Thirty-two members of the Prince William Symphony resign over the dismissal of a veteran player and other differences with the orchestra's administrator-turned-music director and board of directors, the Manassas Journal Messenger reports:
http://www.manassasjm.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=MJM/MGArticle/WPN_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1173353724382&path=
Richmond Symphony & Symphony Chorus,
Erin Freeman conducting
Nov. 30, Second Baptist Church, Richmond
Erin Freeman, associate conductor of the Richmond Symphony, made her public debut as director of the Symphony Chorus in the first of two Christmas-season performances of Handel’s "Messiah." Although she was facing James Erb, the chorus’ founding director, now singing in the tenor section, she showed no hesitation in crafting her own choral sound and putting her own interpretative stamp on this all-too-familiar work.
Freeman, one of the younger protégés of the late Robert Shaw, audibly works from the old master’s template. She obtains assertive, rhythmically precise ensemble singing with focused intonation and unusually clear diction. In this performance, she exploited every opportunity to draw dynamic variety from the choristers – most strikingly, building a crescendo in the phrase "he was bruised for our iniquities," the second section of the chorus "Surely He hath borne our griefs."
That effect, and sharp contrasts in tempo, phrasing and dramatic effect in the number’s four sections, made this sequence, normally overshadowed by "Hallelujah," "For unto us a child is born," "O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion" and "Worthy is the Lamb," the choral highlight of the performance.
Conducting an orchestra of mid-18th century scale – 21 strings and two oboes with continuo in most numbers – Freeman maintained better than usual balance between instruments and a relatively oversized chorus of about 80 voices. ("Messiah" choruses of Handel’s time were half this size or smaller.) String ensemble and articulation were unusually fine, cellos and double-basses unusually hefty.
Harpsichordist Jonathan Moyer – uncredited in the program book, despite having more notes to play than any other instrumentalist – gave stylish, at times richly atmospheric, support to recitatives. The lute tone he produced in "He was despised" was especially noteworthy. Organist Michael Simpson made the most of his elaborative cameo in the chorus "All we like sheep."
Freeman has selected 39 of the 54 numbers of "Messiah," restoring the chronically omitted chorus "The Lord gave the word" and the alto-tenor duet "O death, where is thy sting?" (This is the season's most generous sampling by a professional orchestra in Virginia. The Virginia Symphony of Norfolk and Roanoke Symphony are offering the so-called "Christmas portion," Part 1 plus the "Hallelujah" Chorus. Washington's National Symphony is staging a complete performance.)
Handel's solo vocal numbers pose special challenges. Many are highly theatrical, but they are not operatic arias. In modern librettos, they are called "airs;" early texts of the oratorio termed them "songs." Singers of Handel's time ornamented or elaborated on melodies, and especially on words or phrases – "shake," "crooked," "mountain and hill made low," "lift up thy voice" – that invite illustrative vocal effects.
Several generations of scholar-performers have labored to re-create the kind of voice and performance style appropriate for Handel, but that work is still in progress. European singers seem to have developed a more or less settled Handel style; that’s decidedly not the case in this country. (The Juilliard School recently engaged William Christie, the American-in-Paris guru of baroque vocalization, for its early music program. If anyone can sort things out, Christie can.)
Issues of baroque performance practice can be safely ignored by most concertgoers – that is, until they attend a performance of "Messiah" that aspires to a higher than church-choir standard, encounter soloists who aren't attuned to baroque ornamentation but feel obliged to give it a try, and hear the vocal equivalent of driving with bald tires on a slick road.
This year’s "Messiah" cast features one soloist, soprano Jennifer Ellis Kampani, who specializes in early music and has the straight tone, flexibility and rhythmic acuity to show for it; another, Sumner Thompson, who has sung enough baroque repertory to reconcile its demands with his soft-hued baritone; and two opera singers, mezzo-soprano Tracy Watson and Richmond-based tenor Tracey Welborn (a late substitute for Omar Crook, who pulled out of the first performance due to illness – no word yet on his status for the repeat). Their contributions varied predictably.
More than once, one could imagine Shaw saying: "Look, this isn’t working. Just sing the tune."
The Richmond Symphony's "Messiah" repeats at 8 p.m. Dec. 3 at St. Michael Catholic Church, 4491 Springfield Road in Glen Allen. Tickets: $30. Details: (804) 788-1212, www.richmondsymphony.com
The Eugene McDermott Foundation has pledged $1 million to the Dallas Symphony "to underwrite a two-year artistic and promotional plan to introduce new music director Jaap van Zweden to concertgoers worldwide" and "brand the symphony to reflect Mr. van Zweden's artistic personality," The Dallas Morning News reports:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/columnists/rmiller/stories/DN-p2miller_29bus.ART.State.Edition1.2ad496a.html
The 47-year-old Dutch conductor's name is pronounced: YOPP fahn SVAY-d'n. That might save his new friends a few hundred grand.
Erin Freeman, a 34-year-old native of Atlanta and former music director of the Richmond Philharmonic, is in her first season as the Richmond Symphony’s associate conductor, leading the orchestra’s Pops and Kicked Back Classics series, directing its Young Performers Program, and directing the Richmond Symphony Chorus. We spoke earlier this month.
Q: With Handel’s "Messiah" and the holiday pops concert, you’re launching your first season as 
A: So far, I’ve found the choristers dedicated and the experience of working with them very positive. It’s a pretty intense first season for us. Just a couple of months after "Messiah" we’ll be doing the Verdi Requiem and the Bach cantata "Christ lag in Todesbunden," so we’re already working on those pieces, too. I’m sure the singers find working with me different from working with James Erb [the chorus’ founder and longtime director]. It’s a great help, for continuity and other reasons, that Jim is now singing in the chorus.
Q: Your most important musical mentor was the late Robert Shaw, the great choral director and conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus when you were growing up. What are the big lessons you took away from working with Shaw?
A: I started singing for Mr. Shaw when I was 10, in a youth chorus, and later sang for him in the Atlanta Symphony Chorus. He was all about hard work, and all about the music, and that’s the attitude he expected from everyone who worked with him. Work hard, concentrate on the details, and then you can let the music unfold naturally and spontaneously in performance.
Q: The concert series you lead give many listeners their first taste of classical music, at least as a live experience. Is that an extra challenge for you? Does it give you less freedom, or more, in selecting music?
A: The biggest challenge, with experienced or inexperienced audiences, is to engage them. I think performers of all kinds of music agree on that. Music is all around us, all the time, so we tend to consign it to the background, or to absorb it passively. Live music-making is a contact sport – it takes active participation on the part of the audience. So we’re not just introducing people to classical music; we’re also teaching them to listen. You know how to tell whether people have been really listening? When, at the end of a performance, there’s silence before the applause begins.
Q: Another challenge you face is preparing programs without much rehearsal time . . .
A: Tell me about it. We did [last month’s] Pops concert on one rehearsal. To do that, the conductor and musicians need to prepare as much as possible beforehand. I need to be ready with answers to the questions the players may have about the music, and to anticipate what’s going to require extra attention and when I can assume things will gell without a lot of advance work.
Q: Conductors are authority figures – it’s assumed that they know more and are more experienced than the musicians they lead. Is it harder to exert that kind of authority when you’re no older than the musicians you conduct, and younger than many of them?
A: Not as hard as it used to be. Look at Alan Gilbert taking over the New York Philharmonic [at 42] or Gustavo Dudamel taking over the Los Angeles Philharmonic [at 28]. It certainly hasn’t been a problem for me with the Richmond Symphony’s musicians, who’ve been very supportive. I find it more of an internal struggle. I have very specific ideas about the music I’m conducting, and I know that the musicians have ideas, too. We have to accommodate one another to make the music bloom. So far, I think we’re doing very well at getting onto the same page.
Erin Freeman conducts the Richmond Symphony, Symphony Chorus and guest artists in Handel’s "Messiah" at 8 p.m. Nov. 30 at Second Baptist Church and 8 p.m. Dec. 3 at St. Michael Catholic Church (tickets: $25-$35) and the "Let It Snow!" holiday Pops concert at 8 p.m. Dec. 8 at the Landmark Theater (tickets: $35-$60). Details: 788-1212, www.richmondsymphony.com
By Alex Ross (Farrar Straus Giroux, $30)
Ross, music critic of The New Yorker and the most influential writer on music in the blogosphere, has produced a much-needed primer on the main strains of modern and avant-garde composition. On his blog, he usefully adds a selection of representative audio files, which can be accessed here:
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2007/01/book-audiofiles.html
The book should reach readers beyond the classical-music orbit, however, because Ross surveys modern art-music in 
"Although there is no point in trying to restore Schopenhauer’s separation of art and the state," Ross writes, "it is equally false to claim the opposite, that art can somehow be swallowed up in history or irreparably damaged by it. Music may not be inviolable, but it is infinitely variable, acquiring a new identity in the mind of every new listener. It is always in the world, neither guilty nor innocent, subject to the ever-changing human landscape in which it moves."
Shortly afterward, though, he writes: "In the thirties and forties, the entire Romantic tradition was effectively annexed by the totalitarian state." Romantic music’s guilt by association with fascism and communism was a major – perhaps the major – motivator in compositional trends of the mid-20th century, and of the anti-naturalist or expressionist movement in stagings of 19th-century operas. (In this context, Ross notes one of the century’s most peculiar artistic developments: the CIA’s role in promoting the budding European serial school of composition as anti-communist expression during the years immediately following World War II.)
He neatly accounts for serialism’s failure to connect with listeners: "The serialist principle, with its surfeit of ever-changing musical data, has the effect of erasing at any given moment whatever impressions the listener may have formed about previous passages in the piece. The present moment is all there is."
The book is studded with comparable perfectly formed nutshells of explanation and characterization:
– On art-musicians’ flirtation with jazz in the 1920s: Composers "were enjoying a one-night stand with a dark-skinned form, and they had no intention of striking up a conversation with it the next day."
– On American academic serialists: "Their theoretical essays could be interpreted as so much barbed wire to keep untrustworthy strangers at bay."
– On spirituality as a reaction to hedonism: "It seems no accident that both Stravinsky and Schoenberg responded to the decade of the twenties – the century’s first extended bout of mass consumption, youth rebellion, and sexual liberation – with, respectively, the Symphony of Psalms and Moses und Aron."
– On minimalism, "found-sounds" composition and other avant-garde manifestations: "Many radical American works of the sixties and seventies were created . . . with the composer setting up a musical situation and sitting back to observe the outcome."
As a survey of 20th-century music, "The Rest is Noise" is provocatively individualistic – more words devoted to Jean Sibelius and Benjamin Britten than to Bela Bartók or Anton Webern – and decidedly post-modern in its (selective) admission of jazz, pop and non-Western musics to the contemporary canon.
Critics hate to be accused of committing journalism, but how else to characterize Ross’ inclusion of telling or jolting details such as Webern’s embrace of Nazism (unreciprocated, of course); or Christmastime performances of Handel’s "Messiah" at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris, led by Olivier Messiaen; or Philip Glass installing a dishwasher in Robert Hughes’ apartment; or John Adams tripping on LSD while listening to Rudolf Serkin play Beethoven’s "Choral Fantasy;" or patients in a New York hospital ward asking to hear Arvo Pärt’s "Tabula Rasa" as they died of AIDS?
Or the author's ear for resonant quotes: "I am in a prison," says György Ligeti. "[O]ne wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape." "[T]o hell with the public and with the performers too," says Eliott Carter. "[A] wasteland dominated by these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone write this crazy creepy music," Glass says of the European avant-garde.
"The temptation is strong to see the overall trajectory [of composition] as one of steep decline," Ross writes. "From 1900 to 2000, the art experienced what can only be described as a fall from a great height."
His view of music’s future is more optimistic: "As the behemoth of mass culture breaks up into a melee of subcultures and niche markets, as the Internet weakens the media’s stranglehold on cultural distribution, there is reason to think that classical music, and with it new music, can find fresh audiences in far-flung places."
Nov. 26, University of Richmond
Bruce Stevens, who as organ instructor at the University of Richmond presides over the Beckerath organ in UR’s Cannon Memorial Chapel, put the instrument through its paces in an all-German program ranging from Buxtehude and Bach to Brahms and Rheinberger.
The two-manual, 26-rank tracker organ, installed in 1961 and restored in 2003, was modeled by Rudolf von Beckerath after baroque organs in northern Germany; its predominantly reedy sonority and bright tone colors deliniate contrapuntal scoring as few modern-style instruments can. Stevens demonstrated that capacity in Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E flat major, BWV 552 ("St. Anne") and Buxtehude’s more modestly scaled Passacaglia in D minor.
Stevens delivered his most fluent and idiomatic playing, though, in the Sonata No. 7 in F minor, Op. 127, of Josef Rheinberger, the late-19th century composer whose music Stevens has advocated for much of his career. (He has recorded four discs of Rheinberger’s organ works on the Raven label.)
Rheinberger, a native of Lichtenstein who spent his professional life in Germany (mainly in Munich), was a near-exact contemporary of Brahms; but his style might better be compared with that of Camille Saint-Saëns. Like the French composer (also a near-contemporary), Rheinberger was a fecund melodist who dressed up his tunes with displays of technique and explorations of instrumental atmospherics while adhering to conventional classical form. His Seventh Sonata (he wrote 20 in all) is a grandly stated representation of his work; Stevens’ performance made a very persuasive case for it.
The program also featured the Preludium in G minor and chorales on "Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist" and "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" by Buxtehude, Brahms’ Chorale Prelude on "Herzlich tut mich erfreuen" and Mozart’s Adagio and Allegro in F minor, K. 594, for mechanical organ.
Virginia Opera, Joseph Walsh conducting
Nov. 23, Landmark Theater, Richmond
The operettas of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan are an acquired taste, requiring an ear for preciously phrased sarcasm and sufficient knowledge of 
Virginians of a certain age and background are among the most hardcore of American Anglophiles, and they’re turning out in force for the Virginia Opera’s "Pirates."
Still, stage director William Theisen takes no chances on the show's not connecting with moderns. Theisen, vividly assisted by set designer Chris Clapp and costume designer Howard Tsvi Kaplan, has fashioned a bright, manic, thoroughly over-the-top production, seemingly cast with veterans of Phony British Accent Reader’s Theater and Talk Like a Pirate Day. The women cavort like college boys in drag, and the men act as if they’re in a Monty Python skit. Queen Victoria herself descends on the proceeedings in the finale, and even she would be amused.
William Ferguson, a Richmonder building an international career as an operatic and art-song tenor, is unquestionably the star of this show. He is the best singer and clearest speaker in the cast, and wears the proto-Dudley Doright role of Frederic like a second skin. Alcia Berneche is almost as persuasive as Mabel, the object of Frederic’s desire. Her bel canto is show-stoppingly vertiginous; she just needs a little more irony to go with her wide-eyed winsomeness.
In the first of two Richmond performances, Ferguson and Berneche received theatrically adept but vocally variable support from Dominic M. Aquillino (the Pirate King), Chris Mooney (Samuel) and Jonathan Kimple (the Sergeant of Police). In the two broadest comic roles, Gary Briggle (the Major General ) and Myrna Paris (Ruth) had all the right moves but were sorely taxed vocally. Choruses too often turned into tonal traffic jams.
Conductor Joseph Walsh obtained an alert, animated reading of Sullivan’s Mozartian-cum-Rossiniesque score from members of Norfolk’s Virginia Symphony.
Although "Pirates" is sung in English, the projected captions come in handier than usual. The show's dialogue and patter numbers are mostly unintelligible in the Landmark Theater, and probably won't be much clearer in the Fairfax venue.
The Virginia Opera’s "Pirates of Penzance" concludes its run with performances at 2:30 p.m. Nov. 25 at Richmond Landmark Theater, and 8 p.m. Nov. 30 and 2 p.m. Dec. 2 at George Mason University’s Center for the Arts in Fairfax. Tickets: $20-$85 (Richmond), $44-$94 (Fairfax). Details: (804) 262-8100 (Richmond), (703) 218-6500 (Fairfax), www.vaopera.org
