Unhitching wagons from stars

Facing recession-driven budgetary strains, the Minnesota Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony and other orchestras are economizing by canceling the appearances of costly guest stars. Hampton Roads' financially troubled Virginia Symphony is increasingly turning to its principal players as concerto soloists; other ensembles, including some major orchestras, look to be doing the same.

The Richmond Symphony anticipated this trend some 20 years ago after it found that paying high fees to guest soloists didn't boost concert attendance. Now the orchestra is dipping its toes back into the stellar talent pool, bringing in pianists Jeremy Denk and Jon Nakamatsu, violinist Gil Shaham and jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval this season. Chalk that up to its return to the Carpenter Theatre, where it can accommodate piano soloists and play to large crowds for the first time in five seasons, and to increases in its ticket prices and the potential challenge of drawing suburbanites to a downtown concert hall.

The best-known classical instrumentalists and singers have routinely commanded fees in the high five figures, even nudging into six figures, for a one-night stand playing a concerto or singing some arias. A few, such as Emanuel Ax, have reduced or forgone their fees when performing with cash-strapped orchestras. But international-grade soloists continue to be paid generously, even lavishly (at least by classical standards), thanks in large part to the willingness of state-subsidized orchestras and music festivals in Europe and East Asia and their well-heeled clienteles to pay big money for big names.

This is about celebrity, not artistry. There are dozens of cellists who can play Dvořák or Elgar as well as Yo-Yo Ma, dozens of sopranos who can sing Richard Strauss as well as Renée Fleming, probably hundreds of pianists who can play Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff as well as Evgeny Kissin or Lang Lang. Truly singular artistry – András Schiff playing the Beethoven piano sonatas, for example – is quite rare, and often doesn't correspond with the size of the artist's paycheck.

Many of Ma's high-profile engagements in recent years have been devoted to appearing with his Silk Road Ensemble, playing music from Asian cultures previously unknown to Western listeners, and to introducing works that he commissioned. If resistance to high-dollar solo engagements outlasts the economic downturn, might we see more big names not replaying the warhorses but presenting new or neglected music that they uniquely perform?

Sound check

With the Carpenter Theatre, the main venue of the Richmond CenterStage performing-arts complex, set to open in two weeks, the project’s acoustical consultants and a revolving cast of local musicians have spent this week conducting sound checks in the renovated theater. I sat in on two of these sessions, as members of the Richmond Symphony, the Richmond Symphony Youth Orchestra, the Richmond Philharmonic and the Richmond Symphony Chorus performed excerpts of Beethoven’s First Symphony and Handel’s "Messiah."

The sound was, to my ears, more brightly resonant, more transparent in musical texture and more consistent from one seating area to another than the sound heard in this hall prior to its acoustical upgrading.

Important qualifiers: I was listening in a nearly empty auditorium, without the sound-cushioning effect of bodies filling seats; the orchestral forces were minimal (just three violinists showed up for the run-through of the Beethoven); and, in any event, these test pieces are not thickly textured music.

Several wind players remarked that the sound onstage was "hot," or quite loud, although Rolla Durham, the symphony’s principal trumpeter, said he heard more warmth than in the past. In both the Beethoven and Handel, most of the instrumentalists were playing on the section of the stage that thrusts into the auditorium. (This section is lowered for theatrical productions to form the orchestra pit.) The back line of winds played directly under the proscenium arch. The chorus sang behind the proscenium, within a new orchestra shell that is narrower and deeper than the old shell.

A set of "clouds" – acoustical panels suspended overhead, at roughly the same level as the top of the proscenium – reflect sound back to the stage and outward into the auditorium. Other sound reflectors are built into the walls of the theater, notably in the formerly dead-sounding space under the balcony. The floor under orchestra-level seats has been adjusted to reduce the height difference between the stage and seats in the front rows and to create more space (or at least the sensation of more space) between the overhanging balcony and the seats underneath.

The acousticians have installed an extensive amplification system. Some of it is to be used only for amplified pop-music events, but other components can be employed to enhance and regularize volume of unamplified music as it reaches more distant seats in the upper balconies.

I was moving around the hall, not looking over the technicians’ shoulders, during these sound checks, so I can’t say which components were turned on or off at which times. I can say that whatever sound enhancement was in use wasn’t obvious and didn’t sound artificial.

Some of the sonic difference can be traced to visual perception: The stage floor, which was painted black, is now blond wood, and the stage lighting is brighter. The walls are freshly painted, and 20 years’ worth of dust and grime have been cleaned away. "You’d be amazed how much the absence of dirt affects sound," observed Mark Holden of JaffeHolden, the project’s acoustical consultant.

Physical comfort plays a role, too – more leg room in balcony seats and more aisle space reduce the claustrophobic sensation that affected the listening experience in much of the old hall.

The bright sound that came off the stage in these sound checks at times bordered on the chilly or brittle, especially when the winds played loudly or the chorus sang at full volume. Holden didn’t seem too worried by that. "If things sound ideal in an empty hall, I would be worried," he said. (During these sessions, he was especially attentive to the sound of cellos and double-basses.)

The acousticians will continue to check their systems during performances for much of the theater’s opening season. The true sound of the space probably won’t be known until midwinter, when patrons turn up with sound-deadening overcoats.

Digital music, c. 1500

A sequence of O's, I's and II's, which could be a musical score, has been found on a 16th-century wood medallion at Stirling Castle in Scotland. A harpist is at work trying to decipher the tune, the BBC reports:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/8222727.stm

Review: Richmond Chamber Players

Aug. 23, Bon Air Presbyterian Church

In the finale of the Richmond Chamber Players’ Interlude 2009 series, George Manahan, the former music director of the Richmond Symphony, now music director of the New York City Opera, returned to town to join John Walter, the troupe’s artistic director, in Bela Bartók’s Sonata (1937) for two pianos and percussion. They played to a very full house, likely the largest crowd the Chamber Players have drawn in three summers at Bon Air Presbyterian Church.

Bartók may not be a doorbuster in Richmond, but Manahan performing Bartók has been, to judge from the turnouts here and when he conducted the symphony in the composer’s Concerto for Orchestra last year.

This was possibly the tardiest makeup date in Richmond’s musical history. Manahan and Walter played the Bartók sonata in February 1996 symphony concerts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Hardly anyone heard them, as the dates coincided with a "wintry mix" that frosted local roads with ice. I remember thinking at the time that this music was perfectly suited to an ice storm, both in its chilly sonorities and reinforcement of hazardous-driving anxiety.

The pianists, with percussionists James Jacobson (also an alumnus of the 1996 gig) and Montgomery Hatch of the City Opera Orchestra, didn’t really dispel Bartók’s chill – the piece’s body temperature is set by bright, often blunt, piano lines and high-frequency percussion instruments such as xylophone and cymbals; but their performance displayed the work’s wide range of cool colors in vivid detail. Played in this intimate space, with the percussion elevated, the sonata sounded huge and muscular. The frost melted nicely in the final movement, a rhythmically complex mosaic evoking Hungarian and other Balkan dances.

Flutist Mary Boodell, violinist Catherine Cary and violist Stephen Schmidt opened the program in Beethoven’s Serenade in D major (1801), a breezily Haydnesque piece with a few hints of the Beethoven to come in slow or lyrical passages (including an andante one of whose variations more than vaguely pre-echoes the "Pathétique" Sonata). The musicians, who played standing, brought a light touch and gratifying technique to the serenade’s fast figures; Boodell was especially soulful in the flute-led variation of the andante.

Mendelssohn, whose 200th anniversary the group has been marking in these concerts, was represented here in the String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80, written while the composer was mourning his sister, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, and finished a few months before his own death in 1847. That back story and the F minor key signature suggest a work of passion and gravity – and so it is, although its musical content rarely lives up to its mood and atmospherics.

Violinists Susy Yim and Catherine Cary, violist Schmidt and cellist Neal Cary played the Mendelssohn as big, serious music, but without much polish and with snatches of iffy intonation.

More Vivaldi

In The New York Times, Matthew Gurewitsch recalls the old quip that Antonio Vivaldi didn't write hundreds of concertos, but the same concerto hundreds of times – apparently coined by Luigi Dallapiccola and subsequently repeated by Igor Stravinsky.

Exploration of the archives at the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino in Turin, Italy, suggests that there are many more works by Vivaldi awaiting rediscovery:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/arts/music/23gure.html?ref=music

Only in England (let's hope)

The "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is played on 1,000 ukuleles at the Royal Albert Hall, Jack Malvern reports in The Times of London:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/proms/article6802537.ece

Staph killed Mozart?

Stephen Adams of Britain's Telegraph reports on the latest theory on the cause of Mozart's death on Dec. 5, 1791. Dutch researchers note that his symptoms conform to those of MRSA – more commonly known as Staphylococcus aureus – a bacterial infection widespread in Vienna at the time:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/6042515/Mozart-was-killed-by-superbug-like-MRSA.html