Category: music

It’s not unusual for audiences at orchestral concerts to accidentally disrupt the performance with a burst of applause, thinking that a piece has ended before it actually has. But last week, outgoing Detroit Symphony music director Neeme Jarvi created his own disruption, to the astonishment of many in attendance. Following the breathless conclusion of Carl Nielson’s powerful Fifth Symphony, “with his back still to the house, [Jarvi] raised his baton once more, called over his shoulder ‘Encore!’ and proceeded straight into a rather banal waltz by Shostakovich… Jarvi loves to do encores. But this was nuts.” The incident left Lawrence Johnson wondering if Jarvi’s fragile health has begun to affect his judgment.

Finnish conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste has been tapped to succeed Andre Previn as chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic. The ensemble has frequently been regarded as being among the finest in Europe, and Saraste’s task will be to raise it to the heights it enjoyed under the 20-year directorship of Mariss Jansons. Saraste’s contract calls for him to spend 10 weeks each year in Oslo conducting concerts, plus additional weeks spent touring and recording with the orchestra.

A long-lost Adagio written by Beethoven is getting a performance. “Beethoven likely wrote the draft in Vienna in the 1790s, when he was in his 20s. It was found among bundles of his sketches and drafts in the British Library and published in 1970. Beethoven titled his draft “Concerto in A for Piano,” with brief indications for other instruments.”

Next month, conductor Roger Norrington will stage a recreation of Felix Mendelssohn’s famous 1829 performance of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, which many scholars consider to have been the catalyst for the widespread 19th-century revival of Bach’s music. But fans of the famous choral work may be shocked by what they hear: “Huge numbers of the meditative arias and chorales have gone. The story line is there, but I suppose [Mendelssohn] thought people just couldn’t handle four hours, three-and-a-half hours, or whatever it is.”

The St. Louis Symphony has canceled another round of auditions – for principal and associate principal cello – as the ensemble’s nearly month-old work stoppage drags on. “Throughout the past several weeks, the SLSO musicians have claimed that in order to attract the best of the best world class talent they need to keep pace with what their peer orchestras pay. The SLSO management claims this isn’t the case and the organization will be able to attract the same level of musicians they always have, even with a lower pay scale. The… cello audition cancellations may be the first real test of that philosophy.”

“The St. Louis Symphony has named Jeremy Geffen, artistic administrator of the New York Philharmonic since 2000, as its own vice president for artistic administration… Geffen replaces Kathleen van Bergen, who succeeded Simon Woods in a similar position at the Philadelphia Orchestra last fall, after Woods was named president of the New Jersey Symphony.”

At bars and dance clubs, customers are bringing in their iPods, plugging in to the clubs’ sound systems and playing to the crowd. In one club, “on a typical night, about 10 people bring their iPods loaded with a special playlist for the occasion. They sign up, wait for their turn and then plug into the Tonic Room’s sound system. They have 15 minutes to wow other customers or simply soothe their own souls.”

Elvis Costello on his opera about the life of Hans Christian Anderson: “The 50-year-old singer-songwriter has consistently expressed his unwillingness to be remembered for “a handful of songs I wrote 25 years ago. All the music comes out of the same head. It’s just using different methods to get at the solution to whatever motivated you to write it in the first place.”

Leonard Bernstein’s absence looms over classical music and its current dilemma: superstar conductors and dwindling receipts, “crossover” CDs and spiraling sales, and the ongoing burnout between academic composers and listeners. When Bernstein began his Young People’s Concerts in early 1958, classical culture was different in ways he changed irrevocably: the concert tradition was “high culture” filtered through Europeans like Toscanini, targeted at an educated elite, and orchestras were the province of elderly white men. How quaint that all feels today…

“Jay Greenberg is a child prodigy studying at the Juilliard School in New York City. Some of his professors claim he is the greatest composing talent in more than 200 years. He is composing his fifth symphony. He has about 150 fully orchestrated pieces on his hard drive and a further 300 completed works on manuscript paper.”