Month: April 2024

Hae Lee, who last year was second prize winner at the Sergey Kussewitzky International Conducting Competition and a finalist in the Besançon International Competition for Young Conductors, has been appointed associate conductor of the Richmond Symphony and conductor of the Richmond Symphony Youth Orchestra.

He succeeds Chia-Hsuan Lin, who has been named music director of the Rochester Symphony in Minnesota.

Lee was a participant in the Richmond Symphony Conducting Seminar in 2022. The 32-year-old is a graduate of the Korea National University of the Arts and the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. He will join the symphony staff in July.

The symphony also announced that Daniel Myssyk will conclude his tenure as conductor of the Richmond Symphony Youth Orchestra at the end of this season. Myssyk, who is director of orchestral activities at Virginia Commonwealth University and conductor of the VCU Symphony, will continue as the Richmond Symphony’s assistant conductor.

Updated April 24

Chia-Hsuan Lin, associate conductor of the Richmond Symphony since 2016, has been named music director of the Rochester Symphony in Minnesota.

Lin “inspired each section and every player to perform to their full potential,” Joseph Mish, chair of the orchestra’s music director search committee, told the Post-Bulletin of Rochester. “She made an immediate connection with her ease and confidence on the podium and in front of the audience.”

In its current season, the 70-member ensemble is presenting six pairs of subscription concerts, a holiday program and other performances. It also supports a 90-member chorus.

Lin succeeds Jere Lantz, who retired in 2022 after conducting the Rochester Symphony for 42 years.

In Richmond, Lin has been primarily responsible for conducting pops and special programs; casual, children’s and tour concerts; most of the Metro chamber-orchestra series; and working with the symphony’s Young Performers Program. In recent years, she also has conducted regularly in the orchestra’s mainstage series.

She has conducted the Williamsburg Symphony Orchestra, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Richmond Ballet and other ensembles in Virginia and Taiwan, and has served as a cover (potential substitute) conductor with several major US orchestras.

Born in Taiwan, Lin initially studied piano and percussion. After being injured in an auto accident, she turned to conducting, earning a doctorate after studying with Victor Yampolsky at Northwestern University. Prior to her Richmond appointment, she was assistant conductor of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic in Indiana.

Lin currently divides her time between Richmond and Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is married to James Ferree, former principal horn of the Richmond Symphony, now playing that role in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

UPDATE: Following her Minnesota appointment, the Richmond Symphony has named Lin principal guest conductor. In that capacity, she will appear with the orchestra “over the next couple of years,” according to a symphony news release.

Andrew Davis, the eminent British conductor, has died at 80.

Davis was chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1989 to 2000, leading 12 of its iconic Last Night at the Proms evenings in London’s Royal Albert Hall, “twice delivering the customary conductor speech in the manner of the major-general in Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘The Pirates of Penzance:’ ‘This is the very model of a modern music festival,’ ” Mark Brown writes in an obituary for The Guardian.

Davis also served as music director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera (1988-2000), and led the orchestras of Toronto (1975-88) and Melbourne, Australia (2012-19). In the US, he was music advisor to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (2005-07) and music director of Lyric Opera of Chicago (2000-21).

Davis was a prolific recording artist, acclaimed for his discs of music by Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Michael Tippett, Harrison Birtwistle and other British composers.

Brown’s Guardian obituary:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/apr/21/sir-andrew-davis-former-chief-conductor-of-bbc-symphony-orchestra-dies-aged-80

7-9 p.m. EDT
2300-0100 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

Franz von Suppé: “Poet and Peasant” Overture
Vienna Philharmonic/Zubin Mehta
(Sony Classical)

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: “Commedia dell’Arte”
Gabriela Díaz, violin
Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose
(BMOP sound)

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467
András Schiff, piano
Camerata Academica des Mozarteums Salzburg/Sándor Végh
(Decca)

Richard Strauss: “Salome” – “Dance of the Seven Veils”
Staatskapelle Dresden/Rudolf Kempe
(Warner Classics)

Bartók: “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta”
Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Fritz Reiner
(RCA)

Bohuslav Martinů: Double Concerto for piano, timpani & string orchestra
Jaroslav Saroun, piano
Václav Mazáček, timpani
Czech Philharmonic/Jiří Bělohlávek
(Chandos)

Updated April 19

Two members of the New York Philharmonic who were accused of sexual misconduct, dismissed in 2018, then returned to the players’ roster in 2020 after an arbitrator ruled that they were unjustly fired, are not rehearsing and performing with the orchestra following publication of an article in New York magazine recounting the incident.

In the article, by Sammy Sussman, a former philharmonic horn player, Cara Kizer, alleges that she was sexually assaulted, possibly after being drugged, during an evening with the orchestra’s principal oboist, Liang Wang, and associate principal trumpeter, Matthew Muckey, in 2010, while the orchestra was performing in Vail, Colorado. The two men have denied Kizer’s accusation:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/a-hidden-sexual-assault-scandal-at-the-new-york-philharmonic/ar-BB1lwx3S

(via http://artsjournal.com)

The article “prompted a lot of strong feelings” among the orchestra’s musicians, the philharmonic’s president, Gary Ginstling, told The New York Times’ Javier C. Hernández. “Mr. Ginstling declined to say when they might rejoin the ensemble, or whether the orchestra would once again seek their termination. But he noted that the Philharmonic faced constraints” after the arbitrator ruled against the two men’s termination.

“The Philharmonic decided that it would be best for Liang and the other musician to take a couple of weeks off while the Philharmonic manages the firestorm that the distorted article ignited,” Wang’s lawyer, Alan S. Lewis, said in a statement to The Times.

“The orchestra committee, which represents players, said in a statement that it is ‘the overwhelming sentiment from the orchestra that we believe [Kizer]’ and that ‘we don’t believe these are isolated incidents involving Matt Muckey and Liang Wang,’ ” Hernández reports. “The committee added that the orchestra has a culture of ‘not taking musician complaints seriously so musicians often do not feel safe in raising accusations of sexual harassment and assault’ and called on management to take action to provide a safe workplace.”

Norman Lebrecht, on his Slipped Disc website, reports that Wang has been fired from a faculty position at the Taipei Music Academy and Festival in Taiwan, and that Muckey has been dismissed as principal trumpeter of the Oregon Bach Festival:

Festivals terminate NY Philharmonic suspended players

UPDATE 1: From Anne Midgette, former music critic of The Washington Post:

“Today, amid the clouds of putative support and ass-covering that are wafting around my social-media feeds in the wake of this story, I am still seeing promotional ads on those very same platforms from leading orchestras featuring the pictures of men whom I have strong reason to believe are sexual harassers, but who haven’t been outed by the press yet. And if I know, you know a lot more. It may be hard for you to believe it, but we journalists are often the last to know . . . because administrations and boards work hard to conceal it, and performers are often too scared to tell us.”

Midgette was the co-author, with Peggy McGlone, of a 2018 Post article exposing sexual harassment in the classical-music industry. Here’s the full blog post that Midgette wrote in the wake of Sussman’s New York magazine piece:

http://annemidgette.com/blog/f/an-open-letter-to-the-classical-music-field?s=03

(via http://artsjournal.com)

UPDATE 2: The Times’ Hernández reports that the New York Philharmonic has hired a lawyer to “launch an independent investigation into the culture of the New York Philharmonic in recent years.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/arts/music/new-york-philharmonic-investigation.html

Jessica Jinyeong Lee, the Richmond-bred violinist who is currently assistant concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, will leave the ensemble to teach full-time at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

She has served on the violin and chamber-music faculty of the conservatory since 2019, and now is head of its violin faculty.

Lee, who performed locally during childhood studies with the Shanghai Quartet’s Weigang Li and later, while studying at the Curtis Institute of Music, was featured as a guest soloist with the Richmond Symphony. Prior to joining the Cleveland Orchestra in 2016, she was a New York-based recitalist and chamber musician and taught at Rutgers University and Vassar College.

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 April 11.

Carlos Miguel Prieto conducting
April 6-7, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center

Carlos Miguel Prieto, guest conductor of the Richmond Symphony in the orchestra’s latest mainstage program, offered a tour d’horizon of musical Americana – all of the Americas, for a change.

Alongside George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Three Dance Episodes from ‘On the Town,’ ” the program featured four works by Latin American composers: Silvestre Revueltas, Alberto Ginastera, José Pablo Moncayo and Arturo Márquez. Altogether, it was a feast of vivid, brassy and percussive tone color.

Among the program’s discoveries, perhaps the most striking was a suite from the score that Revueltas wrote for the 1935 film “Redes” (“Nets”), a moody evocation of the lives of fishermen in Veracruz – “the happiest and saddest place in Mexico,” Prieto said in introducing the piece. That wide emotional spectrum comes through in a richly atmospheric, often complex orchestration – its scoring for winds is especially elaborate and characterful. Much of the music, however, is audibly crafted to accompany or enhance what’s seen onscreen, and sounds ambiguously moody without the visual element.

Ginastera’s “Four Dances from ‘Estancia,’ ” a ballet score produced in 1952, is one of the Argentine composer’s most popular works, a product of his “subjective nationalist” style, propelled by folk-inspired dances such as the graceful “Wheat Dance” and the malambo, the dance of the horse-riding gauchos, but couched in a more international modernist harmonic language and plentifully syncopated rhythms.

Moncayo’s “Huapango,” a 1941 composition inspired by his exploration of folk music in the Veracruz region, is one of the most familiar Mexican orchestral pieces, even to those who don’t recognize its name or composer; the same could be said of Márquez’s Cuban-inflected Danzón No. 2 (1994). Both are infectious and tonally colorful dance pieces.

Prieto, music director of the North Carolina Symphony and Mexico’s Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería, clearly steeped in the musical idioms of Latin America, obtained brightly expressive, largely good-humored performances of all four works, balancing energetic projection of their dance rhythms with exposure of their details of orchestration.

He took Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” at a somewhat measured tempo, giving its bluesy central section an unusually romantic tone. In Bernstein’s “On the Town” dances, drawn from the musical based on his score for the ballet “Fancy Free” (both introduced in 1944), the conductor and orchestra underlined the sly humor at the heart of the music.

The program was a workout for the symphony players, especially the brass and percussion sections – principal trumpeter Samuel Huss’ numerous solos were consistent standouts. Smiling faces proliferated from the conductor’s podium to the back stands of the orchestra. I’ve rarely seen the musicians so visibly enjoying their work.

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

7-9 p.m. EDT
2300-0100 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

Dvořák: “Scherzo capriccioso”
Czech Philharmonic/Charles Mackerras
(Supraphon)

Cécile Chaminade: “Callirhoë” Suite
Orchestre national de Metz Grand Est/David Reiland
(Bru Zane)

Enescu: Suite No. 2 in D major, Op. 10
Charles Richard-Hamelin, piano
(Analekta)

Liszt: “Mazeppa”
Staatskapelle Weimar/Kirill Karabits
(Audite)

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 in F minor
Arctic Philharmonic/Christian Lindberg
(BIS)

S.I. Rosenbaum, writing for The Atlantic, recounts the exploration by Nicholas Kitchen, a Boston-based violinist and co-founder of the Borromeo Quartet, of singular, mysterious markings in the manuscript scores of Ludwig van Beethoven, which never made it into published versions of his music.

In 2013, as Kitchen coached a string quartet in Beethoven’s Op. 132 – the Quartet in A minor that includes the “Heilige Dankesang” (“Holy Song of Thanksgiving”) – the group’s cellist noticed a dynamic marking, “ffmo,” and asked, “What’s this?” The first two letters are standard notation for fortissimo (very loud); but the added “mo?”

“As soon as Kitchen saw Beethoven’s mark, something in his brain shifted,” Rosenbaum writes. “[L]ater, he would tell people that it was as if someone had turned over a deck of cards to reveal the hidden faces behind the plain backs. Suddenly, he had a new obsession. Over the next several years, he would come to believe he had discovered Beethoven’s secret code.”

Poring over Beethoven’s manuscripts, Kitchen kept finding non-standard markings, guiding players on dynamic levels, expressive intensity and other details of performance.

“Kitchen would eventually identify 23 degrees of dynamics (and counting), from fff – thunderous– to ppp – a whisper. He found four kinds of staccato, two kinds of dynamic swells, marks to indicate different ways of grouping notes together, marks to reinforce crescendos and diminuendos,” Rosenbaum writes. “Taken together, Kitchen argued, these marks amount to ‘living instructions from one virtuoso performer to another,’ an elaborate hidden language conveying new levels of expression – and thus emotion – in Beethoven’s music that had been lost for centuries.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/04/beethoven-code-dynamics-manuscript/677964/

The magazine identifies Rosenbaum as “a journalist based in Providence, Rhode Island, who plays the musical saw and has written for The New York Times and Slate.” Most intriguing author credit ever?

Richard W. Robbins, director of choral activities at Shenandoah University in Winchester, has been named director of the Richmond Symphony Chorus.

The symphony chorusmaster’s position has been vacant since 2021, when Erin R. Freeman left to become director of the City Choir of Washington.

Robbins is a graduate of Florida State University and the University of Houston. Before joining the Shenandoah faculty in 2023, he had served as chorusmaster of the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra in Minnesota and assistant choral director of the Houston Symphony. He has published scholarly editions of Italian sacred music from the early baroque period, and has served as adjudicator and director of choral festivals throughout the US.

He will prepare the Richmond Symphony Chorus for performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem in the final mainstage concerts of the orchestra’s current season, at 8 p.m. June 1 and 3 p.m. June 2 at the Carpenter Theatre of Dominion Energy Center.