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.

Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of composer Richard Wagner, has submitted a letter of resignation as director of the famed Bayreuth opera festival in Germany. The 88 year-old Wagner has held the position of director since 1951, when he assumed leadership with his late brother, Wieland, from their mother who was removed of her duties after she was convicted of being a Nazi sympathizer. Both brothers worked to modernize the festival with productions that renounced traditional, state-dictated staging.

The popular festival was started by the composer as a showcase for his operas and continues to produce only Wagner compositions. The Festspielhaus, built in 1876, continues as home to the Bayreuth festival. Outside a brief time when it was operated by the Nazi party, the festival has always been run by Richard Wagner and his family. Wolfgang Wagner has suggested that the reins be passed on to his daughters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier (63) and Katharina Wagner (29). Wieland’s daughter, Nike, has also expressed an interest in the directorship. Wolfgang discussed retiring in 1999, but when the festival’s board of directors balked at putting his second wife, Gudrun, in the position, he exercised language in his contract that made him director for life. Gudrun died in 2006.

The BBC continues a series of composer-themed extensive broadcasts with a tribute to Frederic Chopin on May 17 and 18. BBC Radio 3 will discuss the composer’s turbulent life and air the complete Chopin catalog during the weekend’s broadcasts, including his 24 Etudes as performed in sequence by 24 separate pianists. Regularly aired programs will examine the role of Polish folk music on the composer and how his work has, in turn, influenced the Polish repertoire.

Chopin was born Fryderyk Szopen in the Duchy of Warsaw in 1810. A piano prodigy, Chopin left Poland for a performing and composing career at 20, but he remained patriotic. His many relationships with women famously included a tumultuous affair with the author George Sand (Aurore Dudevant). Chopin died in France at 39 of tuberculosis.

The Miami Herald’s Lawence Johnson reports here that Christoph von Dohnanyi, music director of The Cleveland Orchestra for 18 years from 1984, will sweep through Miami on his farewell tour with The Philharmonia.

Dohnanyi rightly receives his due in Johnson’s piece: “… in many ways, the corporate tonal refinement and tightly disciplined ensemble are the legacy of the 78-year-old intellectual maestro who led the orchestra for almost two decades.”

Music Director Franz Welser-Moest inherited an orchestra at the peak of its game. We can - and should - thank Christoph von Dohnanyi for that. Let no one ever diminish the sheen of his legacy.

Yet it’s important to remember the deep origins of the Cleveland sound - notably, the chamber music precision and ensemble that are this orchestra’s hallmarks. Ironically, one could argue that we have one of history’s most nefarious dictators to thank for it. Had it not been for Adolph Hitler’s insanity and the nightmare of World War II, George Szell might not have emigrated to the US, or taken the helm of an orchestra in Cleveland, Ohio.

Franz Welser-Moest is building his own rewarding Cleveland musical legacy, just as Christoph von Dohnanyi did. For that we can be deeply grateful. But even though most of the musicians are now too young to have played under George Szell, his voice still sings softly from every chair on the Severance Hall stage. Northeast Ohio’s music lovers will never forget him, this Vienna-raised maestro who got the world talking about the unbeatable band in Cleveland.

It is difficult for a modern musician, trained to play what is before his eyes, to realize that the author [composer] did not intend his text [notes] to be followed.

I’m sitting in a darkened concert hall at a recent performance by one of our outstanding regional orchestras, listening and marveling once again at how the musicians respond to the nuances the conductor communicates through the baton.

And then I notice that there’s a little extra action going on a few seats away.

No, not that kind of action. No, we have an audience conductor in our row.

Quietly, not-quite-subtly, just visibly in the subdued light, his right hand is tracing much the same pattern as the conductor’s.

Of course, I have never done such a thing myself. No, no, not at all.

I remembered this when I read a recent news release from the Cleveland Orchestra. Their season sponsor is the international financial services firm UBS, who also support the Verbier Festival Orchestra in Switzerland. UBS is interested in music. VERY interested, enough so that they funded development of Virtual Maestro. I’d call Virtual Maestro a conducting video game, but you might say it’s Guitar Hero for classical music.

Virtual Maestro lets you conduct an orchestra - well, more or less. What you actually conduct is a video recording of an orchestra - the Verbier Festival Orchestra, in fact - shown on a big plasma screen. The repertoire’s a bit limited, but you’re fine as long as you’re keen to conduct Rossini’s William Tell Overture and a few bits snipped from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth.

You mount the podium, sort of, and raise your baton game machine controller. The musicians raise their instruments. Wave your WII remote and they start to play. The faster you beat time, the faster they play. The more violent your movements, the louder they play.

Now, granted, the expressive variety is a little lacking. Cueing individual musicians and sections is pretty much futile. It’s tough to catch the musicians’ eyes. And your most dramatic Bernstein-style podium acrobatics aren’t going to have any effect. But, by golly, you sure do have a grip on the ppp, fff, largo, and presto of the performance. That’s certainly more response than my fellow concert-goer got from his audience conducting.

If you want to try out your skills at orchestra piloting, you’ll have your chance before and after Cleveland Orchestra concerts, during intermissions, and prior to other Severance Hall concerts and events - for a few weeks. The UBS Virtual Maestro will be at Severance Hall from the 4th through the 25th of May; then it continues its tour of other American orchestras.

To find out when you can have your turn at the podium, see the orchestra’s event calendar.