“San Francisco Symphony patrons who watch the stage of Davies Symphony Hall carefully are seeing a welcome sight this month. William Bennett, the orchestra’s principal oboist, is back in action after a bout of tonsil cancer. Bennett was diagnosed in September, just before Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and the orchestra made their live recording of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. He kept mum until the recording sessions were over, not wanting to distract anyone from the task at hand, then went in for surgery followed by a punishing course of radiation and chemotherapy. Today, the tumors are gone, and Bennett, 49, is back where he belongs.”
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China’s Next Generation Of Classical Stars
As China becomes an ever-more-important player on the world stage, the clash between its relatively closed and controlled Communist society and its desire to compete with Western countries on every front possible is leading to some incongruous situations. Case in point: the rise of China’s stable of young classical musicians, bred almost from birth to be the next generation of superstars. On the one hand, the cultural push is giving rise to some phenomenal talents who might otherwise never have had the opportunity to learn the musical craft. On the other hand, some Europeans have been dismayed by the Chinese approach, claiming that children deprived of a normal childhood in favor of intense study in a single area will not grow into well-rounded musicians.
Marin Makes Peace
Before signing her contract as the Baltimore Symphony’s next music director, Marin Alsop spent some time with the orchestra’s musicians in an attempt to put aside any hard feelings and articulate her artistic vision for the ensemble. The musicians, in return, assured Alsop that they would “always give [her] 110%.” Meanwhile, various BSO board members have begun to publicly explain their decision to appoint a music director opposed by 90% of the orchestra’s players, and Alsop herself has described the controversy, which seems to have been about principle as much as personality, as “a warning light about other issues the musicians have that need to be addressed.”
No One Won This Dust-Up
Richard Dyer says that there’s plenty of blame to go around in the Baltimore mess. “At this point, no one should be patting themselves on the back except perhaps Alsop, the innocent bystander/victim in an ugly management-vs.-musician conflict. The management and board should never have let the news out before it had all the ducks lined up. And once the announcement was made, the players should not have made a public issue of their dissatisfaction. What possible purpose could this serve?”
SF Opera Chief Heads To Berlin
“San Francisco Opera General Director Pamela Rosenberg will return to Germany next year to become intendant, or administrative director, of the Berlin Philharmonic. In making the move, Rosenberg, 60, whose term at the Opera ends Dec. 31, will be going back to the country that has been her home and base of operations for most of her career. Although she was born and raised in California, her children and grandchildren live in Germany… Rosenberg’s appointment in Berlin comes as a surprise. She has little or no experience in the orchestral world, having spent her career in opera. And for an administrator who has always taken a hands-on role in artistic decisions, Rosenberg’s new job will involve a much higher degree of fund raising and financial oversight.”
Inside The Lines
The tourists who pack Broadway shows seem, unaccountably, to have developed a new habit of standing in line outside the theatre they’re waiting to enter, when they could just as easily walk right up to the door and walk to their $100 reserved seat anytime they please. No one seems to know why they do it, and no native New Yorkers seem especially eager to point out that the big line o’ tourists isn’t strictly necessary. “There was no rational reason to stand in line. Had security lines at airports inured people to standing around, waiting to shed their shoes? Or had Americans since 9/11 come to see lining up as a sign of good citizenry, and a rejection of unseemly anarchy?”
Why Don’t We Value Talent?
“Nowadays, if someone is vastly more talented than us, we don’t congratulate them – we envy them and resent their success. It seems we don’t want heroes we can admire, so much as heroes we can identify with. We want to think we could be like them, and so we make sure to select heroes that are like us. This is the real reason for the astonishing rise of reality TV. We allow halfwits to become celebrities precisely because there is no great gap separating them from us. We can’t bear the idea that some people might be better than us, so much better that we could never be like them, no matter how hard we tried. That upsets our democratic ethos, our belief that all people are born equal. But raw talent is not distributed equally…
A Backlash Against Hip?
“Just what is hip has become nebulous in a digital age of microtrends, when a cultural blip goes from underground to overexposed in one season. Likewise, the original concept of hip as something outside the purview of the mainstream has been replaced by the hipstream: mainstream cool packaged by corporate marketing departments. The inevitable backlash — not against the bohemian veritas but the sycophantic consumer of cool — is well underway.”
A Powerhouse Principal
Svetlana Zakharova, now 26 and a principal dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, based in Moscow, is a remarkable onstage force. For seven years, Ms. Zakharova was the brilliant young face of the Kirov Ballet, in St. Petersburg, where she spent one year in the corps before being promoted to principal dancer; in 2003, she surprised the dance world by defecting to the Bolshoi.”
Royal Opera House To Vilar: Pay Up! (Or Else)
London’s Royal Opera House has given troubled philanthropist Alberto Vilar 60 days to pay up on his £10 million pledge, or else. Or else what? The ROH isn’t saying if they’ll take Vilar’s name off its building. “The 1999 agreement allows the Royal Opera House to give Mr Vilar notice in writing that, by not making the payments he has committed a material breach of that contract. If he does not resume making payments by the end of a 60-day period specified in the agreement, the ROH will then be entitled to notify Mr Vilar that the agreement is terminated.”