Lou Sawyer, a longtime music educator and director of the Virginia Beach Chorale from 1980 until he was diagnosed with lung cancer earlier this year, has died. His obituary in The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk:
http://hamptonroads.com/2008/08/longtime-director-virginia-beach-chorale-dies-73
Sony Corp. of America is buying out the half-interest of its partner in the Sony-BMG recording combine, the German firm Bertelsmann AG, for $1.2 billion, The New York Times reports:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/business/worldbusiness/06music.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1217959240-xMvQU+5kV64wRRvk9kjQsA
Sony-BMG, formed in 2004, controls the catalogues of the former Columbia and RCA Victor labels and, through them, most of the music recorded in the U.S. prior to 1950.
The record company, once sold, will be renamed Sony Music Entertainment. Its roster is dominated by pop artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Celine Dion and Alicia Keys, but also includes Yo-Yo Ma, Murray Perahia, Emanuel Ax and Joshua Bell, as well as extrensive back catalogues of recordings by most of the major American orchestras, ensembles such as the Guarneri and Juilliard quartets, and soloists ranging from Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein to Leon Fleisher and Isaac Stern.
William Ferguson, the Richmond-born tenor, has spent the summer starring as Brian Cohen in "Not the Messiah: He's a Very Naughty Boy," 
Ferguson's getting good reviews. "[A] clean-cut tenor with a clean-cut sound," opines Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-et-not4-2008aug04,0,7389608.story
Mixed reviews for the show itself: The Washington Post's Stephen Brookes found it "hysterically funny" . . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/25/AR2008072502791.html
. . . while David Mermelstein on MusicalAmerica.com (subscription only) dissed it as "crude vaudeville."
To hear Ferguson in Handel's "Messiah," as well as other non-naughty repertory, go here (click on his name, then click on "media"):
http://www.williamferguson.com/
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Richmond-bred composer Mason Bates' "Liquid Interface," introduced in February 2007 by the National Symphony in Washington, rated as the "triumphant high point" of the opening weekend of California's Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, writes Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/04/DD8L124HUI.DTL&hw=kosman&sn=002&sc=599
Gwinnett County, GA, the Atlanta suburb that snared the Braves' Triple-A baseball team from Richmond – the team is due to move in 2009 – has lost its local orchestra. A projected 20 percent increase in costs led the Gwinnett Philharmonic to shut down after 13 seasons, Pierre Ruhe reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
http://www.ajc.com/cherokee/content/metro/gwinnett/stories/2008/08/01/philharmonic_closes.html
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At the Bayreuth Festival, meanwhile, a downpour and subsequent flooding delayed a July 31 performance of "Siegfried," the third installment of Wagner's "Ring" cycle. The washout is supposed to come at the end of the fourth and final installment, "Götterdämmerung." Mother Nature evidently misplaced her libretto:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iMB-gG6eCi4ZqWZStqPXkK5Xr1jQ
Aug. 3, Bon Air Presbyterian Church
The Richmond Chamber Players launched their 2008 Interlude series with a program of French early modern works that didn’t always conform to the usual notions of their time and place.
The best-known offering was Claude Debussy’s last major composition, the Sonata in G minor (1917) for violin and piano, a piece in which impressionistic tone colors serve mainly to underline emotional and expressive ambivalence. The sonata requires substantial technique on the part of the violinist, but also demands an important interpretive decision: Whether to show off technique or delve into its musicality.
Violinist Susy Yim chose the latter course. While her technical command was never in doubt, her qualities that stood out in her performance were introspection and exploration. Each gesture, each venture into rarified tonality, sounded within a deeper context. She played the sonata not as a musical argument or essay, but as an act of contemplation.
Pianist John Walter, artistic director of the ensemble’s summer series, stayed expressively in tune with Yim – as he would with other collaborators throughout the program.
Bracketing the Debussy were lesser-known works from two composers of "Les Six," leading lights of the generation that followed Debussy: Darius Milhaud’s Suite (1936) for violin, clarinet and piano and Francis Poulenc’s Sextet (1939) for winds and piano.
Yim, Walter and clarinetist David Niethamer played the Milhaud with a collective ear cocked for its jazzy and Brazilian undertones, but made more of its neoclassicism à la Stravinsky, a quality most pronounced in its "Jeu: Vif" movement. Niethamer’s clarinet overbalanced Yim’s violin in the early going, but they achieved better sonic balance as the performance progressed.
If Poulenc was the most Mozartian of French moderns – "content to follow the gentle neoclassical formation of Ravel’s piano music and songs," as Nicolas Slonimsky put it – then this sextet is one of the gaudiest outliers of his output. The piece is densely scored, often aggressive in its rhythmic language and abrupt in its dynamism, and largely romantic, even Wagnerian, in its melodies and the way they are expressed. It’s also notably short on Poulenc’s trademark humor, unless you hear the piece as a sendup of romantic style.
Flutist Mary Boodell, oboist Sandra Lisicky, bassoonist Jonathan Friedman, French horn player Paul LaFollette, clarinetist Niethamer and pianist Walter gave an outsized performance of the Poulenc. In louder passages, they came close to producing more sound than the Bon Air Presbyterian Church sanctuary could comfortably accommodate.
The ensemble maintained good balance within the music’s thick textures, and solos – notably by Lisicky, LaFollette and Friedman – were sensitively played. Walter reveled in the work’s assertive piano part.
The six musicians were on more characteristically light-hearted French woodwind turf in an encore, Jean Françaix’s "The Little Nervous One."
The Richmond Chamber Players’ Interlude series continues with concerts at 3 p.m. Aug. 10, 17 and 24 at Bon Air Presbyterian Church, 9201 W. Huguenot Road. Tickets: $14-$16. Details: (804) 340-1405 (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts ticket desk).
The Richmond Symphony finished its 50th anniversary 2007-08 season $25,715 in the black on a $4.75 million budget, reports David Fisk, the orchestra's executive director.
The symphony, heading into its fifth season of playing subscription concerts in church sanctuaries and other alternative venues, expects to know by the end of this month whether the renovated Carpenter Theatre (formerly the Carpenter Center) in Richmond CenterStage, the new downtown performing-arts complex, will be ready for orchestra concerts in fall 2009.
As of this week, Fisk said, CenterStage construction is on schedule.
The Virginia Opera, which has been staging its productions in the Landmark Theater, also is scheduled to move into the Carpenter Theatre for its 2009-10 season.
Up to 40 percent of musicians suffer from hearing loss, according to some recent studies. In classical music, orchestral string players seated downwind of brass sections are especially at risk:
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=fdf725c5-63ef-4d11-bc34-94fed3626b69
Sound compression leaves out 10/11ths of the audio information in a "good" quality MP3 file, Rhodri Marsden reports in The Independent:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/you-wont-believe-your-ears-the-new-sound-revolution-880230.html
Unfortunately, the article does not compare or relate MP3 sound compression with that commonly employed in commercial recordings and broadcast-radio signals. Was some of that 10/11ths of audio gone long before it got to the new playback media? Or are we talking about compounded compression – i.e., fractions of fractions of the original sound?
