VCU Rennolds Concerts 2011-12

Violinist Leila Josefowicz, pianist Vladimir Feltsman and the new-music string quartet Brooklyn Rider highlight the 2011-12 Rennolds Chamber Concerts series at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The coming season also will feature the Montreal-based Ensemble Appassionata, led by Daniel Myssyk, better-known in Richmond as conductor of the VCU Symphony Orchestra.

All concerts will begin at 8 p.m. in Vlahcevic Concert Hall of the Singleton Arts Center, Park Avenue at Harrison Street in Richmond’s Fan District.

For ticket-subscription information, call the VCU Music box office at (804) 828-6776. (Current subscribers’ seats will be reserved until July 1.) Single tickets – $32 for adults, $28 for seniors (60 and older) and VCU employees, $10 for full-time students – will go on sale later.

The 2011-12 Rennolds schedule:

* Sept. 17 – Vladimir Feltsman, piano.

* Oct. 8 – Brooklyn Rider Quartet.

* Nov. 5 – Fry Street Quartet with Robert McDonald, piano.

* Jan. 21 – Ensemble Appassionata, Daniel Myssyk conducting, with Richard Raymond, piano.

* April 14 – Trio Solisti.

* May 5 – Leila Josefowicz, violin.

(All programs TBA.)

Credo

Composer John Adams, in his recent commencement address at New York’s Juilliard School, speaks up for the fine arts, forcefully and with plain-spoken eloquence.

“A life in the arts,” Adams says, “means a life of sacrifice and tens of thousands of hours of devotion and discipline with scant remuneration and sometimes even scant recognition. A life in the arts means loving complexity and ambiguity, of enjoying the fact that there are no single, absolute solutions. And it means that you value communicating about matters of the spirit over the baser forms of human interaction, because you know that life is not just a transaction, not simply a game about winning someone’s confidence purely for purposes of material gain.”

The full text at NewMusicBox:

http://newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=6949

(via Alex Ross)

Freeman's Chicago farewell

Paul Freeman, the Richmond native who became the most prominent African-American conductor of his generation, steps down from the Chicago Sinfonietta, the orchestra he founded 24 years ago.

The 75-year-old Freeman, who has been in declining health, is honorary chief conductor of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra in Prague, which he led from 1996 to 2006.

The Chicago Tribune’s John von Rhein reviews an emotion-packed Chicago Sinfonietta concert celebrating Freeman:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-live-0525-sinfonietta-review-20110524,0,7726283.column

WNO taps Zambello

Francesco Zambello, the opera and musical-theater stage director who last year became artistic director of the Glimmerglass opera festival in upstate New York, has been named artistic advisor of the Washington National Opera.

As Plácido Domingo relinquishes artistic direction of the company after 15 years and WNO’s administration goes under the wing of the Kennedy Center, Zambello’s role will be “open-ended, exploratory,” she tells The Washington Post’s Anne Midgette:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/classical-beat/post/zambello-to-wno---as-advisor/2011/05/25/AGPvsGBH_blog.html#pagebreak

eighth blackbird's new violinist

Yvonne Lam, currently assistant concertmaster of the Washington National Opera Orchestra, has been named the new violinist of eighth blackbird, the contemporary chamber-music ensemble in residence at the University of Richmond and University of Chicago when not riding jetstreams around the planet.

Lam succeeds Matt Albert, a founding member of the ’birds, who is retiring after 15 years to pursue a more traditional classical career. “I’m looking forward to playing Sibelius symphonies, Mozart string quartets, and new violin works that I’ve commissioned,” he says. “These possibilities, and the many others I’ve yet to discover, are why I’m excited, and why the rest of the group is excited for me.”

Albert tells The Washington Post’s Anne Midgette that he has auditioned for several orchestras and is exploring free-lance opportunities:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/two-violinists-traveling-in-opposite-directions-in-the-music-world/2011/05/19/AFu0HQ7G_story.html

Albert’s final performance with eighth blackbird will be at Chicago Counterpoint, a festival of works by Steve Reich, on Aug. 22.

Healthy, cultured Norwegians

A research team affiliated with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology finds that “participation in receptive and creative cultural activities was significantly associated with good health, good satisfaction with life, low anxiety and depression” . . .

http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2011/05/04/jech.2010.113571.abstract

Curiously, the study found that among men, “attending receptive, rather than creative, cultural activities was more strongly associated with all health-related outcomes” – e.g., that attending a piano recital proved more beneficial than playing the piano.

So, “don’t just do something, sit there” may be sound advice, at least for Norwegian guys.

Biblical prize winner

The Richmond-born composer Zachary Wadsworth has won a King James Bible Composition Award for “Out of the South Cometh the Whirlwind,” an anthem setting verses from the Book of Job.

The work will be performed on Nov. 16 at Westminster Abbey, London, in a service celebrating the 400th anniversary of the English translation of the Bible by scholars commissioned by King James I.

Wadsworth’s anthem will be published by Novello.

The composition competition, open to composers under 30, was initiated by the King James Bible Trust and supported by the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey. Awards were presented in two categories: a work for advanced choir, won by Wadsworth; and one for non-professional choir, won by the British organist and teacher Christopher Totney.

The 28-year-old Wadsworth, a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and Yale University, is pursuing a doctorate at Cornell University. In 2008 he was one of the recipients of the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composers Award; in 2007 he won the ASCAP-Lotte Lehmann Foundation Art Song Competition.