The much-anticipated new book by the eminent musicologist and artistic programming genius Elena Dubinets has just been published: Russian Composers Abroad: How They Left, Stayed, Returned. I had the honor of contributing one of the cover blurbs for this study of a century of Russian émigré composers (especially from the 1970s on) and diasporic identities.
As Vice President of Artistic Planning and Creative Projects for Seattle Symphony, Elena Dubinets not only played a decisive role in shaping that institution — its international profile grew significantly under her tenure — but left a mark the American orchestral field generally.
To Seattle’s loss, Dubinets left the SSO just before the pandemic and has only recently embarked on a new path as Artistic Director of the London Philharmonic. The LPO is going through an exciting period of transition as it returns to live performances under its new Chief Conductor, Edward Gardner.
Composer Carlisle Floyd, widely viewed as a founding father of American opera, died Thursday at age 95 in Tallahassee, Fla. His death was announced by his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, which did not share the cause of his death.
Seattle Symphony just announced that Thomas Dausgaard, who was reportedly unable to join his orchestra for last weekend’s much-anticipated gala concert and comeback to live performance, has been “further delayed due to pandemic restrictions.” As the official press release phrases it: “Due to continued and unavoidable governmental delays, the Seattle Symphony’s Music Director Thomas Dausgaard is unable to join the orchestra for his originally scheduled Delta Air Lines Masterworks Series concerts in October.”
Why the “continued and unavoidable governmental delays” when other artists have successfully managed the paperwork and roadblocks? Are they really unavoidable?
Here’s the complete wording of the press release:
Seattle, WA — Due to continued and unavoidable governmental delays, the Seattle Symphony’s Music Director Thomas Dausgaard is unable to join the orchestra for his originally scheduled Delta Air Lines Masterworks Series concerts in October.
As Dausgaard’s work visa process continues to be severely stalled due to COVID-19-related travel issues, the Seattle Symphony has confirmed two renowned guest conductors as substitutes. Eight-time Grammy winner Giancarlo Guerrero will take to the podium on October 7 and 9 for vibrant concerts that include Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances and Arturo Márquez’s Fandango, a new violin concerto featuring revered soloist Anne Akiko Meyers. Meyers will be performing instead of the previously announced violinist, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who also encountered pandemic travel restrictions. Music lovers can also stream the October 7 concert on Seattle Symphony Live. Then, on October 14 and 16, Stefan Asbury will make his Seattle Symphony debut for a performance featuring soprano and composer Adeliia Faizullina and her Tatar Folk Songs, which won the Seattle Symphony’s 2020 Celebrate Asia Composition Competition.
The British-born, Berlin-residing Rebecca Saunders is this summer’s composer-in-residence at Lucerne Festival. Tonight brings the culminating event of her residency: the world premiere of her piano concerto to an utterance. She wrote it while working closely with the soloist Nicholas Hodges, in her signature fashion, to explore aspects of the instrument’s sound potential.
The premiere was originally to have taken place last summer and had to be postponed because of the pandemic. In another twist, Ivan Volkov, who was originally scheduled to conduct, had to bow out just last week for reasons of health. Composer-conductor Enno Poppe will lead the newly named Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra. They will then take the work to Musicfest Berlin.
“The solo piano within this concerto was conceived as a disembodied voice,” explains Saunders. “It seeks to tell its own story, wavering, almost painfully, inevitably failing to sustain its uncertain striving. It seeks to attain the silence of its end through its own excessive speaking: an incessant, compulsive soliloquy on the precipice of non-being.”
The clip above is from a piece titled “Study,” based on the solo part, that Saunders presented last year at the Musikfest Berlin.
toan utterance is the tenth in the series of Roche Commissions sponsored by the pharmaceutical giant Roche. The latest composer to be commissioned has also been announced: Thomas Adés, who will write a violin concerto for Anne-Sophie Mutter to be unveiled in the summer of 2022.
The 25th annual George Enescu Festival is now underway in the composer’s native Romania. This year’s edition, held between 28 August and 26 September 26, is presenting over 3,500 international and Romanian artists. Most of the performances take place in Bucharest, but some are planned for other cities around Romania.
Paavo Järvi conducted the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra in the opening night concert–Ensecu’s Romanian Rhapsody Op. 11, no. 2, the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 on Saturday, with Hilary Hahn as the soloist. A complete listing of events programmed for this ambitious festival can be found here.
Saturday evening, 28 August, at Seattle Center, starting at 7pm, Seattle Opera returns to performance with a live audience with a “Welcome Back Concert” consisting of highlights from Die Walküre. More than 2,000 people are expected to attend this special outdoor opera performance, which I’m chagrined I will have to miss.
It’s sold out but jumbo screens will allow anyone who strolls down to the Seattle Center Campus to enjoy the performance at various non-ticketed areas.
The cast: Angela Meade, Eric Owens, Alexandra LoBianco (most recently Seattle Opera’s Tosca), Raymond Aceto, and Brandon Jovanovich. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra will be led by the group’s former leader MaestroLudovic Morlot.
I’m looking forward to Houses of Zodiac: Poems for Cello, the first album collaboration between Paola Prestini and former Kronos Quartet cellist Jeffrey Zeigler (her husband).
Zodiac presents Zeigler’s performances of Prestini’s solo cello works, along with poetic interludes featuring the writings of Anaïs Nin (which are read by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings fame), Pablo Neruda, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Natasha Trethewey. The album also includes Prestini’s score for We Breathe Again, an award-winning documentary performed by musicians Tanya Tagaq and Nels Cline and others.
Filmmaker Murat Eyuboglu has additionally created a full-length film featuring dance and choreography by Butoh master Dai Matsuoka and New York City Ballet soloist and “Rogue Ballerina” Georgina Pazcoguin.
It’s heartbreaking to learn of the death on Friday of Michael Morgan, a much-loved conductor and generous colleague who devoted three decades to his work with the Oakland Symphony. “Our entire organization is grieving a profound loss,” Jim Hasler, the Symphony’s Board Chair said. “Michael’s impact on our community and the national orchestra field cannot be overstated – and he has left us too soon.
Writes Joshua Kosman in his touching tribute: “Michael was an excellent conductor, but more than that, he was a superb music director. His overall ambition was less to perform the symphonies of Beethoven or Schubert well — though naturally that was also part of the plan — than to find ways for the Oakland Symphony to be a force for good, in both the artistic and the civic arena. That’s why his programming was so restless and innovative, so devoted to championing the work of the underrepresented and the little-known.”
“In the manner of an older generation of conductors who came to an area and stayed put, Mr. Morgan spent the last 30 years of his life mostly in the Bay Area and its environs,” according to Tim Page in his Washington Postobituary.
Here’s a sample of Michael Morgan’s artistry — a clip of him conducting the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra in John Corigliano’s 1977 Clarinet Concerto:
Running August 19-22, Tippet Rise on Tour: August Festivalwill premiere seven short classical performance films captured at unusual locations across the country: from a tractor barn in Colorado and Ensamble Studio’s Cyclopean House in Massachusetts to the Noguchi Museum in New York City.
The films feature cellist Arlen Hlusko; flutist Brandon Patrick George; pianists Michael Brown, Jenny Chen, and Anne-Marie McDermott; violinist Geneva Lewis; and the vocal ensemble The New Consort.
The festival is free to everyone. The films will stream each day at 8PM ET. Starting at 7:30PM ET this Thursday, August 19 is a live “backstage” gathering via Zoom that will include a discussion with Tippet Rise co-founders Cathy and Peter Halstead and Ensamble Studio’s Débora Mesa and Antón García Abril, the creators behind three monumental sculptures at Tippet Rise—the Domo, the Beartooth Portal, and the Inverted Portal.
Thursday’s location is Cyclopean House, the Brookline, Massachusetts, home and workplace of Débora and Antón, where violinist and rising star Geneva Lewis will perform an eclectic mix of works. Next up is New York and the Jerome Robbins Theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center for a performance by Brandon Patrick George, flutist of Imani Winds.
Friday, August 20, brings a visit to one of the most tranquil and beautiful places in all of New York City—the Noguchi Museum—for a program of new works and poetry performed and read by cellist Arlen Hlusko, followed by a film featuring pianist Jenny Chen at the Blue Gallery in Manhattan.
Saturday, August 21 is set in a tractor barn nestled in Colorado’s Vail Valley at nearly 9,000 feet, where pianist Anne-Marie McDermott devotes her program to Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat major.
The festival concludes in New York on Sunday, August 22 with two films: one beneath a church in Brooklyn at The Gymnasium-Gymnopedie, featuring the solo-voice ensemble The New Consort, and then again at the Blue Gallery for a performance by pianist Michael Brown, featuring a work of his own composition, Breakup Etude for Right Hand Alone, along with works by Chopin and Mendelssohn.
Full program details:
August Festival | Day One | August 19, 2021 | 6PM MDT Geneva Lewis, violin KAIJA SAARIAHO: Nocturne HEINRICH IGNATZ BIBER: Passacaglia EUGÈNE YSAŸE: Sonata No. 5 in G Major for solo violin, Op. 27 Filmed at Cyclopean House, Brookline, Massachusetts Jean Coleman, filmmaker; Noriko Okabe, audio engineer. Duration:
Brandon Patrick George, flute JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Partita in A Minor for solo flute, BWV 1013 TŌRU TAKEMITSU: Air DAVID LANG: Thorn Filmed at Jerome Robbins Theater at Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York Tristan Cook, filmmaker; George Wellington, audio engineer. Duration: 21’
August Festival | Day Two | August 20, 2021 | 6PM MDT Arlen Hlusko, cello JOHN CONAHAN: Philly ‘hood Flashes NICHOLAS YANDELL: Restless/Release MICHELLE ROSS: Haiku DAVID JAEGER: The Blue Trees Rise Again (1. Landscape, 2. Evening, 3. Conjure You) SETH COLE: Mi’Mahalah L’Mahol (From Sickness to Dancing) Filmed at The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Long Island City, New York Jean Coleman, filmmaker; Noriko Okabe, audio engineer. Duration: 20’
Jenny Chen, piano FRANZ LISZT: Three Concert Études, S. 144, Étude No. 3 Un Sospiro FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Barcarolle in F-sharp Major, Op. 60 FRANZ LISZT: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 10, in E Major, S.244/10 Filmed at Blue Gallery, New York, New York Xuan, filmmaker; Noriko Okabe, audio engineer. Duration: 25’
August Festival | Day Three | August 21, 2021 | 6PM MDT Anne-Marie McDermott, piano FRANZ SCHUBERT: Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960 Filmed at Tractor Barn, Edwards, Colorado Tristan Cook, filmmaker; Jim Ruberto, audio engineer. Duration: 45’
August Festival | Day Four | August 22, 2021 | 6PM MDT The New Consort, vocal ensemble (Madeline Apple Healey, Rhianna Cockrell, Clifton Massey, Nathan Hodgson, Brian Mummert) CARLO GESUALDO: “Moro, lasso, almio duolo” CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI: “Zefiro torna e’l bel tempo rimena” TED HEARNE: Ripple SAMIH CHOUKEIR, arranged by Shireen Abu Khader: Lau Rahal Sawti Filmed at Gymnopedie, Brooklyn, NY Jean Coleman, filmmaker, Noriko Okabe, audio engineer. Duration: 30’
Michael Brown, piano MAURICE RAVEL: Jeux d’eau MICHAEL BROWN: Breakup Etude for Right Hand Alone (2020) FREDERIC CHOPIN: Impromptu in F-sharp Major, Op. 36 ALEXANDER SCRIABIN: Poème in F-sharp Major, Op. 32, No. 1 FELIX MENDELSSOHN: Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 14 Filmed at Blue Gallery, New York, New York Xuan, filmmaker; Noriko Okabe, audio engineer. Durati
This evening in Lucerne (at 6.30 pm local time), the 2021 Summer Festival begins with Riccardo Chailly leading the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in a program of Mozart and Schubert. The concert is being streamed on arte.
The summer’s theme, quite aptly for these times, is “Crazy” — the German word verrückt having especially rich connotations that extend from mental imbalance to the dislocations and ruptures that seed a paradigm shift.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 