Classical Music Buzz > SymphonyNow
SymphonyNow
Presented by the League of American Orchestras
96 Entries
Sometimes it’s hard to predict how hungry a community can be for great music. This summer, Patricia Glunt, a retired New York City Public Schools music educator and resident of the richly diverse Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights, fulfilled a longtime dream by forming a new musical group, the Jackson Heights Orchestra. Six rehearsals later, on December 12, the volunteer ensemble made its debut, eighteen strong, at a packed Community United Methodist Church, performing music of Handel, Holst, and Respighi, as well as arrangements of two traditional Christmas carols with New York-based soprano Jayne Skoog as soloist. The community support [...]
5 months ago | |
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In late November, I travelled to Beijing at the invitation of the China Conservatory for a weeklong residency. It was a densely packed schedule of chamber music coaching and orchestral readings, as well as performances by the China Conservatory Orchestra. This was my fourth visit to China over the past 30 years. My first two visits, in 1983 and 1986, were multi-city tours of the country when I was associate conductor of the Long Island Youth Orchestra. In December 2011, I led the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony on a nine-city tour of China. (Two members of the Park Avenue Chamber [...]
6 months ago | |
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Discussions about an orchestra conductor’s importance and the role he or she should play never seem to go away. Part of that may be due the enduring mystery of what they do, the subtleties beneath those strange hand signals. But the debate may also stem from the way in which the conductor’s role is always changing. The debate had a flare-up last month when Montreal Symphony Associate Trumpet Russell Devuyst took Montreal Gazette reviewer Lev Bratishenko to task over an October 27 review of the orchestra. “I have rarely heard him,” Bratishenko had written of the conductor Nathan Brock, “but [...]
6 months ago | |
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Some of the biggest Broadway stars and marquee soloists have taken the stage alongside the New York Pops, but on Friday, November 9 at Carnegie Hall, the orchestra decided to feature some of its own. Music Director Steven Reineke, taking into consideration comments from patrons suggesting a night featuring just the orchestra—sans guest soloists—constructed a program of some of the most popular works from the classical canon along with a handful of pieces putting musicians of the orchestra out front-and-center. Among them were Concertmaster Cenovia Cummins, who performed Vittorio Monti’s sultry-to-fiery Csárdás, and Principal Cellist David Heiss giving a yearning [...]
6 months ago | |
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As the year 2013 approaches, the city of Boise, Idaho prepares to mark an important date in its history: the 150th anniversary of its founding. Boise Philharmonic Music Director Robert Franz, contemplating what the orchestra might do to mark the occasion, dug a bit into Idaho history to find out, “What happened here 151 years ago?” He quickly discovered that the area’s two original native peoples—the Shoshone and the Bannock tribes—had been forcibly relocated by white settlers in the 1800s from what is now Boise to Fort Hall, near the Nevada border. And thus the seeds were planted for the [...]
6 months ago | |
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Elliott Carter, a composer whose works were as applauded as they were challenging, died Monday, November 5 at the age of 103. Carter remained productive right up until very recently: in April he completed Instances, a co-commission by the Tanglewood Music Center and the Seattle Symphony that is set to premiere in February 2013. In our issue of November-December 2008, Symphony marked the iconoclast’s 100th birthday with an article by Frank J. Oteri, “The Carter Century.” We pay tribute to Carter by re-running the story here. The Carter Century Elliott Carter’s complex modernism has inspired generations of conductors, musicians, and [...]
7 months ago | |
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A comment on a recent YouTube video of a flashmob orchestra performance has touched a raw nerve. The objection wasn’t to the YouTube performance itself, which was charming—music from Star Wars performed outdoors by the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne, Germany—and can be viewed here and here. So what’s the problem? Nowadays at a “spontaneous” musical flashmob, almost no one watches the performance. Instead, bystanders are busy making video recordings of that performance. Of course, every orchestra hopes people will document these performances and share with friends. But an audience full of people all recording the performance maybe isn’t what [...]
7 months ago | |
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How can words capture the soul of a classical pianist and his relationship with the art that consumes him? Widely divergent approaches to this can be found in two new books out this fall from Colin Eatock and Jonathan Biss. Eatock looks at the legendary pianist Glenn Gould, who died in 1982 at the age of 50, from the diverse viewpoints of managers, industry professionals, journalists, friends, and fellow artists. Biss, a young American pianist currently active on the concert circuit, writes from the heart about a composer who provides special inspiration for him—Robert Schumann—and with whom he in some [...]
7 months ago | |
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Up in California’s Sonoma County this past weekend, there was a lot to see and hear during the Green Music Center’s festive opening weekend. Concerts on September 29 and 30 on the campus of Sonoma State University—by the Santa Rosa Symphony, an assortment of choral groups, pianist Lang Lang, and the country/bluegrass band Alison Krauss and Union Station—were preceded by a flurry of behind-the-scenes preparations. Final Friday-night rehearsals by the Santa Rosa Symphony reportedly lasted until 11 p.m., as acoustics were fine-tuned. Technical tweaks to the concert Steinway by pianist Lang Lang continued throughout Saturday afternoon, just a few hours [...]
8 months ago | |
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As many orchestras across the country look to streamline their operations in the face of an unsympathetic economy, one musician is actually building something from nothing: conductor and violinist Toru Tagawa, co-founder of the Arizona-based Tucson Repertory Orchestra. The greater-Tucson classical music scene appears to be thriving: the Southern Arizona Symphony is presenting new works by local composers on all five of its concerts this season; and musicians from the Tucson Symphony and University of Arizona are performing a series of concerts this weekend around the theme of immigration. This same pool of players feeds the Tucson Repertory Orchestra, which [...]
8 months ago | |
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