Resonate

Percussionist Evelyn Glennie — or rather, Dame Evelyn Glennie — is spending the week in residency in Winston-Salem, N.C., where she will be performing and giving master classes at Wake Forest University.

As far as the percussion community knows, Glennie is the only classical percussionist in the Western Hemisphere that is actually a “full-time” performer: All the other percussionists have to teach or have another job to sustain themselves financially. She also is the only classical percussionist who performs regularly on network television and who has a film about her “Touch the Sound,” available at every Blockbuster.  

Perhaps she has become so well-known because she is deaf. She lost her hearing when she was 12 years old.

Glennie always performs barefoot because she says it helps her feel the music’s vibrations. She has a very particular, aggresive, almost harsh tone when she plays instruments such as the marimba, and some percussionists attribute her sound to her hearing impairment.

Glennie created a busy schedule  for herself this week in North Carolina. She presented a master class on Saturday with students from Wake Forest, Elon College and North Carolina School of the Arts (my high school alma mater). On Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday she will be the featured soloist with the Winston-Salem Symphony. She is performing Joseph Schwantner’s “Percussion Concerto,” which Glennie commissioned. (The Schwantner concerto is pretty fascinating. It involves a huge amount of percussion instruments, and features the soloist on the marimba and the shekere.)

Glennie has made an undeniable contribution to contemporary classical percussion both in her effort to commission new works for percussion — she has commissioned more than 140 pieces — and in exposing percussion to a more mainstream audience. 

(Photo courtesy of Christopher McNulty)

Opera singer Anna Netrebko is pregnant. The Russian-born soprano has withdrawn from her engagement this summer with the Salzburg Festival, where she was to star as the title role in Gounod’s “Romeo et Juliette.” The Metropolitan Opera said Netrebko has also canceled her 10 October performances of “Lucia di Lammermoor” with the Met.

Netrebko’s manager, Jeffrey Vanderveen, said Netrebko “will keep her engagements as long as her doctors permit it.” It is still undecided whether the rest of her engagements for late 2008 and early 2009 will happen as planned.

A European tabloid, Oesterreich, reported Wednesday that Netrebko would “soon” wed her fiance, Uruguayan-born baritone Erwin Schrott.

Netrebko, who has gained an international reputation for her extensive and varying performances with both opera companies and symphony orchestras, was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2007.

You may leave general comments for me here, considering that my “tell me what you think” page is not up and running yet.

It’s not every day that a new orchestra pops up in this country, which is why I couldn’t help but get excited this morning when I learned that the Concert Association of Florida is creating a new ensemble called the Florida Symphony.

The symphony will perform in Miami and Broward, at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts and at Miami’s newly named Adrienne Arsht Center. The musicians will also perform as a pops group called the Miami Pops Orchestra.

The association said an in-house orchestra in Broward was necessary because people cited the lack of full-orchestra concerts as the reason they don’t subscribe to the hall’s subscription series.

For the orchestra’s first season, 2008-2009, three men will temporarily share the conducting podium: Jose Antonio Molina, Thomas Sanderling and Steven Mercurio.

American-Chinese conductor Xian Zhang received a lot of attention this week thanks to an article in The New York Times.

On Sunday, Zhang conducted the Orchestra of St. Luke in her professional premiere at Carnegie Hall.

Zhang has become well-known after being appointed associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic by its music director, Lorin Maazel, in 2004. Despite the impressive title, Zhang is not scheduled to conduct the New York Phil again until the 2009-2010 season.

That’s ok, though. She has plenty to keep her busy. Her upcoming schedule includes performances with the Frankfurt Opera in Germany, plus the Houston Symphony, National Symphony, Toronto Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Zhang told The New York Times that although she doesn’t experience overt sexism, she knows that people treat her differently as a woman conductor:

     “If a conductor messes up in a rehearsal, if he or she makes a mistake, it would be absolutely OK for a man to walk into the next rehearsal and just correct himself, and everything goes on,” she said. “If this is a woman, people would start saying it happened because she is a woman, or something like that. People tend to be harsher on women in their work.” 

Avant-garde Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki conducted the Polish Orchestra and Chorus of the National Opera in the European premiere of his new work, Symphony No. 8, on Friday. Polish soprano Olga Pasiecznik and mezzo Agnieszka Relis performed the work’s sung solos.

The symphony, also called “Lieder der Verganglichkeit” (Songs of Transcience), is a cycle of nine songs with text by German writers such as Goethe and Rainer Maria Rilke. Penderecki has said he will continue to add movements to the symphony. 

The first recording of the symphony, performed by the Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, made its debut last week on the Naxos label. So far the critics like the recording, noting Penderecki’s move to a more Romantic-influenced style of composition.

Also this week, Penderecki’s 2005 “Capricioso” album became the first all-Polish album to win a Midem festival award in Cannes, France. The album features violinist Patrycja Piekutowska and pianist Beata Bilinska.

Marin Alsop will lead the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra  in her Carnegie Hall premiere next Saturday night. Well, it is sort of her Carnegie premiere.

Alsop used to play violin with various ensembles at Carnegie Hall on a regular basis. This is merely her first time conducting in the esteemed venue.

The concert will feature a percussion concerto by Steven Mackey called Time Release. Up-and-coming Scottish percussionist Colin Currie will be the soloist.

But Alsop and the BSO have something else of interest on their calendar this month. On the last weekend in February, Alsop will lead the orchestra in an unconventional concert called “CSI Beethoven,” which will explore the effects of Beethoven’s deafness with the help of forensic scientists and medical specialists. The orchestra will perform sections of each of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, split between two nights’ concerts. One of the doctors has even created samples of what the music might have sounded like to Beethoven.

It’s not uncommon for a major American orchestra to travel to a foreign country and act as a musical ambassador (i.e. the New York Philharmonic performing in North Korea this month).  

It is unusual, however, to have an intranational residency. The Cleveland Orchestra has residencies in Vienna and in Lucerne, Switzerland, but the orchestra must also enjoy escaping the Midwestern winter to spent time in southern Florida.

The Cleveland Orchestra wrapped up a two-week residency in Miami with a concert on Saturday night featuring pianist Radu Lupu.

This is the orchestra’s second year of a planned 10-year residency in the city. Similar to last year, the orchestra will return to Miami for a week in late March for another round of performances. On March 28 and 29, violin virtuoso Midori will join the orchestra to perform Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.

During their time in Miami, the orchestra members gave performances and taught workshops for the University of Miami, Miami-Dade public schools and for the Miami-based professional training orchestra New World Symphony. Several musicians also gave recitals, performed at a local temple and even ran the Miami Marathon.

The orchestra’s visit to Miami comes only weeks after the city’s year-old performing arts center was renamed the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. The name-change was prompted by a $30 million donation from Arsht, the former chairwoman of TotalBank. It should be interesting to see what the center will do with its new funding.

Greg Sandow, a former music critic for The Wall Street Journal and Entertainment weekly, blogs about the future of classical music. In his most recent posting, he discusses a “hidden cost of classical music.” 

Sandow says that people don’t realize that a well-respected pop musician such as Ani DiFranco doesn’t need to attend music school so that she can fill a venue, whereas a musician has to invest in her craft, paying for years of lessons and schooling.

Is this true? I just assumed that people knew we were trained.

Sandow’s post sparked a conversation about whether pop musicians can attract a larger crowd than an orchestra because the pop artists will generally only appear once a year in a given city. Meanwhile, orchestras assume there is a general demand to hear them play every week or so.

As Sandow suggests, demand is the important factor in determining how many concerts to give. Subscriptions — typically purchased by an aging audience – for orchestras have declined, and now it is time to think about how to attract a younger audience without dumbing down the performance. Perhaps orchestras should copy the North Carolina Symphony’s subscription series targeting people under 35 years old as a way to fill the concert hall.

A lawsuit filed by a violinist against the Seattle Symphony claiming emotional distress caused by the orchestra’s music director was dismissed by a judge on Friday.

Violinist Peter Kaman claimed that he had endured “emotional distress arising out of hostile environment and harassment … over a long and extended period of time” in the lawsuit, which was filed two years ago.

Kaman says music director Gerard Schwarz targeted him because he has an anxiety disorder, which by law is considered to be a disability. He said Schwarz was making a long-term attempt to have him fired.

Kaman claimed — and had 30 of the orchestra’s 88 musicians ready to testify about it — that Schwarz verbally attacked him for talking during rehearsals and slumping in his chair, as well as threatening to fire him.

Many of the musicians said they don’t like Schwarz, and several of the principal players in the orchestra have quit or been fired after disagreements with him. The assistant concertmaster told The New York Times:

”It’s a bully atmosphere,” John Weller, the acting associate concertmaster, said in an interview echoing his declaration. ”We’re sitting there with a sledgehammer over our heads. There’s no music or inspiration coming from him to nurture us or show us the way.”

A conductor’s verbal abuse of musicians is nothing new, nor is the conductor’s choice to hold a grudge against certain members of the orchestra. The treatment probably would be unacceptable if it were a boss harassing his employee in any profession outside the arts. But as musicians, how can we protect ourselves if we can’t sue?

One of the worst experiences I’ve had was working under a guest conductor at Sewanee Summer Music Festival. Whereas he learned the mens’ names and treated them politely when they erred, he would scream at any woman who made a mistake. When I realized that no one — namely, the orchestra administration — was going to do anything about his hostility, I felt trapped.

What can a musician do? She can warn others to stay away from particularly abusive conductors.

Kaman plans to appeal the judge’s dismissal, so we’ll have to see what comes next.