The inaugural recital of the new Seward Organ (C.B. Fisk, Op. 135) at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music, played by Janette Fishell, Marilyn Keiser, Jeffrey Smith, Charles Webb and Christopher Young, will be streamed live online, beginning at 7:50 p.m. (Eastern time) today:
http://www.music.indiana.edu/publicity/organ/
A repeat performance at 4 p.m. May 2 can be heard on a live stream from IU's public radio station, WFIU:
http://indianapublicmedia.org/radio/
Having heard that a teenaged defendant plays the violin "extremely well," a Virginia circuit court judge took him to her chambers to hear him play, then recused herself from the case, Tasha Kates reports in the Charlottesville Daily Progress:
http://www2.dailyprogress.com/cdp/news/local/crime/article/judge_steps_aside_after_suspects_violin_solo/55567/
With a grant from longtime patron Gerald Morgan Jr., the Richmond Symphony has launched a "2010: Transformation" fund-raising campaign to secure its financial well-being in the coming decade.
Morgan will match, up to $50,000, the amount donated by the first 200 businesses or individuals making first-time donations or purchasing ticket subscriptions for the first time. This challenge grant's deadline is May 31.
The campaign's ultimate goal is to attract 2,010 new supporters this year.
For more information or to make a donation, call (804) 788-4717, ext. 112, or visit www.richmondsymphony.com
U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Diane P. Wood, one of the names being touted as a successor to retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, plays the oboe.
The Los Angeles Times' Meghan Daum, a onetime practitioner of the instrument, notes that an orchestra's principal oboist plays the A to which the rest of the musicians tune their instruments, making oboists "about the most judgmental people on the face of the Earth. . . . Oboists may not always be right, but we're still the deciders":
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-daum-20100429,0,19656.column
Opposition-research riddle:
Q: What's the difference between a SCUD missile and a bad oboist?
A: A bad oboist can kill you.
(via MIT's jcb)
The Washington Post’s Anne Midgette worries that President Obama "spoke for a majority of his generation when he expressed his concerns, before the [White House] classical music event in November, about knowing when to clap" – reinforcing the notion that classical music is "a duty more than a pleasure: good for us, but a little dull":
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/23/AR2010042300047.html?sid=ST2010042303184
Midgette writes that "the strongest message the White House could send to our nation about classical music is that it’s actually enjoyable. . . . There’s no better way to send a signal about the benefits of classical music than to show Obama having fun listening to it."
Hmm. Judging by opinion polls, I suspect that somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of the U.S. population would be inclined to dislike anything that this president was seen to enjoy. Nevertheless . . .
Midgette imagines a variety of performances of American art-music, from Stephen Foster songs to George Crumb’s Vietnam War meditation "Black Angels." (One of her suggestions is a White House engagement for eighth blackbird playing Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, which was introduced in 2008 at the University of Richmond and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2009.)
Commendable and appropriate as such concerts might be, I wonder whether they would segue with "having fun listening" – especially when you consider the guests typically invited to cultural events at the White House. The only such affair I’ve witnessed was a half-hour musicale of fairly undemanding pieces by Mozart and Haydn, squirmed through by an audience of politicians and big donors. Trying to imagine how those folks would have reacted to something like the Reich sextet, "fun" doesn’t come to mind, except maybe the perverse fun of Schadenfreude to be had by various outsider-onlookers.
As the late R.W. Apple noted in a 1998 essay in The New York Times . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/26/arts/elected-bodies-with-hardly-a-cultured-bone.html?scp=1&sq=%22r.w.+apple%22+music&st=nyt
. . . most high-level Washington political figures are high-culture illiterates, especially when it comes to music. (The last U.S. president who had more than a passing familiarity with classical music was Richard Nixon.) In the 12 years since Apple wrote that piece, political Washington has become an even more attention-deficit-disordered culture in which substance is condensed/warped into slogans and sound-bites. What makes these people successful makes them unresponsive to ambiguities and abstract ideas worked out at length. (Obama is said to be an exception, but his "professorial" inclination is also said to be a political weakness.)
The best way – maybe the only way – to get members of the political class to respond more than dutifully to classical music is to give them sensation and spectacle, virtuosity and theatricality. The White House is not an ideal venue – the East Room is not a theater; and the greatest classical repertory, old or new, is not geared to limited attention spans. But there are possibilities.
Midgette’s suggestion of engaging a major opera singer, such as Plácido Domingo, for a program of arias, could be enjoyable to a White House audience. (Political types like to be seen with celebrities, even when they don’t respond to what makes the celebrities celebrated.)
In the realm of contemporary art-music, I would go for works that are either theatrical (for eighth blackbird playing George Crumb, make it "Voice of the Whale") or highly physical (for Steve Reich, make it one of his drum works).
The most promising option, though, is the solo virtuoso playing finger-busting showpieces. To cite two examples from my recent concert-going experience, I can easily imagine pianist Yuja Wang playing Ravel’s "La Valse" and Mozart’s "Rondo alla Turca," or violinist Gil Shaham playing Sarasate’s "Zigeunerweisen" and "Carmen" Fantasy, and making a White House crowd visibly enjoy the experience.
In a New York Times report on the resurgence of classical music on public radio stations . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/business/media/26radio.html?ref=business
. . . Elizabeth Jenkins obtains this insight from Marc Hand, managing director of the consulting firm Public Radio Capital:
"Classical audiences have an average age of 63, Mr. Hand said. 'In the commercial model, that’s not at all an attractive demographic for advertisers,' he said, but for a public broadcaster, 'it’s a great demographic for membership,' a passionate group with disposable income and a disposition to contribute."
Would someone care to explain why an audience with money to spend is "not at all" attractive to advertisers?
Steven Smith conducting
with Gil Shaham, violin
April 24, Carpenter Theatre, Richmond CenterStage
Steven Smith's debut as the fifth music director of the Richmond Symphony was a gala event, featuring the most stellar of this season's guest soloists, violinist Gil Shaham. In 
this fund-raiser for the orchestra – not as debt-ridden as many of its brethren, but still under recessionary financial stress – the symphony's musicians donated their time for rehearsals and the performance.
Smith launched his tenure by dealing head-on with the top artistic priority facing the conductor of this orchestra: Sorting out orchestral sonorities, timbres and balances in the often challenging acoustical environment of the renovated Carpenter Theatre. He began that task in a program of very colorful and sonically complex works of Ravel, Debussy and Manuel De Falla.
Their color and dynamism effectively cloaked the hard work in progress, and the program was generously garnished with ear candy: The orchestra playing Ravel's Bolero and an arrangement of Debussy's "Clair de lune," and accompanying Shaham in the "Fantasy on Bizet’s 'Carmen' " and "Zigeunerweisen" ("Gypsy Airs") by the late 19th-century Spanish violin virtuoso-composer Pablo de Sarasate and the "Meditation" from Massenet’s "Thaïs."
Shaham dove into the Sarasate pieces with both fiery and cheerful virtuosity and rendered the Massenet with a kind of chaste soulfulness. His body language and perma-grin suggested he was having the time of his life; and his almost in-your-face proximity to Smith (a violinist-turned-conductor) was an unusually vivid demonstration of close collaboration and fiddlers’ kinship.
Smith, who had auditioned for his job with music of Stravinsky, Schubert, Berlioz, Beethoven and Shostakovich, concluded this formal debut concert with Ravel’s "La Valse," a work that not many conductors would dare to audition with – but that I’ve heard several select as an opening-night showpiece.
Perhaps the most striking musical representation of old Europe lurching violently into modernity, "La Valse" is scored for a large orchestra that produces a welter of unusual sound effects atop skidding rhythms. The piece is full of precarious balances and unexpected twists, big rhetoric spiked with sly asides. The conductor must direct heavy and intricate traffic, and as an interpreter must capture a spirit that’s equal parts neurosis and farce.
Smith directed traffic expertly and with close attention to voicing, balances and dynamics. His waltz time was on the broad side, which took some of the edge off of Ravel’s wilder expressive gestures and muted the undertone of frenzy until it was unleashed in the climax. The symphony’s strings were gratifyingly woozy, the winds nicely varied in tone color, the brass and percussion assertive but not domineering.
The conductor and orchestra achieved comparably fine results in Debussy’s too rarely heard "L’Isle joyeuse" and the Suite No. 2 from De Falla’s "The Three-Cornered Hat." They and "La Valse" were the most agreeably balanced accounts of brightly colored, high-volume music that the orchestra has performed since moving back into the Carpenter Theatre.
