That’s right. In the latest marriage of music and technology, Asimo, Honda’s humanoid robot, made its conducting debut in Detroit Tuesday. The little white 4-foot-3, 119 pound robot-that-could marched onto stage, gave the crowd a wave, then proceeded to lead the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in “The Impossible Dream.”

“I’m worried that they’ll teach it to multitask,” said cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the rehearsal earlier Tuesday.

Honda corporate affairs manager David Iida came up with the idea to teach Asimo to conduct as a way to put an exclamation point on the company’s DSO partnership. Honda also is sponsoring a master class for students led by Ma.

Read the rest of the Detroit Free Press article here…

…and check out the video below!

Like many professions, for centuries music was dominated by men. For about the last three decades, though, orchestras have taken measures to ensure equal consideration for women and minority musicians. In most cases, for example, prospective players now try out behind screens that hide them from the judges.

By 2005, the change was significant — female membership of international orchestras (outside of Germany and Austria) had increased considerably. It varied from about 26% at the Philadelphia Orchestra to 41% at the New York Philharmonic and 43% at the French National Orchestra.

Three women are already too many … By the time we have 20 percent, the orchestra will be ruined.”        – Vienna Philharmonic musician, quoted in a 2003 issue of Profil

The orchestras of Germany and Austria have generally lagged behind the others, and the Vienna Philharmonic remains at the very bottom of the list. Effectively a musicians’ democracy, it has been deeply reluctant to admit women to its ranks.

It wasn’t until 1997 that the Vienna Philharmonic officially ended their policy discriminating against women players. For years after that, however, their only female member was a harpist. Television producers were allowed to show only her hands. Her name was not listed in programs.

Fully 10 years later, in May 2007, the Vienna Philharmonic finally granted full membership to violist Ursula Plaichinger. Plaichinger had been hired in 2001, in spite of an audition in which the screens came down for the final round (the Vienna Philharmonic reportedly believes it is "important to see what musicians look like while they play").

Cellist Ursula Wex, hired in 2003, and violinist Isabelle Ballot, brought on board this year, now play in Vienna Philharmonic concerts. However, both are still listed on the orchestra’s roster as probationary.

Both Wex and Ballot started their Vienna tenures in the Vienna State Opera Orchestra (Wiener Staatsoper), traditionally a training ground for the Philharmonic. The Staatsoper still has only 5 women, and one of them, oboist Helene Kenyeri, was handed her walking papers in March.

But last Thursday (8 May), the Staatsoper promoted first violinist Albena Danailova to concertmaster. She will take on her new duties with the Staatsoper in September — just as Kenyeri is leaving.

The number of women in the orchestra will thus actually fall, but the dynamics of musical leadership will undergo a seismic shift. Many of the same musicians play in both the Vienna Philharmonic and the State Opera Orchestra, and the politics of this situation will be intriguing to watch. The glass ceiling may not have ruptured yet, but perhaps change is finally in the air for this last bastion of male-dominated classical music-making.

The Firelands Symphony has announced the appointment of Carl Topilow as music director from July.

Topilow is music director of the Cleveland Pops and is also known in Northeast Ohio for his work with the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra. Last season he led a well-received Holiday Pops concert for the Akron Symphony Orchestra, and has been invited to perform the same role for this year’s Akron holiday concert.

Highlights of the upcoming Firelands season include a performance of the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez with guitarist Jason Vieaux, and violinist Caroline Goulding soloing in the Bruch Scottish Fantasy.

After conducting two presentations in March, Cleveland Orchestra music director Franz Welser-Moest has bowed out of two additional Zurich Opera performances of Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus, citing dissatisfaction with the staging. Although the operetta’s story has nothing to do with vampires or Count Dracula’s castle, Michael Sturminger’s staging uses those devices, apparently solely on the inspiration of the work’s title, which means "The Bat."

In addition to his Cleveland duties, Welser-Moest is general music director of the Zurich Opera.

More from the Chicago Tribune.

From the official Deutsche Grammophon Web site:

“For this recording, Plácido Domingo has drawn directly on the origins of music - the music of the street. Domingo and the Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid, one of Europe’s up-and-coming ensembles, have chosen the popular song form of the copla which, along with zarzuela and flamenco, constitutes the three-pronged spear of recent Spanish popular music. The copla, like its close relative, the cuplé, is music written by a composer, but one who draws so extensively on the folk music tradition that his music merges with that tradition and becomes indistinguishable from it. The great composers of Spanish coplas can proclaim with every justification: “I am folk music.”

Read the rest of the liner notes and purchase the album online here.

Junichi Hirokami & Columbus Symphony

(Photo: Columbus Dispatch)

The Columbus Symphony has announced that they plan to shut down on the first of June, and will not perform their annual outdoor summer pops concerts.

In April, the orchestra’s musicians voted to reject management’s final offer for next season’s contract. It included a 40% salary cut for all 53 full-time musicians. In 2005, the players had agreed to $1.3 million worth of reductions in the length of the season and in benefits.

More from The Columbus Dispatch.

Additional background here.

Last month, violinist Philippe Quint got out of a taxicab in Manhattan - and left his four million dollar Stradivarius violin behind.

You might think, "This is not going to end happily." But it did. The next morning, Quint had his instrument back, and taxi driver Mohammed Khalil had a $100 tip. The city of Newark awarded Khalil a medal for his honesty.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Quint wanted to do something more for his driver. So, on Tuesday (6 May 2008) he gave a concert for Khalil and about 50 of his cabbie friends, at Newark Liberty International Airport, by the taxicab holding area, outdoors.

The drivers danced.

Read more (New York Times website; registration required)

Yesterday (Monday 5 May) the Chicago Symphony confirmed what the rumor-mongers have been speculating about for weeks. A voyage begun over 3 years ago has reached port with Riccardo Muti named as the orchestra’s next music director.

Muti was music director at La Scala for 19 years. In 2005 he resigned from that post in a swirl of controversy and announced that he was he was considering an offer from the Chicago Symphony.

Nothing developed that year, however. As of last autumn Chicago’s short list was reported to include Muti and Riccardo Chailly as the top contenders, along with Antonio Pappano, David Robertson, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin and Michael Tilson Thomas. Some writers were betting on Chailly, in part because Muti’s relationship with La Scala was not his only contentious one. Chailly also had a good long-term relationship with the orchestra.

But a widely acclaimed 2007-08 season opener and a a very well-received European tour boosted Muti’s musical capital with the Chicago Symphony board, and yesterday they gave him the nod. He will be the orchestra’s 10th music director.

In the US, many music lovers remember Muti for his years as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra (1980-1992). There he was credited with (or blamed for, depending on your perspective) considerably toning down the lush "Philadelphia Sound" originated by Leopold Stokowski and amplified under Eugene Ormandy.

Muti has also been a frequent guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic. His name came up as a possible successor to both Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel, but Muti indicated that he wasn’t interested.

Chicago, former home of such legendary conductors as Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti, has been without a full-time music director since Daniel Barenboim retired in 2006, relying on principal conductor Bernard Haitink and conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez to tide them over. They’ll go a while longer, too; Muti won’t take over until the fall of 2010. However, he’ll give the city a preview of his style next January, when he conducts the Verdi Requiem.

CSO’s Official Release

Chicago Tribune story

“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.”

Read the rest of the AP article here…

Thomas Humphrey, an American luthier whose innovative designs and building techniques helped increase the volume, sustaining power and projection of the soft-spoken classical guitar, and whose instruments were played by many renowned concert guitarists, died on Wednesday, April 18 at his home in Gardiner, N.Y. He was 59.

Read the whole NYT obit here…

Can you make classical music popular by performing it in places where popular music is played? Some musicians apparently think so.

Good local musicians have been toiling largely unheralded in upscale cafes and tea rooms for years, usually for a pittance. But as far as I know, cellist Matt Haimovitz was one of the first more recognizable names to take classical music on the road, so to speak, playing in clubs, taverns, and other venues more often associated with jazz and rock.

How many new listeners this has generated for classical music is still an open question. Nevertheless, a few other musicians have followed his lead. The Chiara Quartet is an example; on Saturday they played at Nighttown in Cleveland Heights.

To be sure, some of the musicians experimenting with non-traditional concert spots have dressed down a bit, and perhaps even used a bit of sound reinforcement. But talk about slippery slopes …

I was just reading about the Estonian conductor, Kristjan Järvi, yet another baton-wielding member of that intensely musical family. In a recent piece for The Australian, Matthew Westwood writes of Järvi’s crusade to bring more improvisation to the concert hall. "It is really important to make the performers feel that they have freedom, that they can express music rather than just play the notes," Järvi says.

Järvi’s spot on when he points out that this was expected of musicians from the medieval to the classical eras. One look at a Perotin motet or the figured bass of a Bach sonata will tell you that there are lots of blanks to fill in.

And in a sense, as Järvi suggests, realizing a figured bass IS something like playing jazz. The notes on the page are a skeleton; it’s up to the performer to give it flesh. This is also true, though to a lesser degree, in the other parts of Baroque music. It’s the performers’ prerogative (or obligation) to stamp them with a bit of style.

The question of just what that style should be is one that the historically informed performance movement (HIP - read about it here and here) has tried to answer. One of HIP’s elements is an effort to teach performers the interpretive language of early music, so they naturally play it the way a musician of the period would have. Comparing this with jazz practices will be left as an exercise for the reader.

But Järvi doesn’t seem to be that interested in Baroque and Classical-period music. Rather, he seems keen to let folk influences and improvisatory elements have sway in more recent works. "Whether it’s Sibelius, the Nordic composers or Piazzolla and Ginastera, I really love the national flavour when it comes out in the music of serious orchestral composers," he says.

I may be missing something, but it seems to me that this is at least as much the conductor’s responsibility as the orchestra members’. There’s a good reason that collectors treasure Karel Ancerl’s 1963 reading of Smetana’s Ma Vlast, for example. How much of that is Ancerl’s view and how much his players’? You could make a pretty good case, I think, that performers’ personal interpretation is more appropriate in solo and chamber music than it is in orchestral music.

What’s more, national flavor isn’t static. Folk and popular music performing traditions are contantly evolving. If the musicians apply a Finnish "national flavour" to a Sibelius symphony, should it be the “national flavour” of Sibelius’s time, or of ours?

Finally, how far should we take this bus? Will future generations react to Järvi’s "tweaking" of the standard repertoire the way our generation has reacted to the interpretive excesses of the early 20th century performers and conductors?

Stay tuned. It’ll be intriguing to see Järvi run with this ball.