Category: music

Henry Cowell “was a prolific composer whose own music was eclipsed by the works of his students.” The director of a San Francisco organization that’s celebrating him this week “discovered Cowell through the pioneering percussion music of the composer’s famous pupils John Cage and Lou Harrison.”

There’s been nary a note of professional opera in Orange County since Opera Pacific closed a year ago, and there’s none on the horizon but a single performance of a single-soprano piece by the Long Beach Opera next May. But a group of boosters is working to end the drought, with imports first and maybe resident productions later.

The world premiere of the piece, by the Atlanta Symphony, was first planned for summer 2008 and has just been postponed for the third time. Marsalis “keeps missing his deadline. Two of the planned seven movements are completed and playable. Two more are in rough draft form. The rest is still in Marsalis’ head.”

“He’s back in America with his doctors and they’ve said, ‘Go rest and come back at the end of November and we’ll do a check-up’,” said the maestro’s manager. Slatkin, music director of the Detroit Symphony, has been out of commission since suffering a heart attack on Nov. 1 after conducting the Rotterdam Philharmonic.

Anne Midgette: “The main problem is that both fields seem to be incapable of coming up with an actual new business model, in part because both fields are so deeply invested in their own traditions that they tend to confuse those traditions with their function.”

The Honolulu Symphony announced last week “that it will file for Chapter 11 reorganization and must cut its payroll by as much as half,” but patrons aren’t clamoring to get their money back for canceled November and December concerts, or for the uncertain remainder of the 2009-10 season.

Mona Webster, a retired civil servant from Edinburgh who died in August at age 96, has left nearly half of her wealth – £4.5 million – to the Metropolitan Opera. (Most of the rest went to the UK’s Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust.)

Incoming Chicago Symphony music director Riccardo Muti is named Musician of the Year, with mezzo Elina Garanca as Vocalist, Louis Andriessen as Composer, and Joshua Bell as Instrumentalist. A special award for Collaborative Pianist goes to vocal recital specialist Warren Jones.

And what’s No. 1? King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, for what it’s worth, followed by the complete Bessie Smith, but the list is strictly chronological, not ranked. The dates range from 1923 to 2009; in a telling detail, fully one-third of the titles have been deleted from the catalogs.

“If you were part of a poor family–mainly in Italy but here and there around Europe–and you had a son with a glimmer of musical talent, it was off to the chop shop. As a young chorister, Joseph Haydn narrowly escaped it. Barbers in Naples hung a sign: ‘Boys castrated cheap here.'”