The Guardian's Kate Connolly profiles Katharina Wagner, who with her half-sister, Eva Pasquier-Wagner, now runs the Richard Wagner shrine and festival at Bayreuth:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/aug/23/katharina-wagner-bayreuth
Pianist Stephen Hough, in his blog for the British newspaper The Telegraph, takes on the issue of vibrato in string playing. He notes that this practice of slightly wavering pitch to produce a more rounded, rich tone became prevalent when musicians stopped using gut strings, which have an "internal quiver due to the irregularity of the natural material," and began using steel strings, which are "naturally clean and 'cold' and in need of vibrato" to flesh out their sound:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/stephenhough/100046034/quaver-or-not-should-orchestras-use-vibrato/
String vibrato vs. its minimization – not its absence: Fiddlers rarely play with absolutely no vibrato – has been one of the hottest points of contention between adherents to historically informed performance (HIP) practices and non-HIP ("modern") musicians.
I spent many fruitful hours discussing the issue with the late Frederick Neumann, the musicologist and violinist who in the years after his retirement from the University of Richmond faculty was one of the most articulate foes of low-vibrato playing. (He was kind enough to acknowledge my interlocutor’s role in his book "New Essays on Performance Practice.")
Neumann (1908-94) lived through the transition from gut to steel strings, and would endorse Hough’s point that high-tension steel strings are more reliable in pitch and produce a more brilliant tone that projects better in large, modern concert spaces. I chuckle to think how Neumann might have responded to Hough’s observation that the unsteadier pitch of gut strings "simulate a vibrato" when played in ensembles.
If he were around today, Neumann would probably say he lost his battles against reduced vibrato and other HIP practices, such as double-dotted rhythms and the note-swelling technique called messa di voce. They are employed routinely in baroque and classical music, and have been used selectively in much of the 19th-century romantic repertory.
Neumann, though, planted a question about vibrato: How little is too much, making string sound too thin and weak, and denaturing musical tone and expression? The answer that HIP and HIP-aware fiddlers have settled on might gratify him.
String players today, whether playing modern or period-style instruments (more and more play both), naturally produce a leaner tone and articulate more crisply in Bach, Mozart and Beethoven than they do in Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Puccini. And because they do, they tend to play the earlier composers at faster tempos and with sharper accents. (Perhaps not coincidentally, they seem to play the later composers more broadly.)
Vibrato – hardly lush, but perceptible and sometimes quite pronounced – has returned to baroque and classical string performance, especially in slow movements and passages meant to impart emotional affect. In the quest for affectus, historically informed specialists sometimes apply more vibrato than a modern violinist would think seemly.
The battle that Neumann joined, and Hough revisits, sounds to have been resolved sensibly. Strings, gut and steel, are played with vibrato, but with differing quantities and qualities, depending on the composer, the music’s period and its pace and expressive demands.
Central Virginia has four principal classical-music presenters: the Richmond Symphony, the Virginia Opera, the Modlin Arts Center at the University of Richmond, and the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Music, which stages the Rennolds Chamber Concerts. They frequently use one another’s spaces and/or talent, collaborate on projects, share administrative and logistical support.
One would think that coordinating performance schedules might be part of the interactive package. Not this season, though.
Assembling the 2010-11 overview of classical performances in Richmond, which I’ll post here in early September, I count eight conflicting dates among the four frontline presenters. Two of the conflicts cannot be resolved by switching to an alternate symphony or opera date; a third requires a choice of two attractions from three options; a fourth requires sprinting from an opera matinee to an evening concert.
Figuring in these conflicts are some of the season’s prime atttractions: both of the Shanghai Quartet’s University of Richmond concerts, the Virginia Opera’s "Rigoletto" and "Valkyrie," the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields at UR, three of the six Rennolds Concerts, eight of the symphony’s 15 classical programs. You may hear percussionist Evelyn Glennie or cellist Zuill Bailey, not both.
Add festivals, college faculty and church concerts, choir performances and so on, and we may be looking at the most conflict-heavy Richmond season in memory.
This is not just bad timing, but badly timed bad timing.
Classical presenters are financially stressed – the Virginia Opera is seriously in the red, the Richmond Symphony more modestly so; and with the recession driving down contributions, grants and earnings from endowments, keeping up ticket-sales income is crucial.
Season-subscription packages are the base of this income, as well as being the most convenient and cost-effective way for patrons to buy tickets. The season’s multiple conflicts discourage potential subscribers. Those who do subscribe must count on liberal and efficient ticket-exchange policies, and plan to spend some time making exchanges.
The alternative, buying single tickets, is more expensive and more labor-intensive, on the part of both buyers and sellers.
The box-office lines are going to be longer this season. No-shows – tickets purchased but not used or turned in for resale of the seat – will be more numerous.
Some conflicts are inevitable. The audience prefers weekend dates, and presenters have obliged. Touring artists’ schedules are often inflexible, especially for choice weekend dates. This leads to clusters of performances – overloads of music – followed by days or weeks of inactivity, even when it doesn’t produce conflicting events.
Whatever the cause of these conflicts, the result is likely to be depressed attendance, and missed ticket sales that will cost these groups especially dearly.
Metro Collection, the Richmond Symphony’s chamber-orchestra series, will present four programs in five suburban venues in the coming season.
Friday concerts, at 8 p.m., will be staged in Goochland, Midlothian, Bon Air and western Henrico County. Sunday 
Steven Smith, the symphony’s new music director, will conduct three of the programs. Erin R. Freeman, the orchestra’s associate conductor, will lead the first pair of concerts in the series.
Three symphony musicians, piccolo player Ann Choomack, clarinetist Jared Davis and bassoonist Martin Gordon, will be featured soloists.
Tickets for the series are $68, $40 for youths. For information, call the symphony’s box office at (804) 788-1212, or visit http://www.richmondsymphony.com/
The 2010-11 Metro Collection programs:
Oct. 1 (8 p.m.)
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, 12291 River Road, Goochland
Oct. 3 (3 p.m.)
Blackwell Auditorium, Randolph-Macon College, 205 Henry St., Ashland
Erin R. Freeman conducting
Honegger: "Pastorale d’été"
Dvořák: Serenade in D minor, Op. 44
Ives: "Tone Roads" No. 1
Tchaikovsky: Serenade in C major
Nov. 5 (8 p.m.)
Robins Theatre, Steward School, 11600 Gayton Road
Nov. 7 (3 p.m.)
Blackwell Auditorium, Randolph-Macon College, 205 Henry St., Ashland
Steven Smith conducting
Brahms-Hermann: "Liebeslieder Waltzes"
Copland: "Music for the Theater"
Michael Torke: "Lucent Variations"
Haydn: Symphony No. 82 in C major ("The Bear")
Jan. 28 (8 p.m.)
KingsWay Community Church, 14111 Sovereign Grace Drive, Midlothian
Jan. 30 (3 p.m.)
Blackwell Auditorium, Randolph-Macon College, 205 Henry St., Ashland
Steven Smith conducting
Purcell: Fantasia
Vivaldi: Concerto in A minor for piccolo and orchestra
Ann Choomack, piccolo
Respighi: "Gli uccelli" ("The Birds")
Ravel: "Pavane pour une infante défunte"
Ginastera: "Variaciones concertantes"
Feb. 25 (8 p.m.)
Bon Air Baptist Church, Forest Hill Avenue at Buford Road
Feb. 27 (3 p.m.)
Blackwell Auditorium, Randolph-Macon College, 205 Henry St., Ashland
Steven Smith conducting
Elgar: Introduction and Allegro, Op. 47
Franz Shreker: Intermezzo, Op. 8
Richard Strauss: "Duett-Concertino" for clarinet, bassoon and string orchestra with harp
Jared Davis, clarinet
Martin Gordon, bassoon
Poulenc: Sinfonietta
Aug. 8, Bon Air Presbyterian Church
The Richmond Chamber Players launched their 32th season with a program devoted entirely to music of English composers, which is to say obscure music.
Anglophilia is widespread among Americans who listen to classical music; but their tastes in neckties and interior décor haven’t extended to English music. There’s no good reason for this. I suspect it’s just habit on the part of programmers.
So, all hail John Walter and friends for picking fruit from the English tree, even if some of it wasn’t fully ripe.
The program contrasted one of the last works by Ralph Vaughan Williams, "Ten Blake Songs" (1957), with one of his earliest surviving pieces, the Piano Quintet in C minor (1903-05). Between them, there was the Viola Sonata (1919) by Rebecca Clarke, one of the first prominent female composers in Britain (although she wrote the sonata during an extended stay in America).
Vaughan Williams pared musical materials, texture and instrumentation to the essentials in "Ten Blake Songs." This setting of poems by William Blake is scored minimally, for voice and oboe; yet those two voices produce the same melodic and harmonic currents, the same pastoral atmospherics and spatial qualities, as his most lavishly orchestrated music.
Tenor Tracey Welborn and oboist Gustav Highstein captured just the right balance between the intimacy of Blake’s poems and the expansiveness of Vaughan Williams’ settings. Welborn effectively conveyed the introspection and sense of wonder in these verses, and Highstein phrased and colored the oboe’s micro-orchestration masterfully. They treated "Ten Blake Songs" as a neglected masterpiece, which it is.
(By happy coincidence, if you missed this performance, there's another chance to hear the song cycle, performed by soprano Ilana Davidson, tenor Derek Chester and oboist Roger Roe in an Aug. 25 Staunton Music Festival program.)
The Vaughan Williams piano quintet is not a neglected masterpiece. Its string instrumentation (violin, viola, cello, double-bass) is modeled after that of Schubert’s "Trout" Quintet; but Vaughan Williams’ texture is much thinker and his timbres much darker. The piano’s hard, bright chords flash rather aggressively through the fiddle murk. The concluding theme-and-variations Fantasia, the lightest-textured section of the piece, is the most successful.
Walter, playing piano, and violinist Susy Yim, violist Stephen Schmidt, cellist Neal Cary and double-bassist Fred Dole played gamely, and with rich expressiveness in solo passages.
The Clarke sonata is a reminder of how effectively British composers can balance modernity and antiquity, intellect and sensuality. The three-movement piece is impressionistic in its colors, verging on jazzy in its rhythmic character, and a very fine showcase for the range and tonal character of the viola. Violist Schmidt played it expertly and lovingly, with sonorous and stylish accompaniment by Walter.
(And what do you know, Clarke’s Viola Sonata will be played on Aug. 22 at the Garth Newel Music Center in Bath County.)
The Richmond Chamber Players’ Interlude series continues with concerts at 3 p.m. Aug. 15, 22 and 29 at Bon Air Presbyterian Church, 9201 W. Huguenot Road. Tickets: $18. Details: (804) 272-7514, ext. 312.
Donald Rosenberg, who was removed from covering and reviewing the Cleveland Orchestra after the orchestra complained to his newspaper, The Plain Dealer, about his negative reviews of conductor Franz Welser-Möst, has lost his lawsuit against the paper and orchestra.
Rosenberg had sued The Plain Dealer and its editor for age discrimination (the critic is 58) and the Cleveland Orchestra's parent organization and its officers for interference and defamation, Daniel J. Wakin reports in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/arts/music/07critic.html
Rosenberg's suit "was a brave and worthy battle to fight on behalf of those who were hired to offer our opinions about artistic quality," writes The Baltimore Sun's Tim Smith:
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/classicalmusic/2010/08/music_critic_loses_case_agains.html
(Disclosure: I was among the critics who signed a letter of protest to The Plain Dealer after Rosenberg's reassignment in 2008.)
Kate Lindsey, the Richmond-bred mezzo-soprano, has received an artist of the year award from the 
The company gave an artist of the year award to Stephen Wadsworth, who was stage director of both "Amelia" and an August 2009 production of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde."
