Month: February 2024

I am medically advised to be cautious about attending crowded public events, including Richmond Symphony concerts. The orchestra is making video streams of its Symphony Series performances available to ticket-holders. The stream of this program was posted on Feb. 28.

Valentina Peleggi conducting
with Dinara Klinton, piano
& Richmond Symphony Chorus
Feb. 24-25, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center

Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor is the apotheosis of the romantic musical warhorse, a work that has been a prime vehicle for generations of piano virtuosos (not all of them Russian – it was premiered in 1875 by a German, Hans von Bülow, in Boston), and remains one of the classical repertory’s most consistent crowd-pleasers.

The crowd at the Richmond Symphony’s latest mainstage program was certainly pleased with the performance of the Tchaikovsky by the Ukrainian pianist Dinara Klinton, and rightly so.

Klinton found just the right balance between pianistic brilliance in service to Tchaikovsky’s high-romantic rhetoric and sensitivity to the concerto’s lyrical currents, between high-volume power and almost hushed intimacy. The pianist also showed gratifying attentiveness to the orchestral colors and sound textures that make the piece more than a piano showcase with orchestral padding.

In the big first movement of the concerto, Klinton did not stint on the power chords and other grand keyboard gestures, but took the time to treat lyrical phrases flexibly, with a Chopin-like sense of fantasy, an approach that also enhanced her treatment of the central andantino. She brought high energy and rhythmic acuity, nicely spiced with playfulness, to the concerto’s finale.

The orchestra, led by Valentina Peleggi, its music director, provided rich, at times rhythmically punchy support to the pianist. Brightly expressive woodwind playing enhanced the performance.

Zachary Wadsworth, the Richmond-born composer now on the faculty of Williams College in Massachusetts, came home for the premiere of “Letter to the City,” his choral-orchestral setting of a poem by Joanna Lee that paints an atmospheric portrait of Richmond’s river-centric climate, cityscape and inhabitants.

Most of the atmosphere of the piece comes from its orchestration, a busily productive mosaic of wind, string and percussive tones that add color and texture to straightforwardly lyrical choral scoring.

Wadsworth (who has another premiere in store, on March 3 with the Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia) may or may not have had Maurice Ravel in mind while composing “Letter to the City;” but the piece proved to be highly complementary to Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé” Suite No. 2, which followed his premiere.

Ravel characterized his nearly hour-long ballet score as a “choreographic symphony,” and the second suite he extracted from the third act of the ballet is a miniature symphony with a wordless chorus woven into the orchestration.

Peleggi and the orchestra and chorus proved to be winning weavers. Their performance realized both the sonic haze and dapples of sunlight in this music – woodwinds, singly and collectively, being the primary dapplers – while maintaining its pulsing momentum and dynamism.

The stream of this program remains accessible until June 30. Access: $30. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); http://richmondsymphony.com

7-9 p.m. EST
2200-0000 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

Debussy: Danse (“Tarantelle styrienne”)
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Riccardo Chailly
(Decca)

Dvořák: Violin Concerto in A minor
Pamela Frank, violin
Czech Philharmonic/Charles Mackerras
(Decca)

Bartók: “Contrasts”
Richard Goode, piano
Lucy Chapman Stoltzman, violin
Richard Stoltzman, clarinet
(RCA)

Pēteris Vasks: “Summer Dances”
Vadim Gluzman & Sandis Šteinbergs, violins
(BIS)

Sibelius: Symphony No. 2 in D major
San Francisco Symphony/Herbert Blomstedt
(Decca)

Seiji Ozawa, who died earlier this month, was a master of orchestral tone-painting and detailing, as we’ll hear in a wide-ranging sampler of the recordings he made with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he was music director for 29 years, and the Saito Kinen Orchestra, the Japanese ensemble that he co-founded in the 1980s.

7-9 p.m. EST
2200-0000 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

Stravinsky: “The Firebird” Suite
Boston Symphony Orchestra/Seiji Ozawa
(RCA Victor)

J.S. Bach: Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 – Chaconne
(Hideo Saito transcription)
Boston Symphony Orchestra/Seiji Ozawa
(Decca)

Tōru Takemitsu: “Ceremonial – an Autumn Ode”
Saito Kinen Orchestra/Seiji Ozawa
(Decca)

Ravel: “La valse”
Boston Symphony Orchestra/Seiji Ozawa
(Deutsche Grammophon)

Berlioz: “Symphonie fantastique”
Boston Symphony Orchestra/Seiji Ozawa
(Deutsche Grammophon)

Claire Lewis, a graduate student at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, has been selected for the new Richmond Symphony Conducting Apprenticeship, launched in collaboration with the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, established by Marin Alsop to promote the conducting careers of women.

Lewis, a 20-year-old student of Alsop’s at Peabody, was conducting scholar at last year’s Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, NC, and was the 2023 winner of the Respighi Prize in Conducting, which led to her debut at Carnegie Hall with the Chamber Orchestra of New York.

Spending four to six weeks in Richmond during the 2024-25 season, Lewis will work with the symphony’s music director, Valentina Peleggi (a Taki Alsop fellow in 2015), and with the Richmond Symphony Chorus, Virginia Opera and Richmond Ballet as well as the orchestra.

After years of being confined to January’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and February’s Black History Month, the music of Black American composers increasingly is being heard year-round alongside “standard” repertory. In that spirit, this Black History Month program features works of Black composers along with music of their White contemporaries.

7-9 p.m. EST
2200-0000 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

William Grant Still: “American Suite”
Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Avlana Eisenberg
(Naxos)

Aaron Copland: “Billy the Kid” Suite
New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein
(Sony Classical)

George Walker: “Lilacs”
Latonia Moore, soprano
Cleveland Orchestra/Frans Welser-Möst
(Cleveland Orchestra)

Samuel Barber: “Knoxville, Summer of 1915”
Julia Bullock, soprano
Philharmonia Orchestra/Christian Reif
(Nonesuch)

Florence Price: Piano Concerto in D minor
Michelle Cann, piano
New York Youth Symphony/Michael Repper
(Avie)

Amy Beach: Theme and Variations, Op. 80
Eugenia Zukerman, flute
Shanghai Quartet
(Delos)

Jessie Montgomery: “Rounds” for piano & string orchestra
Awadagin Pratt, piano
A Far Cry
(New Amsterdam)

Seiji Ozawa, the longtime music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, has died at 88.

Born to Japanese parents in Mukden during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, Ozawa was schooled in piano and conducting in Japan. After winning the International Competition of Orchestra Conductors in Besançon, France, he was invited to the Tanglewood Music Center, where he continued conducting studies with Charles Munch and Pierre Monteux. After further study with Herbert von Karajan in Berlin, Ozawa was appointed by Leonard Bernstein as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic in the early 1960s.

Ozawa was music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1965-69) and the San Francisco Symphony (1970-77) before his appointment in Boston in 1973, becoming one of the first Asians to take musical charge of a major US or European orchestra. He led the Boston Symphony until 2002, the longest tenure of any music director in the orchestra’s history. He also was a regular guest conductor with an worldwide itinerary.

In his later years, Ozawa concentrated on performances and recordings with Japan’s Saito Kinen Orchestra, which he had co-founded in 1984.

From the late 1960s onward, Ozawa amassed an extensive discography, conducting Boston, Saito Kinen and other orchestras. Although he was not closely associated with the core Austro-German classics, he won widespread praise for discs of late-romantic and modern music, especially of Mahler and Ravel. His recordings of Tōru Takemitsu’s works were key to bringing the Japanese composer to worldwide notice.

An obituary in The New York Times by James R. Oestreich:

George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was introduced on Feb. 12, 1924 by Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, with the composer at the piano, in “An Experiment in Modern Music” at Aeolian Hall in New York. The piece is, by most any measure, the most popular classical composition produced by an American in the past 100 years – or most popular ever, if we (unjustly) disqualify John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” as classical.

Whether the rhapsody is a classical work comparable with Richard Strauss’ Burleske or Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Africa,” to cite two other non-concertos for piano and orchestra, is a complicated issue.

The tunes and structure of “Rhapsody in Blue” are Gershwin’s; for the 1924 performance, Ferde Grofé orchestrated the piece for Whiteman’s band, a “jazz orchestra” of the kind heard in dance halls and ballrooms in the 1920s and ’30s. Grofé’s more familiar symphonic orchestration of the rhapsody dates from 1942, five years after Gershwin died. The original jazz-orchestra version was not widely heard until the mid-1970s.

Nowadays, pianists playing the original version often add improvisations (cadenzas, in classical parlance). The most stylistically informed interpreters – such as Aaron Diehl in his September 2020 performance with the Richmond Symphony – improvise in the manner of James P. Johnson, Willie “the Lion” Smith and other post-ragtime/ pre-swing “stride” pianists of the 1920s, whose playing greatly influenced Gershwin.

Those added touches are not fanciful musical historicism. You can hear Gershwin doing the same thing in his solo piano roll of the rhapsody, recorded in 1925-27:

Compare that with André Previn’s 1971 recording of the symphonic version:

And compare that with Kirill Gerstein’s 2017 recording of the jazz-orchestra version:

So, in assessing “Rhapsody in Blue,” the first issue to address is, which rhapsody are we talking about?

Only then should we get into the more present-tense issue of “cultural appropriation” of a Black musical style, jazz, by a White musician, or the relevant but more nerdy question of whether classically trained musicians can handle the rhythmic language of Black and Afro-Latin music.

The composer and pianist Ethan Iverson, in an essay for The New York Times, faults Gershwin’s rhapsody, writes that it has “clogged the arteries . . . . The promise of a true [jazz-classical] fusion on the concert stage basically starts and ends with it. A hundred years later, most popular Black music is separate from the world of formal composition, while most American concert musicians can’t relate to a score with a folkloric attitude, let alone swing.”

The Times columnist John McWhorter rebuts Iverson, writing that “[t]o Gershwin, the rhapsody was precisely what it needed to be. He specifically sought to avoid straitjacketing it with the unchanging peppiness of a dance beat as if that was all jazz was or could be. He revealed his purpose in a subsequent letter: ‘Jazz, they said, had to be in strict time. It had to cling to dance rhythms. I resolved, if possible, to kill that misconception with one sturdy blow.’ So while the rhapsody certainly has its foot-tapping sections, it also sails, rests, jolts and soars.”

McWhorter acknowledges that “the rhapsody was, by our modern standards, cultural appropriation. Although he did it with sincere artistic intent, Gershwin adopted Black musical forms and as a result gained the fame and fortune that racism at the time made impossible for actual Black American composers.”

Iverson rates “Rhapsody in Blue” as “a flawed classic that exemplifies our nation’s unsettled relationship with the originators of African American music and technique.” It is that. It’s also a musical snapshot in time, an elaborated echo of the “hot jazz” style of the 1920s, and its original version(s) can be heard today as a tribute to, rather than a ripoff of, that style.

Is it a work of cultural appropriation? Undoubtedly – but Gershwin is one of many, many offenders. An eternal truth of music: Everyone steals from everyone else, and always has.

Following last month’s performances by Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, his last subscription concerts with the orchestra that he served as music director for decades, Joshua Kosman, music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, looks back on the conductor’s impact on the orchestra, its audience, and himself.

MTT has been a rare figure on the modern symphonic scene, continuing to lead the same orchestra for 25 years (1995-2020), a tenure comparable with those of Serge Koussevitzky at the Boston Symphony and Eugene Ormandy at the Philadelphia Orchestra.

“Some two-thirds of the current Symphony roster was either hired by him or have been present throughout his tenure, which means that the specific artistic personality of the orchestra – its values, its interpretive strategies, its willingness to combine technical discipline with freedom – will outlast Thomas by at least a generation,” Kosman notes.

“It was Thomas who set the tone for the weekly Symphony concerts around which my entire schedule revolved. It was he who provided fodder for me to engage with, think about and delight in.”

http://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/sf-symphony-michael-tilson-thomas-18640706.php

(via http://artsjournal.com)

Robert Spano, former music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, has been named music director of Washington National Opera. He will take the post, which has been vacant for six years, in the fall of 2025, and will serve in the interim as music director-designate.

Evan Rogister will continue as the company’s principal conductor through the 2024-25 season.

After concluding a 20-year tenure at the Atlanta Symphony in 2021 (he is now music director laureate), Spano became music director of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra in Texas. He also serves as music director of the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado, and as principal conductor of the Rhode Island Philharmonic during its search for a music director.

A 62-year-old Ohio native who studied at Oberlin Conservatory and the Curtis Institute of Music, Spano was assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the 1990s and was music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic from 1996 to 2004. He also taught at Oberlin and ran the conservatory’s Opera Theater program.

In Atlanta, Spano introduced and recorded a number of works by Jennifer Higdon, Osvaldo Golijov, Christopher Theofanidis, Michael Gandolfi and other contemporary composers. At the Metropolitan Opera, he conducted the US premiere of Nico Muhly’s “Marnie.”

“Part of our mission as a national opera company is about shaping the future of the art form,” Timothy O’Leary, Washington National Opera’s general director, tells Michael Andor Brodeur, The Washington Post’s music critic. “And [Spano] has really kind of been personified by this gift for leading new works and giving them life.”

Brodeur’s interview with Spano:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/2024/02/06/robert-spano-music-director-wno/

Virginia Opera will complete its cycle of Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungen” music dramas with “Twilight of the Gods” (“Götterdämmerung”) and stage the premiere of “Loving v. Virginia” by Damien Geter and Jessica Murphy Moo in 2024-25, the company’s 50th anniversary season.

“Loving v. Virginia,” based on the story of Mildred and Richard Loving, the couple whose lawsuit led the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate laws against interracial marriage, is the culmination of Geter’s multi-year residency with Virginia Opera and the Richmond Symphony. It is co-produced with Minnesota Opera. Denyce Graves, the lauded mezzo-soprano, will be stage director of the Virginia Opera production.

As in previous installments of Wagner’s “Ring,” the company will use the adaptation by Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick.

Virginia Opera’s coming season also will feature two staples of the repertory, Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Così fan tutte.”

Casting for the productions will be announced later.

Subscriptions for four performances at Norfolk’s Harrison Opera House are $97.02-$440, and $59.02-$376.92 for four performances at the Carpenter Theatre of Dominion Energy Center in Richmond. Subscription prices for performances at the Center for the Arts of George Mason University in Fairfax, and single ticket prices at all three venues, will be announced later.

To renew or newly purchase Norfolk and Richmond subscriptions, call Virginia Opera’s box office at (866) 673-7282 or visit http://vaopera.org/subscriptions

Virginia Opera’s 2024-25 season schedule:

“Twilight of the Gods” (adaptation by Jonathan Dove & Graham Vick)
(in German, English captions)
7:30 p.m. Sept. 27, 2:30 p.m. Sept. 29, Norfolk
7:30 p.m. Oct. 5, 2 p.m. Oct. 6, Fairfax
7:30 p.m. Oct. 12, 2:30 p.m. Oct. 13, Richmond

“Carmen”
(in French, English captions)
7:30 p.m. Nov. 8, 2:30 p.m. Nov. 10, Norfolk
7:30 p.m. Nov. 16, 2 p.m. Nov. 17, Fairfax
7:30 p.m. Nov. 22, 2:30 p.m. Nov. 24, Richmond

“Così fan tutte”
(in Italian, English captions)
7:30 p.m. Feb. 14, 2:30 p.m. Feb. 16, Norfolk
7:30 p.m. Feb. 22, 2 p.m. Feb. 23, Fairfax
7:30 p.m. Feb. 28, 2:30 p.m. March 2, Richmond

“Loving v. Virginia” (premiere)
(in English, English captions)
7:30 p.m. April 25, 2:30 p.m. April 27, Norfolk
7:30 p.m. May 3, 2 p.m. May 4, Fairfax
7:30 p.m. May 9, and 10, 2:30 p.m. May 11, Richmond