Richmonder wins art-song prize

Richmond-bred composer Zachary Wadsworth has taken first place in the ASCAP-Lotte Lehmann Foundation Art Song Competition for Young Composers.

Wadsworth will receive $3,500 and a commission to write a song cycle for voice and piano to be published by E.C. Schirmer and performed in three three major American cities.

The 24-year-old composer is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and Yale University; he is now in doctoral studies at Cornell University. He has received a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Morton Gould Young Composers Awards from ASCAP and other prizes. His chamber opera "Venus and Adonis" was premiered last summer.

The ASCAP-Lehmann competition, whose second round was this year, was organized to encourage composers under 30 to write art-music for the voice. It is named for Lotte Lehmann, a famed opera and Lieder singer of the early and mid-20th century.

Second-place winner in the competition was Allen McCullough, 29, of Landsdowne, PA. Third place went to Ryan Gee, 29, of Austin. Isaac Shankler, 28, of Los Angeles, won the Damien Top Prize. All will receive cash prizes and commissions to write vocal works.

Kids today

Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra and its 26-year-old conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, have garnered rapturous reviews from recent concerts in Britain and this country. Critics also have been hemorhaging superlatives in the wake of performances by the 20-year-old Chinese pianist Yuja Wang (see previous post for a representative example). Jay Greenberg, a composer who turns 16 next month, had five symphonies under his belt by the time he was 14; a Sony-BMG recording of the Fifth has gotten rave reviews, and Joshua Bell premiered Greenberg’s Violin Concerto on Oct. 28 at Carnegie Hall.

Graze through classical Web sites and blogs, and you’ll read of more leaps into the big league by musicians yet to reach legal drinking age.

Musical prodigies are nothing new – Mozart was knocking wigs askew when he was 5; but it seems today that prodigious talents are maturing more rapidly, thus earning more respectful recognition sooner.

In recent dates, Wang has played the Tchaikovsky Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Boston Symphony. In 2003 she played Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto with the Tonhalle Orchestra of Zürich. The Tchaikovsky is standard young-virtuoso fare. Beethoven 4, on the other hand, has been assumed to be music for a long-seasoned pianist. For a European orchestra of stature to engage a teenager (she was 16 at the time), however acclaimed, as the soloist in this concerto is a pretty radical departure from past practice.

Dudamel and the Bolívar, meanwhile, have been touring with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. This is the sort of repertory normally taken on tour by mature conductors and major orchestras. Not surprisingly, critics have picked nits with Dudamel’s reading; but none of the reviews I’ve read suggested that a 20-something conductor and an orchestra of teenagers were too young and inexperienced to give a convincing performance of it.

When will some authority – teacher, psychologist, anthropologist – weigh in on the accelerated maturation of young artists? Is the same thing happening in other fields that spawn prodigies? Math? Chess? Gymnastics? Is some 12-year-old about to sort out chaos theory and win a Nobel at 15?

And how do we account for it? Is it nature (self-selective breeding by overachievers?), or nurture (infant brain food? Suzuki? Mozart-for-babies tapes of the '90s worked after all?), or what?

Review: Yuja Wang, Shanghai Quartet

Nov. 12, University of Richmond

The Shanghai Quartet doesn’t usually play as an opening act and backup band, but the group may have to reconcile itself to those roles when performing with the young Chinese pianist Yuja Wang.

Wang is the most spectacularly and comprehensively gifted pianist since . . . God knows who and when. Her technique is both awesome and flawless, her ear for piano sonority and color unerring. She projects a pianissimo as forcefully as a fortissimo, and everything in between, and doesn’t exaggerate or misplace any dynamic level. When she plays at speed, her fingers literally blur. Her phrasing is as natural as breathing. She has produced a tasteful arrangement from Gluck’s "Dance of the Blessed Spirits," improving on Wilhelm Kempff’s. Even her posture is beyond reproach. She is 20, and looks maybe 14.

Appearing with the Shanghai during a two-day window between trips to Latin America, Wang played Scriabin’s Sonata No. 2 in G sharp minor, Ravel’s "La Valse" and four encore pieces, including her Gluck arrangement, Vladimir Horowitz’s " ‘Carmen’ Variations" from the Bizet opera, György Cziffra’s arrangement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s "Flight of the Bumblebee" and Mozart’s "Rondo alla Turca" as "paraphrased" by the pianist Volodos. Then she joined the Shanghai in Schumann’s Piano Quintet.

Those selections embrace most every sound a pianist would be expected to make, short of tinkering with its innards or playing cluster chords, and I didn’t hear a sound to fault, an imbalance to correct or, more importantly, a lapse in musicality. (Other than choosing to play the Mozart mosh – let’s chalk that up to Wang being 20 and not reading five stars on YouTube as a warning sign.)

Scriabin’s "Sonata-Fantasy" is an homage to Chopin; a crossbreeding of those two musical personalities is a highly volatile mix. Wang did justice to both in a performance that sustained dreamy lyricism through a succession of expressive outbursts and jagged harmonizations.

The enormous bass sonorities she produced in the Scriabin returned in the Ravel, but the most striking feature of her reading of "La Valse" was its clarity. In the hands of most pianists, this piece is marked by splashes of notes and smears of tone color. Wang played it with the fine articulation and careful proportion that pianists strive for in Mozart, yet she did so without sacrificing any of this music’s ominously surging power or woozy humor.

Schumann, of course, was a pianist – some accuse him of writing piano music regardless of his scores’ instrumentation – and his Piano Quintet can be a precarious balancing act between keyboard and strings. Wang played her part emphatically, but never crowded the Shanghai. The string players, in turn, were at their most expressively assertive and tonally voluptuous.

The foursome opened the program with Beethoven’s "Harp" Quartet (No. 10 in E flat major, Op. 74), perhaps the most quirkily adventurous of his middle-period quartets. The Shanghai emphasized its tonal surprises, sudden twists and dynamic contrasts while maintaining a generally plummy tone and high but not hyper energy level. Solo voices rising from the ensemble, which are plentiful in this piece, were rendered with special sensitivity.

Critic slapped

Tim Page, the Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic of The Washington Post, has been subjected to "disciplinary action" – placed on leave, apparently – after firing off an intemperate (albeit dead-on-target) response to an e-mail from the "media consultant" of ex-mayor, now DC Councilman Marion Barry:

http://www.wusa9.com/news/columnist/blogs/2007/11/post-reporter-disciplined-after.html

Page already was due to take a sabbatical from the paper to teach next semester at the University of Southern California. Anne Midgette, now at The New York Times, will join the Post on Jan. 1 as interim classical music critic. (Still interim? Stay tuned.)

Bending my self-imposed rule against public comment about life in daily journalism, I’ll observe that newspapers increasingly compartmentalize expressions of opinion. Critics venture outside their designated enclosures – or even too close to the borders of their boxes – at their peril. (Page broke out of the box completely, although not in print, and has apologized for doing so.)

Ionarts blogger Charles T. Downey comments:

http://ionarts.blogspot.com/

Comfort maestro

Itzhak Perlman, violin superstar and sometime conductor, has been named artistic director of the Westchester Philharmonic in Purchase, N.Y., PlaybillArts reports:

http://www.playbillarts.com/news/article/7349.html

Perlman signed up for three years, beginning in 2008-09. He will conduct three of the orchestra's five concerts per season.

Asked about his plans, Perlman sounded less like an artistic director, more like a visiting virtuoso on a lark: "I like to do my Brahmses, my Mozarts, my Tchaikovskys. It’s fun. Here’s a term for you: Call it ‘comfort music.’ "

'Industry perspective'

Anthony Tommasini profiles Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/arts/music/11tomm.html?ref=music

The title of the article, "A One-Woman Vanguard," reinforces the meme on Alsop as the first female conductor in the international front rank. (A "really silly epithet," Alsop says of her professional gender distinction.)

When she secured the Baltimore appointment, Alsop was widely described as the first woman to lead a major American orchestra. Whereupon, Tommasini writes, "there were howls of protest from loyal supporters of JoAnn Falletta, the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic" – and, he fails to mention, music director of the Virginia Symphony of Norfolk.

"But with all due respect to Ms. Falletta and her adventurous orchestra, from an industry perspective — in terms of budget, location, schedule, touring, recording and other factors — the Baltimore Symphony is generally viewed as a major American orchestra while the Buffalo Philharmonic, however fine, is not quite."

The "industry perspective" reflected in the article brings to mind Saul Steinberg’s "View of the World from 9th Avenue":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:The_New_Yorker%2C_1976-03-29%2C_Cover_%28View_of_the_World_from_9th_Avenue%2C_priced_and_dated%29.PNG

In Virginia (under the H in "Washington, DC" on Steinberg's map), Norfolk's Falletta is one of three female music directors of orchestras. The others are Kate Tamarkin of the Charlottesville and University Symphony Orchestra and Janna Hymes of the Williamsburg Symphonia. Victoria Bond is the former music director of the Roanoke Symphony. The Richmond Symphony has had three female associate conductors: Alsop, Sarah Hatsuko Hicks and the currently serving Erin Freeman.

However . . . as they say in the industry.

Review: Richmond Symphony

Nov. 9, Bon Air Baptist Church

The Richmond Symphony’s Bach Festival series, like its predecessors spotlighting Mozart and Beethoven, both samples the composer’s music and examines his influence on subsequent generations. The links may be explicit (the Mozart homages of the 19th and 20th centuries, for example), but more often the connections have been inferential.

Some of both filled the second Bach Festival program. Alongside the "Brandenburg" Concerto No. 3, conductor Mark Russell Smith led Stravinsky’s similarly scaled and comparably spirited "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto and Webern’s orchestral arrangement of the Ricercare from Bach’s chamber collection "The Musical Offering."

Then there was Richard Strauss’ suite drawn from incidental music that he wrote for two productions of Molière’s "Le bourgeois gentilhomme," staged in 1912 and 1918 by Max Reinhardt’s Kleine Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Strauss’ template was not Bach, but a musician of the previous generation: Jean-Baptiste Lully, court composer of Louis XIV, king of France in the late 17th century.

Smith and the orchestra made a very persuasive case for reviving this fairly obscure bit of Strauss, which cannily balances echoes of "ancient" music – especially in "Entrance of Cléonte," a theme of Lully’s that Strauss barely modernized – with original music that is unmistakably Straussian but still complements a baroque-period comedy of manners. (Strauss, a bourgeois gent himself, treats the arriviste subject of the play more sympathetically than Lully did.)

The symphony’s chamber orchestra was idiomatically Straussian in its vivid colorations and voluptuous tone, and the score’s numerous solos and cameos for violin, cello, woodwinds and piano received polished and characterful treatment.

The same stylishness and exuberance propelled this performance of "Dumbarton Oaks," a 1938 opus that is among the wittiest, and may be the most cheerful, music that Stravinsky produced.

The third "Brandenburg," played without a conductor by trios of violinists, violists and cellists and a single double-bass from the symphony’s front stands, joined by continuo harpsichordist Joanne Kong, was nicely animated but not consistently focused intonationally.

The Bach-Webern Ricercare suffered from imbalance between strings and winds (especially brass), a problem the orchestra often has in the Bon Air Baptist Church sanctuary.

This program is the only installment of the Bach Festival that won’t get a Sunday-matinee repeat at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland. The Strauss, an attractive piece and a very effective showcase for the orchestra’s leading players, deserves further airing.