Symphony endowment 'Fanfare'

The Richmond Symphony has launched the public phase of a drive to build the orchestra's endowment fund to $11 million.

The private phase of the campaign raised $4.5 million, 90 percent of a $5 million goal. The public component,
"Fanfare – Funding the Power of Music," seeks to raise the remaining $500,000 by June 30.

The endowment fund pays out 5 percent of its value annually to support the orchestra's operations. The most recent payout was $422,000, representing about 10 percent of the symphony's 2009-10 operating budget of $4.75 million.

Contributions may be made to support general operations, or to one of a dozen named endowment funds, among them the Music Director's Commissioning Fund, Music Education Scholarship Fund and James Erb Choral Chair Fund.

For more information about endowment contributions, call the symphony at (804) 788-4717, ext. 115, or visit www.richmondsymphony.com/endowment.asp

Piggybacking on Picasso

I don’t know whether the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ bid for a place in the blockbuster tour of "Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris" – a successful one, Katherine Calos reports in the Richmond Times-Dispatch . . .

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/entertainment/news/2010/sep/28/landmark-picasso-exhibit-coming-virginia-museum-ar-529457/

. . . was widely known to the rest of Richmond’s arts community. But few of the programs that have been scheduled by the city’s performing-arts groups and presenters while the exhibition runs (Feb. 19-May 15, 2011) address Picasso’s cultural milieu.

Just before the exhibition opens, the Richmond Ballet is staging "Giselle" (right place, Paris, but wrong era). Shortly before the show leaves town, the Ysaÿe Quartet will play the Debussy Quartet (contemporaneous to much of Picasso's best work) in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Rennolds Chamber Concerts.

The Richmond Symphony is playing Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev in its mainstage Masterworks series; the Sinfonietta of Francis Poulenc is on a Metro Collection program. The Virginia Opera is staging Wagner’s "The Valkyrie" ("Die Walküre") and Puccini’s "Madame Butterfly." The University of Richmond’s Modlin Arts Center is showcasing Chinese and Lebanese music, Japan’s KODO drummers and Tennessee Williams’ "The Glass Menagerie." Richmond CenterStage has "The Wizard of Oz" and "Beauty and the Beast."

Not to mention Civil War sesquicentennial activity. (The Fort Sumter anniversary falls on April 12.)

So, the field for piggybacking on Picasso looks wide open.

No word yet on whether the museum is planning any musical or other performance events in conjunction with the show. Hope so: Picasso's artistic influence and personal connections extended beyond visual art, into music and dance especially.

There’s certainly no shortage of music to complement this show. Picasso’s working life overlapped several eras and schools of composition, and Paris in his time was a magnet for composers and musical styles from all over the world: Stravinsky, Enescu, De Falla, Martinů, Gershwin, Copland, American jazz, Argentine tango, Indonesian gamelan. Plus, of course, several generations of French composers – Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Milhaud, Poulenc – many of whom knew the artist, all of whom lived and worked in the cultural climate he played a seminal role in creating.

The museum has only one large space dedicated to performance, the old Virginia Museum Theater, basically untouched in the expansion project, I’m told, and never acoustically inviting to musicians. The structure’s new spaces are untried musically. Its Marble Hall, however, has proved in the past to be friendly to various musics – its acoustics are quite good, despite its being built of all the "wrong" materials; it can comfortably accommodate an audience of 300 or so.

One hopes that Richmond’s performers and presenters, in collaboration with the museum or independently, will have the artistic savvy to explore Picasso’s world beyond the canvas, and the marketing savvy to exploit the local buzz and influx of visitors (this is the show's only stop on the East Coast) generated by a blockbuster.

Kentucky dude

The Los Angeles Times' Marcia Adair tells quite the tale, of how Centre College (1,250 students) in Danville, KY (population: 18,000), lured conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Vienna Philharmonic for a concert date with bourbon, horses and persistence (not necessarily in that order):

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/09/gustavo-dudamel-and-vienna-philharmonic-go-to-kentucky-but-why.html

Domingo leaving WNO

Plácido Domingo will relinquish leadership of the Washington National Opera at the end of the current season. The famed tenor was named artistic director of the WNO (then the Washington Opera) in 1996, became its general director in 2003, and has sung and conducted regularly with the company.

The Washington Post's Anne Midgette reports that Domingo told the WNO board that his departure allows "the company to go in new directions, including studying the possibility of a merger with the Kennedy Center," an option first publicly aired in July:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/27/AR2010092704532.html?hpid=topnews

Domingo last week renewed his contract as general director of the Los Angeles Opera through 2013.

Review: Paley Music Festival

Sept. 26, First English Lutheran Church, Richmond

If Alexander Paley weren't the most virtuosic pianist to perform in Richmond during most seasons, which he is, his fall music festival would still be an event to anticipate and savor thanks to his practice of selecting obscure music that's well worth hearing. This extends beyond the four-hands piano literature explored by Paley and his wife, Pei-Wen Chen, and beyond his signature Russian repertory.

One of this year's happiest discoveries, Clara Schumann's Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17, opened the festival's final program. The wife of Robert Schumann and mentor and soulmate of Johannes Brahms was one of the finest pianists of the 19th century. Her trio, however, is not especially piano-centric; the violin plays at least as prominent a role, and the cello is more than a supportive voice, especially in the slow movement.

Paley joined violinist Akemi Takayama and cellist Clyde Thomas Shaw in a performance deeply immersed in romantic temperament and spirit, persuading this listener, at least, that the piece deserves to be rated alongside the far better-known piano trios of Mendelssohn.

An even more obscure selection, Johann Sobeck's Duo concertant on themes from Mozart's "Don Giovanni," proved to be pleasant but decidedly lesser music. Although Sobeck, a Czech clarinetist, was a contemporary of Brahms and Dvořák, this piece's style echoes music of earlier vintage. Sobeck's choice of the aria "La ci darem la mano" for the theme and variations that occupy most of the work is another link to the past; the tune was a popular subject for T&Vs and fantasies from Beethoven, Chopin and other composers of the early 19th century.

Clarinetist Charles West, French horn player Patrick Smith and Paley played the Sobeck jovially and sonorously. Smith's warmly lyrical first statement of the "La ci darem" theme set the tone for what followed.

Paley, violinist Takayama, cellist Shaw and violist Doris Lederer closed the program with one of the staples of chamber music, Robert Schumann's Piano Quartet in E flat major, Op. 47. The string players, who comprise three-quarters of the Audubon Quartet, were very much on one another's stylistic and expressive wavelengths. Paley reined in his customary gusto to complement his collaborators.

Next year's 14th edition of the Paley Festival will be scheduled a few weeks later in the fall, in an effort to avoid conflicts with other musical events. (This year's festival was staged on the same weekend as the opening of the Richmond Symphony's season and the Claremont Trio's season-opener for Virginia Commonwealth University's Rennolds Chamber Concerts.) For 2011, Paley and Chen plan to survey the four-hands piano music of Mozart, and the maestro is looking at chamber works by Medtner and Taneyev and solo-piano music of Schubert.

Detroit: decline or fall?

Musicians of the Detroit Symphony have voted to strike on Oct. 4, three days before the scheduled opening of the season, after reaching an impasse with the orchestra’s management over a contract offer calling for a 30 percent pay cut and taking on additional work outside the concert hall, Mark Stryker reports in the Detroit Free Press:

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100926/ENT04/100926003/1319/DSO-musicians-to-strike-Oct.-4-over-wage-battle&template=fullarticle

As the recession has pushed many orchestras, opera companies and other performing troupes from chronic financial stress toward oblivion, it was just a matter of time before a front-line institution radically cut back or folded. It appears that institution will be the Detroit Symphony, long ranked among the top 10 U.S. orchestras.

That’s not especially surprising: Detroit has been in decline for decades, and the recession walloped the auto industry. As Stryker notes, cultural institutions in Detroit have been hit especially hard by reductions in individual and corporate contributions and grants from local and state government.

Detroit Symphony musicians have been among the best-paid in the country. Under their former contract, base pay was $104,650; the management proposal to cut that to $70,200 would still place the players near the top of the orchestral food chain. Their counter-proposal to accept a reduction in salary to $82,000, rising back to $96,600 in three years, won’t generate much sympathy in such an economically depressed community. (The comments thread following Stryker’s article suggests just how unsympathetic the locals are likely to be.)

A cultural realignment – most classical-music lovers would call it a decline – has been under way for some time in this country. Music education has all but disappeared from public schools; classical music has all but disappeared from mass media. Right-wing populists have conditioned many to think of the fine arts as "elitist," undeserving of public support. Groups that feel no personal or collective stake in maintaining the Western art-music tradition – young people, non-European immigrants and non-whites, religious fundamentalists – are among the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. population. Even among educated and affluent whites, the longtime core audience and donor pool for classical music and its performing entities, younger people are far less attuned to the music than their parents and grandparents.

On top of all that, we see the decline of the old industrial cities that built and sustained most of the leading U.S. orchestras, and no great rush to establish major orchestras in growth areas. If classical groups’ artistic stature reflected the economic and demographic profiles of their hometowns, Denver, San Diego and Charlotte would have larger and better orchestras than Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis.

In Detroit, it appears the options are a qualitatively diminished orchestra or a defunct orchestra. Other cities, in the Rust Belt and beyond, will soon hear the same sad song.

AFTERTHOUGHT: A cruel irony to this situation is that the U.S. classical audience is probably larger today than it was in the supposedly golden age of the 1930s and ’40s. (The country's population has nearly tripled since then.) The audience, however, is far more dispersed geographically; highbrows in Missoula and Mobile are no help to orchestras in Buffalo and Baltimore.

Review: Richmond Symphony

Steven Smith conducting
Sept. 25, Carpenter Theatre, Richmond CenterStage

Think of all the literary, historical, psychological, metaphysical and other non-musical modifers, metaphors and analogies ever used to describe Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Hardly any of them would be useful in describing the Ninth with which Steven Smith launches his first season as music director of the Richmond Symphony.

That’s because most of the non-musical language is used to characterize the subjective, romantic qualities of this work. Smith’s reading of the Ninth, in the first of two weekend performances, was objective in phrasing and voicing, classical in tone and spirit. Tempos were very fast, at times verging on breathless (the soloists in the “Ode to Joy” might strike the "verging on" part), and accents were sudden or slashing (or at least were meant to be).

Clearing away the romantic cobwebs in Beethoven – not wallowing in expressiveness, not letting energetic passages lumber along, not making exclamations and surprises land with a thud – is laudable, and is increasingly standard practice among conductors. Brisk, unindulgent Beethoven can give listeners new or renewed insights, even make them feel as if they are hearing this music for the first time.

A well-wrought classical Ninth, however, isn’t paced so quickly that it blurs or buries the orchestration’s internal figures and makes singers bark instead of sing. Its dynamic range isn’t compressed into the space between never really quiet and rarely very loud. Its silences resonate with wonder or tingle with anticipation, rather than giving you just enough time to think about saying, "Whew."

The orchestra performed alertly, with good sectional balance (hefty low strings, sonorous and punchy but not intrusive brass) and richer sonority than one might have expected at Smith’s tempos. The Richmond Symphony Chorus sang with refinement and fervor, although it sounded distant even when singing full-tilt, a chronic problem when the choristers are placed at the very back of the Carpenter Theatre stage.

The Beethoven Ninth is hell on solo voices – one or another commonly leaps out of ensembles, and some passages require the breath control of a pearl diver. Soprano Mary Dunleavy, mezzo-soprano Christin-Marie Hill, tenor Tracey Welborn and bass Kevin Deas were about average in coping with these issues, above average taking the speedy tempos into account. Dunleavy was the only one to produce memorably beautiful tone.

Time was, the Ninth was performed alone. Nowadays, it often has company on a program. Here, it is preceded by two short pieces by Mason Bates, plus the "Serenade to Music" by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Bates’ "Sonic Panoply," a fanfare commissioned for the new music director, is the first of two works that the Richmond-bred composer is introducing here this fall (the other is a piece for organ to be performed on Oct. 17 in the 200th anniversary service of Centenary United Methodist Church). Although billed as a fanfare, "Sonic Panoply" is more a miniature tone poem. Its colors are almost cinematic; it swings with elaborate syncopation; its stuttering wind and percussion figures give a nervy energy to the piece.

His "Ode" (2001), composed as a prelude or "prequel" to the Beethoven Ninth and peppered with fragmentary quotes from the Ninth, is a mosaic of orchestral sound, with startling accents, colliding motifs and sharply contrasted instrumental voices that strike the ear as a prism strikes the eye.

Smith and the orchestra dove into both pieces, to gratifying, at times dazzling, effect.

"Serenade to Music," performed here as part of the observance of the Symphony Chorus’ 40th anniversary (its founder, James Erb, still sings among the tenors), is high-autumnal Vaughan Williams – spacious, pastoral, lyrical, gazing with quiet wonder toward far horizons. Karen Johnson’s solo violin and the chorus’ sensitive reading of the text (from Shakespeare’s "The Merchant of Venice") paced a mellow, long-breathed performance.

The program repeats at 3 p.m. Sept. 26 at the Carpenter Theatre. Tickets: $16-$72. Details: (800) 982-2787 (Ticketmaster); http://www.richmondsymphony.com/