Mark T. Cox IV is the first Richmond resident to be elected president of the Virginia Opera's board of directors. The company, based in Norfolk, also stages its productions in Richmond and Fairfax; its board members are drawn from those and other localities.
The Richmond Symphony expects to close its 2007 fiscal year, ending June 30, with an $85,000 deficit on an operating budget of $4.5 million. That shortfall will be offset by $100,000 in debt-retirement funds from the Richmond Symphony Foundation.
This will be the first time since 2000 that the symphony has ended a season in the black. Its finances have been especially strained since the closure of the Carpenter Center and the orchestra’s move to temporary venues 3½ years ago.
Reduction of the deficit was aided by special transition funds from the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Community Foundation, the Carpenter Foundation, Philip Morris USA, Bank of America and other foundations. The orchestra used those funds for a $250,000 matching challenge fund to attract new supporters, according to David Fisk, the symphony’s executive director.
The Richmond Symphony Foundation’s restricted endowment assets stood at nearly $9.3 million as of March 31, Fisk reports.
Following a gift of $500,000 to the symphony endowment from the Windsor Foundation, the orchestra’s principal piano and celeste position, held by Russell Wilson, will be named in honor of Quincy and Anne Owen Cole.
At a recent meeting of the symphony’s board of directors, Marcia Thalhimer was elected as president of the board, succeeding Joseph C. Carter III. Gail L. Letts, Linda V. Schreiner and the Rev. Raymond Spence were elected as new board members.
Mark Russell Smith, music director of the Richmond Symphony, has been named artistic director of orchestral studies at the University of Minnesota and director of new-music projects of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. The shared position is a new collaboration between the two 
organizations.
Smith takes up the Minnesota posts in September. He continues in Richmond through the 2008-09 season.
At the University of Minnesota, he will conduct the University Symphony Orchestra, work with conducting students and teach undergraduate and graduate courses in orchestral studies.
He will conduct six weeks of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra season, focusing on contemporary music, and will plan, program and conduct the orchestra’s "engine408" new-music series.
Smith is the second Richmond Symphony alumnus to move on to conducting the SPCO. Peter Bay was the chamber orchestra’s resident conductor in the 1990s, after serving as associate conductor in Richmond; Bay is now music director of the Austin Symphony. George Manahan doubled as music director in Richmond and chief conductor at the Minnesota Opera in the 1990s; he is now music director of the New York City Opera.
Since joining the Richmond Symphony in 1999, Smith has divided his time between Richmond and the Twin Cities. His wife, Ellen Dinwiddie Smith, is a horn player in the Minnesota Orchestra. The couple and their two sons live in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis.
* In Britain, Prince Charles has appointed 22-year-old Claire Jones as his Official Harpist. She is the third musician to hold the post since 2000. "It seems that he just liked the sound of the instrument," The Guardian reports, "and that was what encouraged him to revive a tradition that had been dormant since the reign of Queen Victoria."
The roots of official harpistry, the newspaper explains, "go back to medieval times, when every self-respecting Welsh nobleman had a bard in his household, who would accompany his songs on a forerunner of the harp, the telya."
Jones’ official duties were not reported. (Tea-time musicales? Playing in a corner during social events?) Nor was there any mention of income or benefits. Hint: A suitably royal honorarium would be a brand new, top-of-the-line minivan and a handtruck for transporting the instrument.
The Guardian article: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/06/harps_harpists.html
* Here, meanwhile, the Richmond-based American Youth Harp Ensemble, directed by Lynnelle Ediger-Kordzaia, will perform at 8 p.m. June 22 at Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall in New York.
Returning to Weill Hall after a 2001 appearance, the ensemble will play selections by Bach, Debussy, Granados, Gershwin, Handel, Rameau and others.
Tickets: $35. Information: (212) 247-7800; www.carnegiehall.org
One or more cats-in-residence seem to be a standard component of a well-tempered classical blog. I’m wary of this. Cat pictures can be the first salvo in a sustained 
cuteness offensive, soon escalating to emoticons*, bad puns, lapses into baby talk, photos of pets in kilts and fezzes, doctored videos of animals lip-synching great arias and other giggly icky bits.
Nevertheless, a cat looms over, and sometimes insistently nuzzles his way into, these proceedings, and I guess I shouldn’t conceal his existence. Julius, pictured above, is a 4-year-old, cross-eyed orange tabby, adopted from the Richmond SPCA.
He purrs in octaves, croons, chirps and otherwise makes noises that might qualify as musical. But he is indifferent to singing and the sounds of instruments other than "buzzy" ones – bassoon, harpsichord, crumhorn, zither – which inspire him to sit on or snuggle up to loudspeakers. His favorite sounds are mechanical and hissy: streetsweepers, skateboards on cement surfaces, room humidifiers.
He is not into electronics (other than playing with electrical cords, which is discouraged) and is oblivious to virtual reality. He is highly interactive, but olfactory and tactile about it. He hasn’t made your acquaintance until he’s sniffed you and pawed your shoes. Luckily for your shoes, and my furniture, he is declawed. You will not see him in that stereotypical cute-cat pose, curled up with a good book, because he likes to gnaw paper (also discouraged).
Like most domesticated cats, he’s convinced that humans exist to feed, water and amuse him. Anything that distracts humans from those tasks is a bad thing. Julius was not born to blog. This appearance is a rare cameo.
* The best our alphabet
can offer in the way of a cat emoticon is a W with an umlaut. Microsoft Word does not seem to offer this character, so I have concocted it in Paint Shop Pro – a humble contribution to the cute-o-sphere.
May 25, Hampden-Sydney College
The Hampden-Sydney Music Festival, staged for 26 years on the rural campus of this Southside Virginia men’s college, is a lot like a family reunion.
Much of the audience is long acquainted with fellow patrons and with the musicians. Many performers return repeatedly for the festival’s two weekends of concerts, capping two weeks spent coaching student artists and ensembles, who perform in preview concerts, then turn into a highly vocal cheering section for their mentors. The size and layout of the venue, Crawley Forum, puts performers in close proximity to listeners, onstage and off.
The Shanghai Quartet, regulars at the festival in recent seasons, returned with a brisk and sharply accented yet expressively probing reading of Beethoven’s Quartet in B flat major, Op. 18, No. 6. Its finest moments came in the scherzo, with syncopated playing of unusual fluidity, and the finale, with a nice contrast between the "Malincolia" theme and its sprightly foil and with its musical surprises well-sprung.
The quartet was joined by the veteran Russian-American pianist Paul Ostrovsky in Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34. This has been one of the Shanghai’s showpieces for years – the ensemble frequently performed and recorded it with the late Ruth Laredo – and the string players showed their customary command of its technical and expressive demands.
Ostrovsky, however, made hard labor of the piece, with often sluggish rhythms, more than a few dropped notes and generally woolly tone.
Pianist James Kidd of Hampden-Sydney, the festival’s executive director, and clarinetist Ethan Sloane, its artistic director, launched the opening-night program with "Cantilene" by the clarinetist-composer Louis Cahuzac and arrangements of Debussy’s "Petite Pièce" and "The Girl With the Flaxen Hair" from Book 1 of the piano preludes. Sloane and Kidd played these minatures of French impressionism without the belabored applications of pastel tone color that many artists feel compelled to add; judiciously phrased and well-balanced between the two instruments, the pieces spoke for themselves quite adequately.
The festival’s May 26 concert is sold out. Limited ticket availability for concerts at 8 p.m. June 1 and 2, with miniconcerts by Artist Fellowship Program participants at 7 p.m. Tickets: $18 Information: (434) 223-6273 or http://www2.hsc.edu/musicfestival/2007/
with violinist Karen Johnson
May 18, Second Baptist Church, Richmond
Karen Johnson, the Richmond Symphony’s concertmaster, was a young Arizona teenager when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Nothing in her biography suggests that she would have much insight into that totalitarian state’s impact on the psychology of its artists. Yet 
she shows complete command of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1, one of the great musical echoes of life and art under the Soviet regime at its most oppressive.
Shostakovich wrote the concerto in the late 1940s, during the final years of Josef Stalin’s brutal, paranoid dictatorship, when the composer endured official censure for the crime of "formalism," or creating artwork that failed to celebrate the Soviet state or promote its ideology. That offense is compounded in this piece by its evocation of Jewish themes and styles, at a time when anti-Semitism was the semiofficial stance of the regime. The composer kept the concerto "in the drawer" until Stalin was dead; its premiere in 1955, with David Oistrakh as soloist, was one of the first signs of a post-Stalinist cultural "thaw."
Johnson’s May 18 performance was deeply attuned, on several levels, to the historical, artistic and spiritual contexts of this work. She played lyrical sections as tragic but stoical soliloquies, gave more aggressive passages an undertone of giddy fatalism and barely concealed terror; every phrase and gesture had a sharp edge yet also conveyed ominous suggestiveness.
Johnson and conductor Mark Russell Smith positioned the violin solo in the near-foreground of the sound picture – appropriate placement in what is often described as a symphony for violin and orchestra.
The violinist sustained the essentially dark tone that Shostakovich gives the instrument, complementing the throaty voice of an orchestration full of low-register woodwinds and brass. Episodes of tonal brilliance struck the appropriate contrast, and showed off Johnson’s impressive technique; but when speaking to the musical essence of the piece – in the opening nocturne, the central passacaglia and subsequent cadenza – her voice was deep, moody and idiomatically Russian.
The orchestra’s final subscription concert of the season is also James Erb’s last as director of the Richmond Symphony Chorus. He prepared the women of the chorus for "Sirènes," the finale of Debussy’s Nocturnes. The positioning of the singers, in three groups on- and offstage, accented the exchanges among the voices and gave the chorus a more spatial quality than one commonly hears.
Smith balanced voices and orchestra nicely, and generally maintained balances among orchestral sections – not an easy feat in the intricate play of tone colors and dynamics in the central "Fétes." The horn section was in excellent form in "Fétes," and Kyle Mustain’s English horn was a richly evocative voice in the opening "Nuages."
After an opening half of tonal ambiguities and moody undertones, Richard Strauss’ orchestral suite from his opera "Der Rosenkavalier" is a late-romantic blowout, an extravaganza of creamy string tone garnished with glittering winds and percussion in broadly inflected Viennese waltzes and bittersweet arias and ensembles. Smith and the orchestra made the most of its colorful theatricality.
The program repeats at 8 p.m. May 19 at First Baptist Church, Boulevard at Monument Avenue in Richmond, and 8 p.m. May 21 at St. Michael Catholic Church, 4491 Springfield Road in Glen Allen. Tickets: $20-$60. Information: (804) 788-1212 or www.richmondsymphony.com
The May 21 performance airs live on WCVE (88.9 FM) in Richmond and WCNV (89.1 FM) in Heathsville.
