Time for live performances to begin again in Lucerne. On Friday Lucerne Festival launches “Life Is Live”, a ten-day-long series of events that invite audiences back into the KKL Concert Hall and other venues.
The Opening Concert also marks a belated debut for the 93-year-old Herbert Blomstedt, who will conduct the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA for the very first time.
Here’s a list of ways to hear programs being broadcast via livestreams and radio. For example, the Opening Concert (with Martha Argerich as the soloist in Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto) will be transmitted with a short time-delay, starting at 2pm EST on 14 August on SRF2.
Other notable events: two all-Beethoven recitals with Igor Levit, an all-Schumann recital by the young tenor Mauro Peter, a recital by the saxophonist Valentine Michaud, and Cecilia Bartoli and friends in the Handel-inspired program “What Passion Cannot Music Raise”.
On 18 July at 7:30p.m. (Beijing time), the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra (SPO) closes its season with a concert that will be delay-streamed a week later, starting at 1:00p.m. EST (7:00p.m. Central European Time) on Saturday, 25 July, on Facebook and Twitter. The stream will remain available here for viewing for an indefinite period.
SPO Artistic Director Zhang Yi will conduct the orchestra in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 (“Romantic”) — part of the ensemble’s complete Bruckner cycle — and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”), with Song Siheng as the soloist.
One sign of hope at least in the music world with regard to live performance: Lucerne Festival, after having to cancel its meticulously planned Summer Festival, has announced a short festival of 10 days that will take its place. Unlike the United States, Switzerland has a functioning government that has actually taken the coronavirus pandemic seriously and is thus in a position to start carefully relaxing restrictions on audience gatherings.
Titled Life Is Live, the short festival includes Martha Argerich and Herbert Blomstedt with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in the opening concerts, as well as a pair of recitals by Igor Levit, who continues his complete Beethoven sonata cycle.
James Ehnes, Seattle Chamber Music Society artistic director, in the recording studio he set up while sequestered at his home near Tampa, Florida, where he just completed recording Bach’s solo violin Sonatas and Partitas. (Courtesy of Kate Ehnes)
Here’s my story about Seattle Chamber Music Society’s plan to go forward with its beloved, month-long Summer Festival with an online version.
Along with its terrible human toll, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the performing arts. Cancellation announcements are now so routine that the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s (SCMS) decision to proceed with a 2020 Summer Festival comes as a welcome respite…
Live orchestral music making is slowly returning to Mainland China. My colleague Rudolph Tang alerted me to this concert from the Shanghai Philharmonic, which is now being streamed from its Facebook page.
More than 150 days since it had to shut, the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra resumed its season with this live concert yesterday led by music director Zhang Yi. A socially distanced audience was in attendance, and the concert marks a major effort to globally stream orchestral music from Mainland China.
This isn’t another chamber concert with just a handful of players, as we’ve been increasingly seeing as concert halls in Europe and Asia tentatively return to business. The centerpiece here is nothing less than the stage-crowding Rite of Spring.
Rudolph Tang attended the concert. He reports that the audience was about 350 strong and “had to go through a series of checkpoints, including body temperature check, filling out forms, showing their QR codes, and metal detection” and were additionally required to wear masks throughout the program.
He adds: “The orchestra encored veteran Chinese composer Shi Wanchun’s Long Live the People after Rite. It’s the theme music of the hugely popular film The Founding of the Nation (1989) about how the PRC was formed. The concert was enthusiastically received and the global streaming initiative was covered widely by the local newspapers.”
More green shoots: on Sunday 24 May 2020, the Taiwan Philharmonic (aka National Symphony Orchestra) will begin performing live again in the first of a series of three concerts (to continue on 30 May and 12 June) at Taiwan’s National Theater and Concert Hall.
These three concerts will be live-streamed to a global audience on this YouTube channel. For the first concert — scheduled to begin on Sunday at 19:30 Taiwan time (12:30 CET/7:30 EDT) — music director Shao-Chia Lü will conduct a program of Dvořák/Serenade in D minor, Tchaikovsky/Serenade for Strings, and Tyzen Hsiao/Bang Chhun Hong (“Longing for the Spring Breeze”).
Taiwan has weathered the COVID pandemic especially well to date, without resorting to shutting businesses or implementing lockdowns. The hope is now to show a way back to being able to perform full-scale orchestral concerts again.
The government has allowed a live audience already for this first concert: a total of 500 in attendance, whose temperatures will be checked. Everyone will be required to wear masks, and other safety measures such as spaced seating will be followed. The orchestra envisions as many as 1,000 people who may be able to attend the upcoming concerts.
The performances will be archived afterward and available on the YouTube channel.
During its virtual gala on Thursday, 7 May at 7pm EST, the Los Angeles-based American Youth Symphony will give the world premiere of Geometric Unity by Music Director Carlos Izcaray.
“Due to this current pandemic, we are all truly being required to live in the digital age, which presents us with an enormous opportunity to do things differently and think about what the classical music experience looks like online” said Izcaray. “Geometric Unity was written with this in mind, utilizing new technologies that support the incredible talent of our musicians, and offer an accessible and inspirational listening experience.”
The title Geometric Unity pays homage to the physicist and economist Eric Weinstein “theory of everything”.*
“Izcaray toys with a new musical algorithm developed to create a richly modern, yet palatable harmonic experience,” according to the press release. The piece is “also inspired by jazz vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier, whose songs often feature highly imaginative uses of harmony.”
Along with the performance, the online virtual gala — available on YouTube and at AYA’s page — includes a panel discussion about composing new orchestral works, an online silent auction, a cooking demonstration, and even a little bit of magic.
*Marcus du Sautoy writes about Weinstein’s challenge to Einstein in The Guardian.
Now available for streaming is Semmelweis, a work of music theater composed by Raymond J. Lustig on a libretto by Matthew Doherty about the Hungarian doctor Ignác Semmelweis, who pioneered the antiseptic response to infection during a Viennese epidemic in 1846.
I haven’t had a chance to view the piece yet and am unfamiliar with the composer, but it’s obviously a timely topic. The performance here is the 2018 world premiere co-produced by Budapest Operetta Theatre and the Bartók Plusz Opera Festival.
Lustig remarks: “There has never been a more urgent moment in history to reflect on the mystery of insight, the tension between truth and hubris, our deadly myopic inertia, and the clear truth that we as a society need our full human participation, our fresh perspectives and brave new ideas, literally to survive. My hope is that, by giving vocal expression to the Semmelweis story … we may all be inspired by his refusal to remain silent on a truth that was not merely inconvenient, but intolerable.”
This week brought the sad news that Lynn Harrell has died. He was only 76. Here are some “master class” observations on Beethoven’s Op. 104, no. 1 that the incomparable cellist shared with The Strad last year:
There is the most wonderful moment in the first movement of Sonata no.4, at the beginning of bar 94, where Beethoven writes in A major in the piano part and D minor for the cello. This lasts only for a moment, but for a Classical composer to have the concept that the two main poles of traditional harmony – the dominant and the tonic – could be played at the same time shows that he was starting to think in a way that might have led, if he had lived another 15–20 years, to a Schoenbergian breaking up of traditional harmony altogether. It’s just extraordinary.
Another disappointing development in the Covid-19 era American orchestral landscape. Brendan Kiley reported this evening in the Seattle Times that the Seattle Symphony Orchestra’s management has decided to furlough three-quarters of its 250-person staff temporarily, bringing it down to 58.
The 88 SSO musicians will enter a temporary furlough projected to last from April 13 to June 1.
According to Kiley: “The decision was reached in negotiation with the musicians’ union — ‘a joint resolution,’ said SSO CEO Krishna Thiagarajan. “That’s really important — we want musicians to get the credit.'”
Fortunately, SSO will continue to provide health insurance coverage for everyone.
Kiley adds: “SSO has not yet seen any relief funding, either from the federal government or local, arts-specific measures — and, Thiagarajan added, they probably wouldn’t have come fast enough to alleviate the organization’s immediate needs.”
In another, more promising development: the National Symphony Orchestra musicians have reached an agreement with Kennedy Center management to take a 35% pay cut rather than an outright furlough, as reported here by The New York Times.
All hell broke lose last month when it was announced that Kennedy Center management planned to deal with the crisis by furloughing the musicians “for an undetermined amount of time so as to address the financial shortfalls from the coronavirus pandemic,” as Julia Jacobs reported. Following as this decision did on the allocation of $25 million for the Kennedy Center as part of the federal emergency stimulus package, the announcement sparked widespread outrage — and was used like red meat to stir up the anti-art frenzy of the MAGA base. That base, however, may have appreciated the quintessentially Trumpian tactics of announcing a unilateral furlough in the first place.
According to Peggy McGlone’s report in The Washington Post, “the musicians [said] they were blindsided” by the original announcement of the furlough. “They said they had contacted NSO Executive Director Gary Ginstling to negotiate some cuts but didn’t hear back. Instead, [Kennedy Center President Deborah] Rutter informed them that they would be furloughed [after April 3] until the arts center reopened.”
Fortunately, a more equitable process of grievance resolution was subsequently pursued: “Ed Malaga, president of American Federation of Musicians Local 161-710, said the musicians were pleased to resolve the grievance and avoid furloughs,” according to McGlone.
MEMETERIA 