Category: music

Last September, James Undercofler announced that he’d be stepping down at the end of this season. Instead, he left abrupt this week. The new interim CEO, a retired financial executive, will have to deal with the current economic tumult, searches for a permanent chief executive and a new music director, and what one board member reportedly describes as a “chaotic” atmosphere in the administrative offices.

Critics will be flocking to Cardiff next season to hear two of the world’s top baritones trying out touchstones of the repertoire: Local hero Bryn Terfel will sing his first Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Meistersinger, and Simon Keenlyside will take on Verdi’s Rigoletto.

The 32-year-old Lisbon native, who is a former assistant conductor at the L.A. Philharmonic and a close associate of composer John Adams (a Berkeley resident), succeeds Kent Nagano, who stayed with the Berkeley Symphony for 30 years, even as his international career soared. Carneiro will also keep her current job as principal guest conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in her hometown.

“The state of Berlin appointed Peter Raddatz as director of the city’s opera foundation, an umbrella organization overseeing three opera companies, a ballet ensemble and a set- and costume-design company.”

In a rough Edinburgh housing estate, Scotland has launched a pilot version of Venezuela’s now-famous music education program. The hope is that sustained attention from teachers and a stable community of fellow students can help pull the estate’s young people from an unrelenting cycle of poverty and social problems.

“Conductor Roberto Paternostro has been appointed musical adviser to the Israel Chamber Orchestra, effective immediately. He will take responsibility for the music, the musical makeup of the orchestra, foreign tours and fund-raising… Additionally, noted violinist and baroque instrumentalist Elizabeth Wallfisch has been appointed to head the orchestra’s baroque programming.”

The Sydney Morning Herald‘s Richard Jinman offers a journal (that’s like a blog, kids, but all in one entry and printed on dead trees) on his stint as a supernumerary in Opera Australia’s Cavalleria rusticana.

Nat Hentoff argues that a Kennedy Center inauguration celebration’s “focus on jazz as well as President-elect Barack Obama (who, I’m told, has John Coltrane on his iPod) should help make Americans, including our historians, aware of the largely untold story of the key role of jazz in helping to shape and quicken the arrival of the civil-rights movement.”

A look at (and listen to) a new oral history of the Lone Star version of the blues, a style that’s “lighter, more fluid, more eclectic than Delta blues. From the start, it contained bits of country, gospel, jazz, Tejano and zydeco.”

“The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra laid off five of its 67 administrative employees and changed one full-time position to part-time today in an effort to reduce expenditures. Those moves, along with a decision not to fill select staff positions, will save the BSO about $500,000.”