Reconciliation at the opera

Peter Mark, the Lyric Opera Virginia maestro who was artistic director of Virginia Opera until his dismissal in November 2010, has been named artistic director emeritus of his former company.

The honor is a sign of reconciliation between Mark and the institution he helped found and led for 36 years. “The [Virginia Opera] board and Peter decided that it was time to come to a resolution of differences, and that’s what happened,” the company’s CEO, Russell P. Allen, tells Teresa Annas of The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk):

http://hamptonroads.com/2012/04/virginia-opera-gives-title-director-it-fired-2010


UPDATE: The Virginia Opera appointment is “part of an amicable resolution,” Mark writes in an April 28 letter to patrons of Lyric Opera Virginia. He also reaffirms his commitment to his new company, paraphrasing Gershwin: “Our LOV is here to stay."

Why 'old believers' believe in vinyl

Norman Lebrecht, writing for Standpoint magazine, goes after “old believers” nostalgic for music on vinyl discs:

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/4433/full

Piling negatives on the 33-rpm record – “scratchy, inaccurate, superannuated, inconvenient, short-lasting” – Lebrecht veers off target on that last one. LPs don’t contain as much music as Compact Discs and downloads, but physically they last a long time. The vinyl-record market is dominated by used discs, among which the newest were manufactured more than 30 years ago. Their imperfections don’t prevent them from being playable. Minor defects silence CDs and sound files.

Whatever their shortcomings, vinyl discs remain the most durable medium for preserving sound.

Tokyo calls it quits

The Tokyo String Quartet, a mainstay of chamber music since the 1970s, will disband at the end of next season. The last two charter members, violinist Kikuei Ikeda and violist Kazuhide Isomura, planned to retire in June 2013; faced with replacing them, the remaining members, violinist Martin Beaver and cellist Clive Greensmith, decided to disband the ensemble, Anastasia Tsioulcas reports on NPR’s Deceptive Cadence blog:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/04/20/151063275/the-tokyo-string-quartet-bids-farewell

Cincinnati taps Langrée

The French conductor Louis Langrée will fill one of the major conducting vacancies in the American orchestra scene, succeeding Paavo Järvi as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Langrée, currently music director of Camerata Salzburg and New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival, will take over in Cincinnati in the 2013-14 season.

Langrée, a 51-year-old native of Alsace, has signed a four-year contract with the orchestra, the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Janelle Gelfand reports:

http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artikkel?NoCache=1&Dato=20120424&Kategori=ENT03&Lopenr=304240090&Ref=AR

Castleton Festival 2012

The Castleton Festival, the month-long series of opera performances and concerts staged on the grounds of the Rappahannock County estate of conductor Lorin Maazel and his wife, Dietlinde Turban Maazel, returns for its fourth season, running from June 22 to July 22.

This summer’s highlights are productions of Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” Bizet’s “Carmen” and Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music,” as well as concerts featuring violinist Jennifer Koh and mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves and Castleton Festival Orchestra performances of Beethoven’s Ninth and Mahler’s First symphonies and the premiere of a Cello Concerto by the Washington-based composer Máximo Flügelman.

The Seldom Scene, the famed bluegrass band, will perform on July 3 in an open-air concert with fireworks.

Most performances will be staged in the 130-seat Theater House and the Festival Theatre on the Castleton grounds.

Two concerts will be presented at Merchants Hall of the Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas: “Gershwin and Company: an All-American Evening,” with pianist Kevin Cole, on June 18; and a concert version of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” reprised from last summer’s production, on July 7. For information on those events, visit http://www.hyltoncenter.org/

Maazel, the former music direrctor of the New York Philharmonic, founded the Castleton Festival as a professional training venture for young singers, instrumentalists and stage technicians. More than 200 will live on the estate, rehearse and perform during the 2012 festival. This summer, Rutgers University and Castleton will offer fellowships and course credits to dozens of festival participants.

The production of “A Little Night Music” is designed especially for a new troupe, the Castleton Artists Training Seminar (C.A.T.S.), directed by Levi Hammer.

Tickets for most performances range from $20 to $120, and subscription packages are available for three or six performances. For details, call the Castleton concierge at (866) 974-0767 or visit http://www.castletonfestival.org/

The 2012 Castleton schedule:

June 22 (7:30 p.m.) – Opening concert: “An Italian Extravaganza,” with mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves.

June 23 (7 p.m.) – Rossini: “The Barber of Seville.”

June 24 (2 p.m.) – Castleton Festival Orchestra, Lorin Maazel conducting. Mahler: Symphony No. 1; Máximo Flügelman: Cello Concerto (premiere) (Inbal Segev, cello).

June 28 (8 p.m., Hylton Performing Arts Center, Manassas) – Castleton Festival Orchestra, Lorin Maazel conducting, with pianist Kevin Cole. “Gershwin and Company: an All-American Evening.”

June 29 (7:30 p.m.) – “The Barber of Seville.”

June 30 (2 p.m.) – “Stars of the Future.”

June 30 (7 p.m.) – Bizet: “Carmen.”

July 1 (2 p.m.) – “The Barber of Seville.”

July 3 (7 p.m.) – The Seldom Scene, concert with fireworks.

July 6 (7:30 p.m.) – “Carmen.”

July 7 (2 p.m.) – Castleton Festival Orchestra & Chorus, Lorin Maazel conducting. Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (“Choral”) (soloists TBA).

July 7 (8 p.m., Hylton Performing Arts Center, Manassas) – Lorin Maazel conducting. Puccini: “La Bohème.”

July 8 (2 p.m.) – “Carmen.”

July 13 (7:30 p.m.) – Sondheim: “A Little Night Music” (C.A.T.S. performers).

July 14 (2 and 7 p.m.) – “A Little Night Music” (C.A.T.S. performers).

July 15 (2 p.m.) – “A Little Night Music” (C.A.T.S. performers).

July 20 (7:30 p.m.) – Song recital (C.A.T.S. performers).

July 21 (3 p.m.) – Song recital (C.A.T.S. performers).

July 21 (7 p.m.) – Jennifer Koh, violin.

July 22 (2 p.m.) – “Spectacular Opera Scenes” (C.A.T.S. performers).

Review: Australian Chamber Orchestra

with Dawn Upshaw, soprano
April 17, Richmond CenterStage

The main offering of the program that the Australian Chamber Orchestra and soprano Dawn Upshaw are presenting on a current U.S. tour is “Winter Morning Walks,” a song cycle by Maria Schneider. This is the second piece written for Upshaw by Schneider, best known as the director of a widely acclaimed jazz orchestra. (Their first collaboration, “Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories,” dates from 2008.)

Schneider’s grounding as a modern-jazz composer and orchestrator is only obliquely evident in “Winter Morning Walks,” a setting of poems by Ted Kooser that evokes “Midwest winter landscapes, moving from the winter solstice to the vernal equinox,” as the composer puts it in a program note.

The set of nine songs is couched in a style that recalls the late 1970s/early 1980s morphing of West Coast jazz into New Age music by the likes of Paul Winter. Schneider’s orchestration, for strings with piano, double-bass and clarinet, is impressionistic and gives off a sense of wide-open space; the vocal lines typically evolve from renditions of text to extended, long-breathed vocalise.

In this performance, printed texts were not provided, and Kooser’s words were only intermittently audible; so I can’t assess Schneider’s settings or Upshaw’s treatment of them. A tone of vaguely nostalgic reverie, set in the first couple of songs, prevailed throughout the cycle; I found myself tuning out by the sixth or seventh number.

“Winter Morning Walks” does not sound to pose much technical or interpretive challenge to Upshaw. She summoned only a few of the colors and inflections that her voice is capable of producing – and that she subsequently produced, with progressing depth of expression, in a post-intermission set of three romantic art-songs, Robert Schumann’s “Mondnacht” and Franz Schubert’s “Geheimes” and “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (“Death and the Maiden”).

The string orchestra, led by Richard Tognetti, made its strongest impression at the outset and in miniature, in the early (1925) Octet for strings of Dmitri Shostakovich, in which a lyrically sober, not quite bleak, first movement gives way to a pre-echo of the kind of intense danse macabre that gave so many of Shostakovich’s later works an ominous or tormented edge.

The full, 21-piece Australian Chamber Orchestra concluded the program with Tognetti’s orchestration of Edvard Grieg’s String Quartet in G minor. As enlarged for orchestra, this rather episodic piece, whose four movements all contrast slow introductions with uptempo, agitato sections, comes across as a suite of Norwegian dances – at least until the final one, which is based on the Italian saltarello.

Review: Richmond Symphony

Steven Smith conducting
April 15, Richmond CenterStage

Brendon Elliott, a 17-year-old violinist from Newport News, is the first Richmond Symphony Concerto Competition winner in memory to be invited to perform with the orchestra in its mainstage Masterworks series.
Elliott fully lived up to that distinction in the second of two performances of
Saint-Saëns’ Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor given over the weekend.

This is one of the great virtuoso violin concertos of the late 19th century; but unlike some from that time, the Saint-Saëns requires more than advanced, flashy technique. Much of this music, especially the main theme of the central andantino, needs to be sung as much as played, by an instrumental voice as lyrical and rich as that of a great operatic voice. And the lyricism of the violin part extends well below coloratura range – even the double-stopped “chest” voice is full of melody.

In Elliott’s hands, the fiddle sang and breathed naturally, unconstrained but never excessive. His grasp of the musical line and expressive flow was unerring – even his occasional slide into a note sounded like the right thing to do at the time. Conductor Steven Smith and the orchestra provided robust and songful support throughout the piece.

The orchestral showpiece in this program was Charles Ives’ “Three Places in New England,” which Smith rightly rates as Ives at his best. The opening and closing tone poems, “The Saint-Gaudens in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and His Colored Regiment)” and “From the Housatonic at Stockbridge,” are complex, both atmospherically and expressively; the central “Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut,” provides a vivid contrast in its evocation of a raucous, brassy Fourth of July celebration, but in its different way is just as challenging in its complexity.

Smith obtained subtly impressionistic, mistily colorful playing from the symphony’s strings in “The Saint-Gaudens,” and almost palpably liquid sounds – enhanced by the “current” of Russell Wilson’s celesta – in “Housatonic.” The orchestra sounded suitably exuberant, but never quite over the top, in “Putnam’s Camp.”

The program closed with an account of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in E minor that was sensibly paced, richly sonorous in low strings and winds, but uneven in sustaining tension. The andante, oddly, sounded more concentrated and expressively taut than the opening allegro; the great passacaglia of the finale sounded heartfelt but not like an epically tragic culmination.

The performance was technically assured – none of the common loose threads of execution unraveled – and the solo voices, notably that of flutist Mary Boodell, were in fine form. But there’s more depth to this piece than was plumbed in this reading.