Guardian website:

   http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2265308,00.html

Bad blood, great art

In CSO's search for director, history shows despised conductors can inspire best performances

By Alan G. Artner

As the procession of guest conductors has crossed the podium of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and speculation has centered on this or that visitor as a possible candidate for music director, a consideration has appeared that largely was absent from past searches.

Reviews of concerts not only have described what has been heard by the audience but also have drawn upon backstage reports on how well the musicians enjoyed working with the conductor, in some cases characterizing the interactions as "love fests."

Such regard for player opinion is inevitable at a time when orchestras have more to say about their destinies than ever before. But the theory that musicians' liking a conductor personally or musically will foreshadow a distinguished partnership is false. Some of the conductors most admired today were, in fact, hated by their musicians.

The greatest musical partnership in Chicago, confirmed by recordings that for 50 years have continuously been available, was between the CSO and Fritz Reiner, an artist described as a precisionist, perfectionist, conductor's conductor, martinet, tyrant and sadist. Critic Paul Griffiths delicately wrote, Reiner's "insistence on rhythmic precision and clarity from his players was unmoderated by any wish to be loved." Critic Harold C. Schonberg bluntly wrote, Reiner "would probably have run at the bottom in any kind of popularity poll taken among orchestral musicians." Yet Reiner raised a good provincial orchestra to one of North America's "Big Five," and had he not been averse to touring, would have gotten it recognized in Russia and Western Europe 20 years before Georg Solti did. It is no exaggeration to say the outstanding CSO began with Reiner, that is, not with love but with fear.

Read more about this at the Chicago Tribune website:

   http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/chi-0316_hatedmar16,1,5650169.story

Car Parts Orchestra

The man who turned a family hatchback into a 30-piece touring band

Jasper Rees

Part of the signature of a car is the sound made by its engine.

If pressed, even the most L-plated among us could probably identify a Rolls by its self-satisfied purr, or a Ferrari by its neurotic throat-clearing. But the most fanatical of petrolheads would struggle to discern, in the ambient jazzy backing to Alesha Dixon's new iTunes download, For You I Will, the snappy hatchback sound of the new Ford Focus.

The advertising industry's reverence for the tangential uses of disembodied cars is a fairly recent phenomenon. In 2003, the award-winning commercial for the Honda Accord fashioned the car's entrails into a hypnotically complicated mechanism. In 2006 a large choir of human voices imitated the clunks and whirs of a Honda Civic. The new ad for the Focus goes a step further, and puts car parts to musical use.

The Car Parts Orchestra consists, among others, of a weirdly bent flute, a bonnet recycled as a gong, a wheel-rim drum kit with gearknob for pedal stick and, the pièce de résistance, a double bass whose body takes the bulging form of a bumper, with a neck made from a roof support, which can be either plucked or bowed with a windscreen wiper.

Read more about this including video interviews with composer Craig Richey and inventor Bill Milbrodt at the Telegraph website:

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/15/bmcarpart115.xml

True face of Mozart revealed

Dalya Alberge,
Arts Correspondent

His image in curled wig, embroidered red tunic and lace ruff stares out from kitsch portraits, decorative porcelain and chocolate boxes without number, but nobody really knew what Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart looked like – until now.

To the great excitement of musical scholars, two previously-unknown oil portraits painted from life – and which can be traced back to a close friend of the composer's father – have been discovered.

They were identified by Cliff Eisen, Professor of music history at King's College London, who has found documentary evidence that links them to letters written by Mozart and his father, Leopold.

One was painted in 1783, during the composer's early years in Vienna when he was in buoyant mood after his marriage to Constanze. Measuring about 19in by 14in (47x35cm), it is by Joseph Hickel, painter to the imperial court. It is now considered so important that it has been insured for £2 million.

Read more about this at the Times website:

   http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article3549310.ece

Global Digital Classical

Indians, according to A.R. Rahman, have to be rescued from the synthesizer. But they could be brought back to it once they are musically better educated. No one would know better than Rahman the complex relationships among music, entertainment, digital technology and globalization, particularly in the context of contemporary film-music. But in all this postmodern music-making, what is the place of the Classical? This seems to be the idea, question and problem at the heart of Rahman's new brainwave – the KM Music Conservatory at Chennai and the national symphony orchestra that would come out of it.

Calling it a "conservatory" suggests a rigorous education in classical music in the Western mode. And this is what Rahman wants to initiate with both singers and instrumentalists, according to proper international standards. But he is equally interested in teaching his students state-of-the-art music technology, and how to "market" themselves professionally. The other synthesis he wants to bring about is in teaching both Western and Indian classical music in this conservatory. So, what his symphony orchestra will play, and what the newly trained composers will compose for it, would be not only Western classical music, but also more hybrid work incorporating elements of both traditions, and then "modernizing" each in different ways. The significant thing here is that Rahman sees a proper grounding in the classical traditions as essential for such forms of musical synthesis.

Read more about this at the Telegraph Calcutta website:

   http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080315/jsp/opinion/story_9016069.jsp

Tributes to "inspiring" composer Hoddinott

Karen Price

Tributes were paid last night to eminent Welsh composer Alun Hoddinott who has died at the age of 78.

Mr Hoddinott's work was commissioned by leading orchestras and was recognised throughout the world.

The night before he died, the world premiere of his last string quartet was performed at London's Wigmore Hall.

The Bargoed-born composer produced symphonies, piano sonatas, operas (including two for television and four with leading parts for Sir Geraint Evans), concertos for all instruments, and a wide range of vocal, choral, instrumental, chamber and orchestral music.

Read more about this at the icWales website:

   http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/2008/03/13/tributes-to-inspiring-composer-hoddinott-91466-20615223/

The energetic Berg Orchestra gets into the spirit

By Frank Kuznik

The Berg Orchestra is opening its spring season with a great musical marketing gimmick: a contest to decide the best new work that the group premiered last year. Seven pieces by young Czech composers were chosen for the competition, which was decided by popular public vote and a professional jury of eight foreign composers.

The contest attracted more than 250 voters – a good number for any modern music event in Prague – and was close, according to Berg artistic director and conductor Peter Vrábel. "There was no single runaway winner," he says. "With the jury alone, there were three first-place winners."

No matter. Through a complicated vote weighting system that was a bit difficult to sort out in translation from Czech to English, a clear winner was determined, and will be performed at the group's concert Thursday night, along with modern music works by Glass, Martinů and Honegger.

This is not the way an orchestra usually operates. But there's little that's typical about Berg, from the music it plays to the venues that it plays in, which have included the Svetozor cinema, Museum Kampa and the city's old sewage treatment plant (now the Ekotechnické museum). "We always try to discover something new for the audience," Vrábel says in a classic bit of understatement.

Read more about this at the Prague Post website:

   http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2008/03/12/a-vote-for-modern-music.php

Nigel Kennedy criticises "egocentric" conductors

By Robyn Powell and agencies

Violinist Nigel Kennedy has criticised star conductors for their egocentric behaviour, for being more interested in promoting their image, than spending time with an orchestra.

Kennedy said some conductors spent only a few weeks with an orchestra. He told The Times: "How many will develop an orchestra rather than feeding off its achievements? They're straight off for the dollar. Round the corner to get a better job. All they're interested in is strutting about, wielding a bit of power.

Nigel Kennedy denounced conducting as an art form

"A conductor can galvanise the troops and evolve an artistic programme and identity of style. If they only give five or ten weeks a year [to an orchestra], how can they do that?" However, he declined to name any specific conductors. But denounced conducting as a form of art for his preference for playing music. "Why would you want to stand there waving a stick when you could be playing an instrument?" he said.

Read more about this at the Telegraph website:

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/12/nkennedy112.xml

Method & madness: The oddities of the virtuosi

What is it about elite pianists? Some are charmingly eccentric, others just insane. Michael Church looks at the oddities of the virtuosi

"It's like a horse before the race," said the great Vladimir Horowitz of his feelings before a recital. "You start to perspire, you feel already in you electricity. I am a general, my soldiers are the keys."

Marshalling their mountains of notes from memory, concert pianists need the skill of jugglers and the strength and stamina of athletes. Meanwhile, in their fusion of instinct and intellect, they must be supreme aesthetes. And they must do all this without safety nets: if their memory fails, or their fingers foul up, all they have is an unforgiving crowd. It takes an unusual person to put their life on the line like this. No wonder many pianists are oddballs; no wonder some go mad.

Such thoughts are prompted by the recent release of yet more posthumous discs on the BBC Legends label of those wonderfully eccentric Russians Shura Cherkassky and Sviatoslav Richter; and by two other massive projects: the four-CD box plus book from Naxos entitled A-Z of Pianists; and the 80-CD box of the original Sony-Columbia recordings by Glenn Gould, who was both a god of the keyboard and more than a little mad. And these are just the tip of the iceberg: we can now survey an entire century of pianism's brilliant weirdness, thanks to the voluminous evidence that record companies are now putting out.

Read more about this at the The Independent website:

   http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/method--madness-the-oddities-of-the-virtuosi-794373.html

Bolshoi's choreographer back

By Tony Halpin

He ruled the world's most famous ballet company with an iron fist for three decades until he was ousted in a revolt against his authoritarian style.

Now Yuri Grigorovich is returning to the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow to oversee the Soviet-era repertoire that earned him global fame as a choreographer.

Grigorovich, 81, was the Bolshoi's artistic director from 1964 until 1995, when he was forced out amid accusations that its reputation had stagnated and crumbled with the Soviet Union. His appointment this week as a ballet master by general director Anatoly Iksanov marks a stunning return.

Grigorovich received the invitation to return to the theatre at the funeral last month of his wife, Natalia Bessmertnova, the legendary ballerina whose name means immortal in Russian. She was among 15 dancers who protested against Grigorovich's departure with a one-day strike. They appeared on stage in jeans and T-shirts before a shocked audience expecting to see Romeo and Juliet, the first time that a performance was cancelled by a dancers' protest since the Bolshoi was founded in 1776.

Read more about this at the The Australian website:

   http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23351747-16947,00.html

Cold War, Hot Pianist. Now Add 50 Years.

By Anthony Tommasini

Fort Worth, Texas
A half-century after meeting him, the Russian people still adore Van Cliburn. That was the message conveyed by Aleksandr S. Sokolov, the Russian minister of culture, and Yuri V. Ushakov, the Russian ambassador to the United States, during toasts at a black-tie dinner and musical tribute here on March 1. Sponsored by the Van Cliburn Foundation, the event commemorated the 50th anniversary of Mr. Cliburn's victory in the first Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow in April 1958.

Before nearly 1,000 guests in an elaborate 40,000-square-foot tent on the grounds of the Kimbell Art Museum, Mr. Sokolov read a message of congratulations from President Vladimir V. Putin, an honorary sponsor of the event, who could not attend. Mr. Ushakov paid tribute to the "two Van Cliburns," as he put it: the proud Texan who conquered Russian hearts with his magnificent artistry and the honorary Russian who was mobbed by Muscovites on the streets hugging and kissing him amid shouts of "Van KLEE-burn!"

Mr. Cliburn, 73, as trim, bright-eyed and effusive as ever, his bushy hair still thick though gray, looked overcome with emotion. He offered a few phrases of gratitude in well-practiced Russian, then delivered an endearingly rambling speech about "200 years of friendship between Russia and America," starting with an exchange of warm letters between President Thomas Jefferson and Czar Alexander I.

But this had to have been a bittersweet evening for Mr. Cliburn, who for nearly 30 years has largely been missing from the classical music field that he electrified during his glory days. Many towering creative artists make their lasting contributions during their youths. Orson Welles and Tennessee Williams come to mind. Some might add the Beatles to that list.

Van Cliburn is another such artist. For a good dozen years he was the best known and most popular classical musician in the world. His recordings routinely sold in the hundreds of thousands. His success was hard won and much deserved. But over time the expectations that this cultural emissary and musical superstar faced were impossible to fulfill. His playing declined. After a dispiriting concert in Toledo, Ohio, in 1978, he announced that he was taking a sabbatical. By the late 1980s he had begun playing again, but infrequently. He left his New York apartment and moved to a spacious house in the suburbs of Fort Worth.

Reflecting on his current life during a visit to New York in January he seemed wistful but at peace. "I do play concerts from time to time," he said. "I work at home quietly, go to the opera, hear concerts, see friends. I like making up now for what I was not able to have then. And I still have to practice."

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/arts/music/09tomm.html

200 performances in the main event from rap to romantics; 360 shows at Fringe Festival

by Julia Brühne

Even if the weather is not yet cooperative, the Budapest Spring Festival is set to lighten your step from Friday. The festival between 14 and 30 March is in its 28^th year and is one of Europe's largest and most celebrated cultural festivals. The 200-or-so theatre performances, exhibitions, classical concerts, jazz shows and other events are expected to attract 200,000 guests.

The classics

The festival will open with the Bavarian State Orchestra led by the internationally renowned Kent Nagano.

On Thursday 20 March, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, under well-known Hungarian conductor Ádám Fischer, will perform Haydn, Mozart and Dvorák adaptations at the Palace of Arts.

The beautiful Hungarian State Opera will not go unused: Wagner's Parsifal, Puccini's La Bohème and Bizet's Carmen should light up the evenings of fans of romanticism.

Not-so classics

In the lighter entertainment genre, the gospel choir Blind Boys of Alabama, some of whose members are now in their 70s, is sure to make an impression.

Those who are interested in contemporary dance should watch out for the performance of the American dance group Philadanco. The group performs major works of modern American dance with individual use of form and technical perfection.

Scheduled at the last minute, but no less worth watching, is a concert by the "enfant terrible" of classical music, Nigel Kennedy who replaces Maxim Vengerov.

Read more about this at the Budapest Times website:

   http://www.budapesttimes.hu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6181

Pianist Alfred Brendel to give his final Chicago performance

By John von Rhein

The great pianists are a hardy breed who would look at you horror-struck if you even whispered the word "retirement" in their presence. In fact many celebrated artists of the keyboard have been known to continue playing, their powers practically undimmed, well into old age. Think of Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz and Claudio Arrau, all of whom were still going strong into their 80s.

Alfred Brendel certainly could have kept his thriving international career going for another decade or so; instead, he has chosen to bow out gracefully at age 77. The celebrated Austrian pianist is to give his final performance in December, playing a Mozart concerto in Vienna with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Before stepping into the good night of retirement, Brendel is playing a farewell concert tour of Europe and America that is to include stops in major cities including Chicago, where he will make his final Orchestra Hall appearance Sunday afternoon.

Read more about this at the Chicago Tribune website:

   http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/chi-0309_brendelmar09,1,7748443.story

Violist Richard Yongjae O'Neill's Art of Giving

By Lee Hyo-won

Violist Richard Yongjae O'Neill reminds you of the Energizer Bunny. He keeps going and going. For the 29-year-old violist, it would be typical to go on a cross-country tour with Schubert across Korea, and then fly to Los Angeles to teach for eight hours before heading to New York. After a few days of playing chamber music at the Lincoln Center and fiddling contemporary pieces at the Guggenheim, he's on the move again. Following a quick stop to lecture at UCLA, he's in Milan with John Zorn, making modern music history. This is how 2007 zipped past for the musician.

One of the few violists to ever receive the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant as well as a Grammy Award nomination (Best Soloist with Orchestra), Richard Yongjae O'Neill is rising to prominence as one of the leading artists of his generation. But it seems to be more than a deep passion for music that keeps him going. It is the power of sharing through music.

"An artist should give of oneself. It's important to give, to share, to reflect on the human condition, our finite existence, life, pain, death, all of these things,'' O'Neill told The Korea Times in January when he visited Seoul. He was celebrating New Year's with his New York-based chamber group Sejong Soloists at one of their sellout performances.

Read the complete interview at the Korea Times website:

   http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2008/03/143_20390.html

Arabic Don Giovanni Earns Standing Ovation

by Maria Karam

The region's first Arabic performance of Mozart's celebrated opera Don Giovanni closed with a standing ovation in the Garden City of the United Arab Emirates Thursday to raise the curtain on the eighth, and largest, annual Al Ain Classical Music Festival.

Having played to a near capacity audience in the Al Ain Municipality Theatre, the cast – of eight soloists from Egypt and Lebanon with a chorus from Lebanon Chorale de l'universite Antonine and superbly accompanied by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor and musical director Zbigniew Graca – drew tremendous applause as they emerged on stage to take their bows with the production's Polish director Ryszard Peryt.

It was an evening when Al Ain wrote itself into the classical music record books – the first Arabic performance in the region of the Mozart masterpiece with the libretto ably translated through 14 months of dedication by Egyptian opera lover, Dr. Aly Sadek.

It was also a night never to be forgotten for young Lebanese soprano Nadine Nassar who made her operatic debut in the production in the role of Zerlina.

Holding back tears at the end of the performance, Nadine said the evening had been "highly emotional" for her.

"I would like to thank the Al Ain Classical Music Festival Committee for this opportunity. The chance to perform with fellow professionals and under professional direction and accompaniment from such a great orchestra is something I will never forget. Al Ain will be a place I will always now remember."

With a simple, yet dramatic, stage set designed by Ryszard Peryt and rich, period costumes designed by Poland's Katarzyna Stolarczyk, the production was a triumph in combining the libretto, music and theatre talents of both Europe and the Middle East.

Read more about this at the Business Intelligence - Middle East website:

   http://www.bi-me.com/main.php?id=18103&t=1&c=33&cg=4

Strings attached

Some musicians like nothing better than to settle down for decades in a chamber ensemble. Others prefer to pick and choose. Who gets the better deal? William Howard and Steven Isserlis compare notes

The 25-year stalwart
William Howard, pianist and founder of the Schubert Ensemble

I met a festival director recently who has a policy of never booking established chamber groups. The best way to get exciting performances, he claims, is to put individual players together for a particular concert. Such a view is not, fortunately, shared by all promoters - but even so, it is a challenge to an ensemble such as ours, which is celebrating its 25^th birthday this year.

Spontaneous concerts can be very exciting - and all of us in the Schubert Ensemble enjoy the opportunity to play with others in this way - but I would challenge the view that long-term musical relationships inevitably lead to dull performances. When I think of the most memorable chamber concerts I've heard, I think of the Amadeus Quartet bringing their glorious years of experience to Haydn and Mozart, or the Smetana Quartet at the end of their career giving electrifying performances, by heart, of the Smetana and Janácek quartets.

I sometimes wonder if part of the excitement of one-off performances is caused by a sense of precariousness that can be communicated - often as something quite positive - from players to audience. But for an ensemble to take real risks in a concert, they need to have a history of performing the music together regularly. As any connoisseur of football knows, imaginative and flowing play is more likely to come from a finely honed club team than from a national team of star players who have had little time to train together. When a concert goes well for us, we can achieve what an audience member once described as "group bungee jumping" - the feeling that you can take a performance to its limits and trust everyone else will come with you. ...

The fly-by-night
Steven Isserlis, cellist

One of my favourite musical activities is organising chamber music concerts. Since I spend most of my time playing concertos with orchestra or recitals with piano, the groups I work with are almost invariably one-offs - one-night stands, so to speak. It is exciting, enjoyable - and challenging.

Nowadays, I am very careful only to work with trusted friends and colleagues. It is essential that we get along personally, as well as musically. Actually, the two are related: everyone knows the feeling of being introduced to a stranger and finding you have absolutely nothing to say to them. The same applies in music; you can play chamber music with someone, and feel that you are playing a completely different piece - no conversation is taking place. ...

Read more about this at the Guardian News website:

   http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2262784,00.html

Regrouped Dance Theatre of Harlem to focus on education

By Susan Reiter

The organization's financial picture improved after a hiatus, but not enough to put its company back on tour.

Until a few years ago, whenever Dance Theatre of Harlem was on a tour of U.S. cities, it routinely held auditions for its school's summer program or to spot potential apprentice dancers. But that was before September 2004, when financial realities forced the umbrella organization to put the professional troupe on hiatus.

At the time, DTH founder and artistic director Arthur Mitchell says, he expected an interruption of a year at most. But although the sizable deficit and the grim overall financial situation that threatened the organization in 2004 have diminished substantially, no one will be seeing the professional company in the near future.

Instead, DTH is conducting a 10-city audition tour devoted solely to the intensive student summer program at its spacious Harlem headquarters, which continues to hum with activity. The Los Angeles tryouts will be held Sunday at the Lula Washington Dance Theatre.

"We made up our minds that we wanted to fill that gap that existed because the company was no longer on tour," the indefatigable and eternally youthful Mitchell, who will turn 74 this month, said the other day. Just outside the conference room where he sat hung posters from DTH's foreign tours -- souvenirs of engagements in Monte Carlo, Verona, Germany, Barcelona.

Read more about this at the LA Times website:

   http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-harlem7mar07,1,994856.story

Ryoji Ikeda

By Donald Eubank

So forward-looking that it's hard to categorize him - Is he an artist? A musician? A conceptualist? - Ryoji Ikeda makes the music that we'll lull the robots to sleep with when they ultimately try to take over. Or that we'll use to convince ourselves that we are the robots.

For performances, Ikeda - who says the most important aspects of his works are "ideas and results" - matches his dense electronic compositions with visuals that could come from a monitor of whatever machine would produce such sounds. The scale of his works feels immense - his last performance in Japan was of "datamatics [prototype]" at the Tokyo International Forum's cavernous Hall C, in which a screen stretched across the full stage projected digital noise. James Brown it's not.

Earlier, Ikeda worked with Hiroshi Sugimoto to produce the crunching sonic backdrop at the Mori Art Museum's exhibition of the photographer's iconic prints of ocean horizons. For his latest, the multitalented artist is revising "datamatics" as a "[ver. 2.0]" in Itami on March 13 and Tokyo March 16.

Read the interview with Ryoji Ikeda at the Japan Times Online website:

   http://search.japantimes.co.jp/rss/ft20080306a2.html

New classical CD aimed at calming dogs

By Amy Hollyfield

Classical music can often calm our heart rate down in traffic, but can it also affect our dogs? A music teacher in Half Moon Bay has just released a new CD specifically targeting out of control canines.

The call of the wild isn't always welcomed indoors. You can't exactly tell that to Sanchez and his friends, but what if music can call the wild right out of them?

Music teacher Lisa Specter accidentally discovered that certain kinds of music she played seemed to bring the energy level down a notch in the dogs she was pet sitting, and also in her very energetic yellow lab.

"I noticed that when I played the piano and when I played certain kinds of music, that he would slow down, lie down and go to sleep within a very short period of time," said Lisa Specter, creator and composer.

She started leaving the music on when she left Sanchez home alone, and he never ate another pair of diamond earrings or destroyed parts of her piano again. Until one day when she couldn't find her CD and tried some different music.

"It was still slow and I thought 'oh this will work, it's really ok,' and I came back and pillows were torn apart and tissues from the trash were all over the place. He was not a happy dog," said Lisa Specter.

Now she realized she was on to something. So she took her discovery and her questions to psycho acoustic sound researcher Joshua Leeds. Four different CDs and 150 dogs later they zeroed in on the music that can calm our canines.

Read more about this at the KGO/ABC 7 News website:

   http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local&id=6005162

German Orchestra Takes Richard Wagner to Abu Dhabi

The New York Philharmonic is hardly the only orchestra to have visited a "hostile" country. DW spoke to Jan Nast, orchestral director of Dresden's Staatskapelle, about whether music can build bridges between cultures.

The tradition of "classical diplomacy" in Germany runs long and deep. In the 1970s and 1980s, Romanian-born conductor Sergiu Celibidache and the Munich Philharmonic were very active in Communist Eastern Europe and often enlisted by the West German government as cultural ambassadors.

Since 1999, the Argentina-born musical director of Berlin's State Opera House, Daniel Barenboim, has led the East-Western Divan Orchestra, which united Israeli and Palestinian musicians. In 2005, the Berlin Philharmonic made an extensive trip to China, which is the subject of a film released this week.

On Saturday, March 8, the Saechsische Staatskapelle Dresden -- Saxony's state orchestra -- is scheduled to perform an all-Wagner concert in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. DW-WORLD.DE spoke to orchestra director Jan Nast about high culture and the everyday task of creating cultural understanding.

Read the complete interview by Jefferson Chase at the Deutsche Welle website:

   http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3167157,00.html

Culture minister criticises Proms

by Peter Apps
Reuters

Culture minister Margaret Hodge stirred up a storm on Tuesday by criticising the annual promenade classical music concerts in London's Albert Hall as not inclusive enough for a modern multi-ethnic society.

The Last Night of the Proms each September sees hundreds of concertgoers in the hall and across the road in Hyde Park waving flags to patriotic songs like "Land of Hope and Glory," "Jerusalem" and "Rule Britannia."

But challenging the arts sector to better reflect modern Britain, Hodge said they were reaching too narrow an audience.

"The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events -- I'm thinking particularly of the Proms -- is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel that they are a part of this," she said in a speech to a London think tank.

[See for yourself: Schedule for the 2007 BBC Proms]

Read more about this at the Reuters website:

   http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKL0439167620080304

Radio 2 plans less weekday classical music

Guy Dixon
Globe and Mail

For the final phase of its overhaul of Radio 2, the CBC plans to play less classical music weekday mornings and late afternoons and more pop, showcasing a wider variety of Canadian music and aiming to appeal to a broader audience.

The new weekday morning show from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. will be a mix of much less classical and much more pop, leaning toward established musicians such as Joni Mitchell and Diana Krall, with around 50-per-cent Canadian content. There's no decision yet on who the host will be.

The midday show weekdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. will be entirely classical, playing both CDs and live performances, with around 40-per-cent Canadian content. But the drive-home afternoon show will be the biggest departure from current programming. That show from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. will ignore classical entirely and instead air a wide variety of genres from contemporary pop and world music to blues and roots, with an emphasis on newer songs and artists such as Feist and Serena Ryder.

In September, Radio 2 will also launch separate all-day all-classical, all-jazz and all-singer-songwriter stations on the Internet. Radio 3 will remain an Internet- and satellite-based service. However, one petitioner among a vocal group of listeners, musicians and composers who have criticized the overhaul argued yesterday that even an all-classical Web-based service wouldn't rectify the fact that Radio 2's on-air, non-classical programs are moving away from what had been the network's core listeners.

Read more about this at the Globe and Mail website:

   www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080305.wtwo05/BNStory/

Exhibit revives musicologist's work

By John Gerome
Associated Press

When people say John Work III had "big ears," they're not being unkind.

Work, who died in 1967 at age 65, had a gift for finding and collecting black folk music. He traveled the South recording blues singers, work songs, ballads, church choirs, dance tunes, whatever struck him as showing the evolution of black music.

And yet what might be his greatest achievement went largely unnoticed for 60 years, stashed in a file cabinet at Hunter College in New York. Now, with the opening of a new exhibit on Work's life at Fisk University and a companion CD, some say Work is finally getting his due.

"He was seeking out music that many African-American academics at the time had no use for," said Evan Hatch, a professional folklorist who helped compile the Fisk exhibit, "The Beautiful Music that Surrounds You," which runs through May 11.

A classically trained musician and composer, Work taught at Fisk University, a black college founded in 1865 to educate newly freed slaves. He also directed the school's famed Jubilee Singers and ran its music department.

Read more about this at the Louisville Courier-Journal website:

   http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080303/SCENE05/803030329/

Changing the Rules of Cello Playing

by Joshua Kosman

The cello is a very fine instrument - just ask Yo-Yo Ma - but it has some fundamental weaknesses. The most obvious one is that there's no way to play more than two of its four strings simultaneously.

Fortunately, a solution is at hand. Scratch that: two solutions.

One comes from the German cellist and composer Michael Bach, who has developed a curved cello bow with loosely strung hairs that can be drawn across all four cello strings at once. The result is a rich, warm mass of overtones that is a far cry from the broken chords cellists generally have to use to play, say, Bach's Suites for Solo Cello.

Frances-Marie Uitti, an American cellist and composer now living in Amsterdam, has a different idea. Over the course of several decades, she's become expert at playing with two bows at once – one in the normal position atop the strings and the other between the strings and the body of the cello – so that the number of string combinations available to her increases instantly.

Read more about this at the SF Gate website:

   http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/02/PKTNV7D1F.DTL

The Musical Mystery
By Colin McGinn

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
by Oliver Sacks
Knopf, 381 pp., $26.00

Music is so ubiquitous and ancient in the human species – so integral to our nature – that we must be born to respond to it: there must be a music instinct. Just as we naturally take to language, as a matter of our innate endowment, so must music have a specific genetic basis, and be part of the very structure of the human brain.

An unmusical alien would be highly perplexed by our love of music - and other terrestrial species are left cold by what so transports us. Music is absolutely normal for members of our species, but utterly quirky. Moreover, it is known that music activates almost all the human brain: the sensory centers, the prefrontal cortex that underlies rational functions, the emotional areas (cerebellum, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens), the hippocampus for memory, and the motor cortex for movement. When you listen to a piece of music your brain is abuzz with intense neural activity.

Read the complete review at the New York Review of Books website:

   http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21059

Call for Submissions
(Papers, Panels, and Tutorials)

The Ninth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval will take place September 14-18, 2008 (Sunday through Thursday), at Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA. Since its inception in 2000, ISMIR has rapidly become the premier venue for the multidisciplinary field of accessing, analyzing, and managing large collections and archives of music information. The expansion of the music information retrieval (MIR) community reflects the enormous challenges and opportunities presented by the recent and tremendous growth in available music and music-related data.

Throughout ISMIR 2008, space will be available for publishers, software companies, booksellers, service providers, system vendors, and any other businesses interested in exhibiting their MIR-related products.

Read more about this at the ISMIR website:

   http://ismir2008.ismir.net/

Experts "Rebuild" Bach's Face

The face of Johann Sebastian Bach has been recreated by experts at Dundee University more than 250 years after the German composer's death. It is believed that only one portrait he sat for still exists.

However, forensic artists at the university built up a picture of his appearance using a bronze cast of his skull and documents from the time.

The face will go on display at the Bachhaus museum in Bach's hometown of Eisenach next month.

Read more about this at the BBC website:

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/7270795.stm

Olivier Messiaen

by Tim Page

For more than half a century, Messiaen really mattered – both within the world of music and, increasingly, to the general public as well. Messiaen inspired no little controversy during his time, but there was one point on which both his admirers and detractors could agree: there was nobody like him, and, once he was gone, nobody could take his place.

Read the complete introduction along with other articles at the Carnegie Hall website:

   http://www.carnegiehall.org/article/sound_insights/Messiaen/art_intro_messiaen.html

How to Become an American

By Joseph Horowitz

Editor's Note: The new book Artists in Exile, written by the noted music critic and lecturer Joseph Horowitz, analyzes the ways in which emigre artists made an impact on American culture and were in turn influenced by it. In these excerpts from the chapter "How to Become an American," Horowitz, who will be guest speaker in a free public lecture March 7 (and in preconcert lectures March 8-9) at Stanford Lively Arts' "The Stravinsky Project," compares the American experiences of choreographer George Balanchine and composer Igor Stravinsky, whose artistic collaboration began at Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (with Le Chant du Rossignol in 1925) and continued at Balanchine's New York City Ballet.

Read more at The Classical Voice:

   http://www.sfcv.org/2008/02/26/how-to-become-an-american/

 

San Francisco Opera and the Bigger Picture Launch Digital Cinema Presentations at 121 Movie Theaters across the Country

Manhattan's Clearview Ziegfield and Brooklyn's AIX Parkside Pavilion Theatre to Offer San Francisco Opera Presentations

Spring 2008 Schedule and Theaters Announced: Multiple Showings of Puccini's La Rondine and Madama Butterfly, Saint-Saens' Samson and Delilah and Mozart's Don Giovanni To Screen Nationwide Beginning March 8

San Francisco Opera and The Bigger Picture launch their nationwide digital cinema presentations at 121 theaters beginning March 8 with four showings of La Rondine starring soprano Angela Gheorghiu in Puccini's rarely-performed gem.  The digital cinema presentations will appear at numerous major cinema chains across the country including Carmike Cinemas, the leading adopter of digital cinema technology; Celebration Cinemas; Clearview Cinemas; Galaxy Theatres; Marquee Cinemas; Rave Motion Pictures; Ultrastar; and Wehrenberg, with many other theaters pending.  Clearview Ziegfield in Manhattan and AIX Parkside Pavilion Theatre in Brooklyn are among the theaters in New York screening these San Francisco Opera presentations.

Read more at http://www.thebiggerpicture.us/opera/

Words and Music

When In Pyongyang
by Kate Julian
MARCH 3, 2008

With the New York Philharmonic slated to make its Pyongyang debut this week, Lorin Maazel, the music director, confessed to some trepidation about the visit. ("I wrote an opera called '1984.' Can that be clearer?") But, some weeks ago, with visions of 1971 Ping-Pong diplomacy in mind, Maazel decided that the concert, which will be broadcast live across North Korea, warranted a few remarks ("introducing music, not talking about North Korean gulags") from the conductor. "It seemed only appropriate, with the North Koreans sitting in the audience and the Americans sitting onstage, that there be some kind of verbal bridge, a 'We're happy to be here and this is what we're playing and hope you enjoy the concert' sort of thing -- just by way of breaking the ice," he explained over the phone last week from Hong Kong, where the Philharmonic was halfway through a tour that was to culminate in concerts in both North and South Korea.

Read the complete article at the New Yorker website:

   http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/03/03/080303ta_talk_julian