This weekend, the last person to hold the title of Blossom Festival Music Director returns to The Cleveland Orchestra’s summer home.

Jahja Ling ran the classical show at Blossom Music Center while he was also leading the Florida Orchestra, and before he moved on to direct the San Diego Symphony. WKSU’s Vivian Goodman spoke to the maestro at his Cleveland hotel, where he’s staying with his wife, pianist Jesse Chang.

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When I tagged along with The Cleveland Orchestra on their tours of Europe and the Canary Islands (1999) and Vienna (2003), I noticed that certain members tended to vanish on free days. Where’d they go? "They’re mountain climbers," violinist Judy Berman explained. "They’re off finding something to climb."

As are Jeremy Dawson, Clare Wallace and James Rees. Cellists all, they have an abiding appreciation for elevation. No longer content with cathedral rooftops, they plan to scale the UK’s highest mountain peaks — where, inspired by the slightly daft sport of extreme ironing, they intend to unpack their instruments and play recitals.

It’s not just for the challenge, though that’s surely the principal reason. It’s to raise funds for charities. Mountain rescue teams, for example.

Further reading:

Cello players reach new heights at the BBC

Although the orchestra hasn’t officially disbanded, its prognosis isn’t good. But don’t count Columbus’s classical music out yet.

The Columbus Symphony, still unable to reach an agreement with its musicians, has officially cancelled part of the upcoming season. There’s still a glimmer of hope for concerts from December, including the holiday pops, but official Columbus Symphony performances through November are definitely off the schedule. This summer’s outdoor concerts were also given the axe.

Despite mediation and telephone discussions, the musicians and management are still far apart. The Columbus Dispatch quotes the president of the board, Robert "Buzz" Trafford: "We have gone absolutely as far as we can go. Unless musicians change their position, we won’t reach an agreement."

This month (July 2008) the musicians rejected an agreement that called for sacking the orchestra’s highly regarded music director, Junichi Hirokami, and cutting 27% from the players’ salaries. The musicians’ union has filed unfair labor charges against the orchestra’s management for allegedly locking them out and failing to bargain in good faith.

Although the Columbus Symphony is shuttered for now, orchestral music has not vanished from the city. As Symphony Columbus, orchestra members have already presented two concerts in Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium this summer, and are planning additional performances. Their concert on 17 August will take place outdoors, at a natural amphitheatre in Hocking Hills’ Ash Cave.

Further Reading:

Symphony Talks Stall in The Columbus Dispatch

Goodbye, Columbus Symphony? in The Wall Street Journal

Columbus Symphony official website

Symphony Musicians

Symphony Columbus

All Columbus Symphony entries in WKSU Classical

When it comes to travel, the Cunard line of cruise ships has made high-class luxury its top goal.  Along with good food, dancing and a variety of entertainment, transatlantic crossings on the Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 typically include cultural opportunities.  Cunard (which calls itself “the Official Cruise Line of the National Symphony Orchestra”) is presenting members of The Kennedy Center Chamber Players, as well as welcoming Nigel Boon, director of artistic planning for the National Symphony Orchestra on the September 8, 2009 transatlantic crossing from New York to Southampton (the crossing to Britain is 6 days and the ship then continues on for the 24-day Grand Mediterranean Highlights tour).  The ensemble is a group of National Symphony Orchestra principals.

Although this adventure definately falls in the super-pricey, not-your-everyday-vacation category, I have been on the ship and it lives up to its posh promise.  And, it’s culturally enriching!

Cleveland’s “working man” comedian Drew Carey is returning to his hometown to take an unlikely role. He’s narrating Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with the Cleveland Orchestra Saturday. Carey expects to draw a few unintentional laughs and maybe talk baseball at a local bar.

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How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Creativity and courage.

Here’s a tried and true formula for orchestral programs (I mean in the concert hall, not necessarily on the radio, though I’ve assembled such hours of music many times). Before intermission, play a short curtain-raiser, then launch into a substantial work. Often the second work features a guest soloist. It may also be something challenging, such as a modern work, or one that’s not too well known. After intermission, play one or two orchestral works. Generally at least one will be a piece from the standard repertoire (something the listener is likely to recognize and / or something accessible).

Though I’m a radio music director, not an orchestral one, I can see good practical reasons for adhering to this outline. The short opener allows for a reasonable break for seating latecomers. Most listeners will sit through even a fairly bracing contemporary work in the second slot, if they can see the promise of a favorite after intermission; putting it on the second half might nudge a few out the door during intermission.

So, it works. But Thomas Morris thinks we can do better.

If the name sounds familiar, it should: Morris was The Cleveland Orchestra’s executive director from 1987 to 2004.

Morris is part of a team putting together the Festival of North American Orchestras. About three years from now (May 2011), New York’s Carnegie Hall will present a 9-day series of concerts by orchestras of all sizes, including regional ensembles. The judges will choose the participating orchestras on only one criterion: programming creativity. The festival will cover the production costs.

The intent isn’t necessarily to promote contemporary music, though the festival’s team won’t resist it by any means. Rather, the idea is to reward innovative, surprising, and ear-opening combinations of works.

Not only may the experience lead the nine winners toward more courageous programming on their own home turf, the process of competing for the prize is likely to encourage many more to reconsider their programming policies. This could produce some interesting results.

Read more:

Adventures in Concert Programming in the New York Times (registration may be required)

It’s not every day that you find a classical composer whose parents didn’t ask, “How’s the fugue coming along, Timmy” when he was 5.

At 5, Dan Visconti was playing violin, but two months later he quit. It wasn’t until he turned 18 that he started really listening to classical music.

A few years later he was composing it, but mixing in a lot of rock, jazz and blues. WKSU’s Vivian Goodman chatted with the Cleveland Arts Prize winner in a practice room at the Cleveland Institute of Music:

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Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto in d minor does not have an Opus number. It has instead "WoO 23." That simply means "Without Opus." The reason it didn’t get assigned one was that, frankly, the people who knew him best and saw his behavior at the time he was composing it were afraid the public might somehow discover a side that they did not want. They thought that his deteriorating mental health was evident in the sound of the piece. So it was kept hidden for more than 80 years.

Schumann started on it on September 11, 1853 and was finished with it in 22 days. The whole thing was on paper in just three weeks. But I should add an asterisk there because of what happened before he was totally finished. A young man named Johannes Brahms showed up on October 1st. Schumann had barely started the 3rd movement. There was something about that first meeting (that has been mentioned many times as one of the most important in Classical Music history). After that first night, although Robert Schumann composed this violin concerto for his old friend, Joseph Joachim, there was something about his new friend that motivated him to compose virtually the entire third movement in just three days!

The concert in which it was to premiere was later that month. Joachim did play the Schumann Fantasie in C major, Op. 131, but he did not play the concerto, and never would. But he held onto the manuscript the rest of his life. Schumann tried to kill himself 5 months later and ended up in a sanitarium. What happened only added to Joachim’s suspicions that a very different man had composed the piece than the one he knew. So, he began a quiet campaign to make sure the concerto would rmain unperformed. He went to Schumann’s widow Clara, and even to his new friend Brahms to get them to agree that the piece should stay out of the public’s hands, hopefully forever. Interesting though, if Joachim felt so strongly that way, why didn’t he destroy it? In his will, he stipulated that it would not be destroyed and should end up in the Prussian State Library in Berlin. It would not be performed for anther hundred years after the composer’s death — which would have made it 1956.

But, in March 1933, during a spiritualist séance in London with two of Joachim’s grandnieces, at least one claimed to have heard the spirit-voice of Robert Schumann requesting that they pull out the manuscript and perform it. It took a while to find it, and then four years later, it just so happened that Yehudi Menuhin was given the music as he was asked for his opinion of it. Menuhin dropped everything he was doing and began to get ready for the premiere.

However, one of the grand nieces of Joachim, who had a reputation as a decent violinist, claimed that the ‘spiritualist’ had told her she should be the one to premiere it. And then the German government (the Nazis) got involved and said that it had to be premiered by a German. So, on November 26, 1937, with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and a relatively unknown (German) violinist, it was premiered. But about a week later, it was Menuhin who gave the second performance (with piano accompaniment), at Carnegie Hall. The niece gave it the third performance.

I’m leading somewhere with all of this. Okay, Robert Schuman was definitely not doing well mentally by the time he composed his violin concerto. He had always been haunted by the fact that his mother had lost her sanity and committed suicide. And now that he had had to fight the onset of syphilis, he knew that often the greatest devastation from it was insanity. So, as so many people did in those days, for it he took mercury. It causes insanity.

We must remember that in those days, people wanted to hide anyone with mental illness…almost to the point of making it look as though mental illness did not exist. So was Joseph Joachim correct in convincing Clara Schumann that her husband’s illness showed up too clearly in this piece?

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There is no doubt that the beginning opens with an intensity rarely heard, and if we were aware of what was going on in his mind, then we could understand a bit more what he was trying to say. But why should we dismiss a potential masterpiece just because we’re too afraid of ‘going inside’ the piece, to let it take ua away? We won’t become insane by listening to it. Actually, because of the intensity in which Schumann composed it, we might be allowed to experience more of the art of it (the music as pure art). Schumann, more than just about anyone in his trade, looked at music as art. Long before he was a composer, he was serious observer of music (including being a well-respected critic and publisher of a highly touted music magazine). Should we not look at a later Van Gogh because we might see insanity?

Was Joachim right? Or should the man, Schumann, be known for everything he was?