Symphony projects $110,000 deficit

The Richmond Symphony projects a $110,000 shortfall on an operating budget of $4.66 million in the 2009-10 fiscal year ending June 30, its board was told this week at the orchestra’s annual meeting.

In the 2008-09 fiscal year, the symphony ran a deficit of about $150,000 on a $4.75 million budget.

In the orchestra's 2009-10 season, its first at the Carpenter Theatre of Richmond CenterStage, attendance rose by 30 percent for the Altria Masterworks series and by 35 percent for the Genworth Financial Pops series. (The previous season’s Masterworks concerts were staged in three church sanctuaries, and pops concerts in the Landmark Theater.)

The new Lollipops series of concerts for children and families, also at the Carpenter Theatre, drew crowds more than three times as large as those attending the family-formatted dates of the former Kicked Back Classics series. Metro Collection concerts, featuring a chamber orchestra playing in suburban venues, saw a 6 percent rise in attendance.

The orchestra announced a new pledge of $100,000 from the Pauley Family Foundation in support of general operations and to encourage contributions to its "2010: Transformation Campaign," which seeks to attract 2,010 new donors this year. A $50,000 challenge grant from Gerald Morgan Jr. so far has attracted more than 200 new supporters, the symphony reported in a news release.

Carmen Rodriguez, corporate strategy leader with the Richmond Federal Reserve, and Joyce Clemmons, new president of the Richmond Symphony Orchestra League, were elected to the symphony board. Suzanne Franke, Carol Hoomquist, Gail Letts, Bob Mattauch, Brenda Mead and Sarosh Sukhia retired from the board.

Maureen Forrester (1930-2010)

Maureen Forrester, the esteemed Canadian mezzo-soprano, has died at the age of 79.

Famed for joshingly complaining that mezzos in opera were consigned to portraying "mothers, maids, witches and bitches," Forrester nonetheless made the most of roles such as Marcellina in Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," Erda in Wagner's "Ring" cycle and the Countess in Tchaikovsky's "Queen of Spades."

She was best-known, though, as a concert artist. In 1957 Bruno Walter selected the young, little-known Forrester to sing on his recording of Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony with the New York Philharmonic; that, and her 1959 recording of "Das Lied von der Erde" with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, established Forrester as one of the most authoritative voices in Mahler's symphonies and song cycles. She was also the mezzo/contralto of choice in a wide range of oratorio and art-song literature. Her legacy includes more than 150 recordings.

An obituary by Ken Winters in The Globe and Mail of Toronto:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/music/maureen-forrester-opera-icon-dies-at-79/article1607041/

Hope over experience?

"The triumph of hope over experience," Samuel Johnson’s quip about second marriages, could be the new courtship philosophy of orchestras in search of music directors.

This week, the venerable Philadelphia Orchestra tapped as its next maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a 35-year-old Canadian who previously had led the Philadelphians in just two programs. Nézet-Séguin has earned a lot of critical plaudits (notably for conducting a production of Bizet's "Carmen" earlier this season at the Metropolitan Opera); but up till now his principal podium has been at the Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, not the usual springboard to an orchestra of Philly's stature.

Nézet-Séguin is the latest in a succession of under-40 conductors to take over artistic direction of major orchestras in recent years.

The most stellar of the young guns, of course, is Gustavo Dudamel, 29, wrapping up his first season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Young conductors are making especially big waves at British orchestras: 33-year-old Vasily Petrenko at the Liverpool Philharmonic, 31-year-old Andris Nelsons at the City of Birmingham Symphony, 27-year-old Robin Ticciati at the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, 38-year-old Vladimir Jurowski at the London Philharmonic. Other highly touted young Brits have recently taken over orchestras across the Channel: 34-year-old Daniel Harding at the Swedish Radio Symphony, 38-year-old Karel Mark Chicon at the German Radio Philharmonic Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern.

Alan Gilbert, completing his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, barely missed the under-40 cut when he secured that appointment. Another New Yorker, James Gaffigan, who turns 31 this year, has been named conductor at the Lucerne Philharmonic in Switzerland and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. Stéphane Denève, a 38-year-old Frenchman, is taking over the Stuttgart Radio Symphony.

Winner of the youthful-conductor sweepstakes – so far – is Alexander Prior, a 17-year-old Brit who scored a conducting fellowship with the Seattle Symphony.

Young classical musicians generally are rising faster – and ever-younger – these days, and the emergence of youthful conductors is accelerating naturally as illness sidelines some elders (James Levine, Seiji Ozawa) and advancing age has led others (Claudio Abbado, Kurt Masur, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink, Pierre Boulez, Charles Mackerras) to cut back on their commitments or go into near-retirement. (Lorin Maazel is the exception: At 80, he stepped down from the New York Philharmonic, and promptly launched a music festival at Castleton, his estate in Rappahannock County, VA, and took over orchestras in Munich and Valencia, Spain.)

As music-director vacancies open at major U.S. orchestras – Seattle, Cincinnati, Boston if Levine doesn’t recover – the grapevine of critics and patrons is buzzing with talk of renewing vitality with youthful leadership. Nézet-Séguin’s Philadelphia appointment surely will amplify such talk.

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Buzz notwithstanding, many orchestras have resisted joining the maestro youth cult.

The Chicago Symphony’s incoming music director is Riccardo Muti, who turns 69 next month. Christoph Eschenbach, 70, begins his first season as music director of Washington’s National Symphony in the fall. Edo de Waart, 69, and Leonard Slatkin, 65, are wrapping up their second seasons as music directors of the Milwaukee and Detroit symphonies, respectively.

Other major U.S. orchestras naming new music directors over the past decade have opted for middle-aged maestros with lengthy resumés: Osmo Vänskä in Minnesota, Manfred Honeck in Pittsburgh, Hans Graf in Houston, Jaap van Sweden in Dallas, Grant Llewellyn in North Carolina. Marin Alsop’s appointment in Baltimore four years ago sparked some sniping about supposed inexperience; but she was 50 years old and had been music director of five orchestras.

The music-director finalists auditioned by the Richmond Symphony over the past two seasons were markedly older than the conductors who vied for the post in the previous two rounds. The orchestra selected Steven Smith, who at 50 is its oldest incoming maestro since its founding conductor, Edgar Schenkman.

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Maturity doesn’t necessarily equate with musically conservative inclination. Smith, who is an active composer and well-known advocate of contemporary music, could turn out to be 50-going-on-30 in his programming practices – as Alsop proved to be in Baltimore.

Smith’s best-known predecessor in Richmond, George Manahan, turns 60 this year. This old-timer is music director of the New York City Opera, a company long known for staging modern and contemporary works, and is set to take over the American Composers Orchestra, the premier new-music orchestra in this country.

Muti, who is among the oldest fully active first-tier elders, marked his appointment in Chicago by naming two young composers, Richmond-bred Mason Bates and the English-born New Yorker Anna Clyne, as co-curators of a new contemporary music series. Slatkin, Vänskä, Michael Tilson Thomas, Simon Rattle and other gray-hairs are also active proponents of modern and contemporary music and active users of new media and new spaces for presenting it.

Passing the baton to a young conductor is not the only way, nor necessarily the best way, to propel an orchestra into the future.

Ernest Fleischmann (1924-2010)

Ernest Fleischmann, the German-émigré musician who turned from performing to artistic management, revitalizing the London Symphony in the 1960s and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a three-decade tenure (1969-98), died on June 13.

In Los Angeles, Fleischmann was responsible for the hiring of Carlo Maria Giulini, André Previn and Esa-Pekka Salonen as music directors (he also had a hand in bringing Gustavo Dudamel to LA), the construction of Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, initiation of the orchestra's Green Umbrella contemporary music series, and the physical and artistic upgrading of the Hollywood Bowl.

An obituary by Claudia Luther for the Los Angeles Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-ernest-fleischmann-20100615,0,26655,full.story

Street piano

Last year, artist Luke Jerram "installed" 30 pianos on the streets of London, inviting passersby to play them. Now, Sing for Hope, a program that places performers in schools, has rounded up and decorated 60 pianos for a "Play Me, I'm Yours" project on the streets of New York. They will be ready to play on June 21, The New York Times' James Barron reports:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/pianos-as-public-art-and-the-publics-playthings/?hp

Philly taps YNS

The 35-year-old Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin – pronounced Yah-NEEK Neh-ZAY Say-GUN, popularly known as YNS – will be the next music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He will take over from the current chief conductor, Charles Dutoit, in 2012, with an initial contract running until 2017, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Peter Dobrin reports:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20100613_In_a_bold_return_to_previous_eras_of_youthful_leadership__NO_HEAD_SPECIFIED.html?cmpid=41144277

Nézet-Séguin, currently principal conductor and artistic director of Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal and chief conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, is widely considered one of the rising stars of the under-40 generation of conductors.

Engaging ears with eyes

Modern and contemporary works may rub listeners the wrong way in concerts, but they thrive in dance programs, as The New York Times' Anthony Tommasini notes in surveying the repertory – featuring scores of Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès, Jay Greenberg and other living composers – in the Architecture of Dance festival of the New York City Ballet:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/arts/music/13martins.html?src=un&feedurl=http://json8.nytimes.com/pages/arts/music/index.jsonp&pagewanted=all

A similar story could be told with film music. From Carl Stalling and Bernard Herrmann to John Corigliano and Philip Glass, modern composers' harmonically, structurally or otherwise innovative music, likely to baffle concert audiences, immediately connects with moviegoers because it complements a visual element.

This has not gone unnoticed by contemporary music composers, performers and presenters. It's no coincidence that so much "alt-classical" repertory has a visual or theatrical element.

And it's not a recent phenomenon. Such seminal works of 20th-century modernism as Richard Strauss' "Salome" and "Elektra," Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" and Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloé" – and, for that matter, Wagner's proto-modernist 19th-century scores – were composed for the theater.

When challenging the ears, it helps to engage the eyes.