Month: November 2024

Katherine Needleman, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s principal oboist, who played the same role in the Richmond Symphony two decades ago, has become a leading US advocate for female musicians who have been victims of sexual misconduct by male colleagues and teachers.

“More than 175 women, nonbinary and other musicians from marginalized groups have sent accounts to her via email or Facebook,” Rebecca Ritzel reports for the Baltimore Banner. “With permission, Needleman strips most identifying information, sometimes subbing in placeholders like ‘fancy Midwestern music school,’ and posts harrowing accounts that include allegations of teenage sexual abuse and major orchestra principals who have been accused of texting inappropriate photos. . . .

“Her Facebook page now generates more than 950,000 views a month, and her four-month-old Substack newsletter has more than 2,500 subscribers.”

Needleman’s advocacy stems from first-hand experience, outlined in Ritzel’s article:

http://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/culture/music/katherine-needleman-baltimore-symphony-orchestra-bso-WZSQ4AULPZHXDNWTBFRJCOUKVI/

(via http://artsjournal.com)

7-9 p.m. EST
0000-0200 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

Weber: “Oberon” Overture
Staatskapelle Dresden/Bernard Haitink
(Hänssler Profil)

Louise Farrenc: Piano Trio in E minor, Op. 45
Célia Oneto Bensaid, piano
Alexandre Pascal, violin
Héloïse Luzzati, cello
(Bru Zane)

Mendelssohn: Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor
Jan Lisiecki, piano
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
(Deutsche Grammophon)

Mozart: Symphony No. 39 in E flat major, K. 543
Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Charles Mackerras
(Linn)

Schumann: Symphony No. 4 in D minor
(Gustav Mahler re-orchestration)
ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra/Marin Alsop
(Naxos)

Why do orchestras tune to an A, and why is the note played on an oboe?

The Australian music educator Kathleen McGuire answers those and other questions in a tutorial on orchestral tuning. Writing for the website The Conversation, McGuire notes that “an open A string [is] common to all orchestral string instruments.” The oboe’s “complex, contrasting overtones, plus a limited yet stable tuning range controlled mostly by a pair of ‘fixed’ reeds” makes it “the practical choice as the tuning instrument.”

Not all A’s are pitched equally, she writes. “An audio frequency of A=440 hertz (Hz) is considered standard or ‘concert’ pitch, although this is a fairly modern concept,” dating from the late-19th and early 20th centuries. And it’s still not standard: Orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic tune to an A with a frequency of 443 Hz, and the New York Philharmonic to A=442 Hz.

Whatever an ensemble’s standard may be, its pitch is subject to all sorts of variables, from temperature and humidity to mutes on strings, which may “slightly alter the pitch of the instrument.”

And why did Giuseppe Verdi advocate a pitch of A=432 Hz? Read on . . .

http://theconversation.com/why-is-the-oboe-used-to-tune-an-orchestra-and-other-questions-about-tuning-answered-238203

The Alexander Paley Music Festival, in which the Moldovan-born pianist will perform with his wife and duo/4-hands partner, the Taiwan-born pianist Peiwen Chen, and two principals of the Richmond Symphony, violinist Daisuke Yamamoto and cellist Neal Cary, will be staged in evening concerts on Jan. 10 and 11 and a matinee on Jan. 12 at St. Luke Lutheran Church, 7757 Chippenham Parkway.

This season’s festival will feature Paley and Chen in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” in the composer’s arrangement for piano 4-hands, as well as 4-hands and duo works by Schubert and Bizet. Paley and the string musicians will play sonatas by Beethoven, Franck and Shostakovich, and Rachmaninoff’s “Trio élégiaque” No. 2. Paley will round out the festival as solo pianist in Liszt’s “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude” from “Harmonies poétiques et religieuses.”

Admission is free, with a suggested donation of $20 per concert.

For more information, visit http://paleymusicfestival.org

The 2025 festival programs:

Jan. 10 (7:30 p.m.)
Rimsky-Korsakov: “Scheherazade”
Alexander Paley & Peiwen Chen, piano 4-hands
Rachmaninoff: “Trio élégiaque” No. 2 in D minor, Op. 9
Alexander Paley, piano
Daisuke Yamamoto, violin
Neal Cary, cello

Jan. 11 (7:30 p.m.)
Franck: Violin Sonata in A major
Daisuke Yamamoto, violin
Alexander Paley, piano
Shostakovich: Cello Sonata in D minor, Op. 40
Neal Cary, cello
Alexander Paley, piano
Bizet: “Jeux d’enfants”
Alexander Paley & Peiwen Chen, piano 4-hands

Jan. 12 (3:30 p.m.)
Beethoven: Violin Sonata in G major, Op. 30, No. 3
Daisuke Yamamoto, violin
Alexander Paley, piano
Schubert: “Divertissement à la hongroise,” D. 818
Alexander Paley & Peiwen Chen, pianos
Liszt: “Harmonies poétiques et religieuses” – “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude”
Alexander Paley, piano

7-9 p.m. EST
0000-0200 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

J.S. Bach: “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 4 in G major, BWV 1049
Alan Choo, violin
Daphna Mor, recorder
Apollo’s Fire/Jeannette Sorrell
(Avie)

Poulenc: “Concert champêtre”
Zuzana Růžičková, harpsichord
Czech Philharmonic/Kurt Sanderling
(Supraphon)

Charles Avison: Concerto grosso No. 6 in D major
(after Domenico Scarlatti)
Chiharu Abe, violin & direction
Concerto Köln
(Berlin Classics)

Einojuhani Rautavaara: “The Fiddlers”
Richard Tognetti, violin & direction
Australian Chamber Orchestra
(ABC Classics)

Mieczysław Weinberg: Concertino, Op. 42, for violin & string orchestra
Linus Roth, violin
Württembergisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn/Ruben Gazarian
(Challenge Classics)

Beethoven: Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4
Quartetto di Cremona
(Audite)

7-9 p.m. EST
0000-0200 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

Smetana: “Libuše” Overture
Cleveland Orchestra/Christoph von Dohnányi
(Decca)

Thomas de Hartmann: Violin Concerto
Joshua Bell, violin
INSO-Lviv Symphony Orchestra/Dalia Stasevska
(Pentatone)

Martinů: Double Concerto, H. 271, for 2 string orchestras, piano & timpani
Josef Růžička, piano
Jan Bouše, timpani
Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra/Charles Mackerras
(Supraphon)

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 10 in E minor
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic/Vasily Petrenko
(Naxos)

Two musicians of the New York Philharmonic, oboist Liang Wang and trumpeter Matthew Muckey, accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women presently or formerly in the orchestra, have been fired after an investigation by an outside lawyer.

Wang and Mackey have been notified by the orchestra that they will not be rehired in the 2025-26 season, The New York Times’ Javier C. Hernández reports. They have been on paid leave since April, following publication by New York magazine of an article in which a former philharmonic horn player said that the two men had engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct in 2010 during a tour engagement in Vail, Colorado.

Wang and Muckey have denied the charges and filed suit against the philharmonic for dismissal without just cause and the musicians’ union local for failing to represent them fairly.

“We have done the right thing and we have followed the letter of the law,” said Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s interim executive director. “The facts strongly supported our case.” Steven J. Hyman, a lawyer representing Muckey, called the inquiry a “sham investigation that could not substantiate cause.”

Following a 2018 inquiry into the two musicians’ conduct, the philharmonic fired Wang and Muckey, but reinstated them after arbitration. In the latest investigation, “11 women came forward with accusations against Mr. Wang, the Philharmonic said, and three against Mr. Muckey. The orchestra said the accusations ranged from inappropriate remarks to assault,” Hernández reports:

Nov. 3, Singleton Arts Center, Virginia Commonwealth University

The Russian school of piano playing, in which muscularity meets poetry, is an archetype of classical music dating back to Anton Rubinstein in the late-19th century and Sergei Rachmaninoff in the early 20th. The tradition sounds to be in good hands for decades to come from Alexander Malofeev, who performed in the latest installment of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Rennolds Chamber Concerts.

Malofeev, a young Russian pianist now based in Berlin, displayed both virtuoso technique and immersion in mood-painting and tone coloration in a program ranging from Schubert and Chopin to Rachmaninoff and Scriabin.

His performance was one of high contrasts, emphasizing the literal meaning of his instrument’s name – pianoforte, from the Italian for “soft” (piano) and “loud” (forte) – with less attention to the volumes in between.

This tendency was most pronounced in his treatments of Schubert’s “Three Piano Pieces,” D. 946, and Chopin’s “Andante spianato and Grand Polonaise brilliante,” Op. 22, brightening and enlarging the tone of music originally heard on early pianos with far less projective power and brilliance than the modern instrument.

The composers no doubt would be dazzled by a Steinway grand, and by this pianist’s emphatic yet fleet pianism; but they also might wish for firmer grounding in the tunes of these pieces, rooted in German and Polish folk song and dance. Malofeev’s exuberant, high-contrast, at times almost bel canto-operatic approach pushed those folk roots deeper underground than Schubert and Chopin might have desired.

He was audibly more attuned to the tonal and expressive qualities of Rachmaninoff’s “Morceaux de fantaisie” (“Fantasy Pieces”), Op. 3, and Scriabin’s four Op. 22 preludes and Fantasie, Op. 28.

Rachmaninoff’s set of five short pieces is the source of his greatest hit, the Prelude in C sharp minor, which Malofeev introduced monumentally in its crack-of-doom opening chords, subsequently exploring its moody depths to memorable effect. He brought similar contrasts of tonal power and expressive nuance to the other pieces in the set.

In the Scriabin selections, and several encores, Malofeev proved to be an unusually sensitive colorist and exponent of musical fantasy. Scriabin’s seemingly improvisational musical constructs clearly strike a chord with this pianist.

Malofeev is 23, past the prodigy stage (he first came to fame as a 13-year-old competition winner) but with full maturity and ripening as an interpreter still ahead of him. He’s got the chops – sensationally – and a keen ear for shades of tone color. It will be fascinating to hear what he makes of his talent in the future.

Quincy Jones, the jazz trumpeter turned composer, arranger, producer and facilitator for a wide range of artists and musical styles, has died at 91.

Born on the South Side of Chicago and reared in the Seattle area, schooled at what is now Berkelee College of Music in Boston, Jones went on to study in Paris with the great French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. (He was one of her last surviving pupils.) He worked as an arranger and trumpeter with a number of jazz musicians – Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis – and led his own band in the 1950s.

In 1961, Jones became musical director of Mercury Records, producing recordings by a number of artists in the pre-Beatles heyday of American popular music. He worked for years with Ray Charles, whom he had known since both were aspiring teenaged musicians.

Jones also wrote and arranged for musical theater productions and films. His scores for films, notably the Sidney Poitier drama “In the Heat of the Night,” established Jones as a go-to figure for music in Hollywood. His other film scores include those for “The Pawnbroker,” “In Cold Blood” and “The Color Purple.”

His most stellar production credit was Michael Jackson’s 1982 album “Thriller,” the best-selling pop recording of all time.

In later life, Jones worked with a number of hip-hop artists. And, while his career increasingly centered on arranging and producing records for others, Jones continued to perform and record as a bandleader.

From the 1960s onward, Jones was active in the civil-rights movement and in projects documenting and promoting Black musicians’ role in American music. He was the recipient of a National Medal of Arts and numerous other honors.

“Beyond his hands-on work with score paper, he organized, charmed, persuaded, hired and validated. Starting in the late 1950s, he took social and professional mobility to a new level in Black popular art, eventually creating the conditions for a great deal of music to flow between styles, outlets and markets,” Ben Ratliff writes in an obituary in The New York Times:

As we approach “Messiah” season, when orchestras, church choirs, community choruses and sing-along participants celebrate Christmas with George Frideric Handel’s sacred oratorio (never mind that it was first performed in Easter season), composer and musical biographer Jan Swafford, writing in The Atlantic, examines the work’s unique qualities, in its own time and ever since.

“Among the towering masterpieces of Western music, the ‘Messiah’ occupies a distinctive place: It is familiar to more people than any other work of its kind,” Swafford writes. “Bach’s B Minor Mass and ‘St. Matthew Passion’ and Monteverdi’s Vespers are comparable among supreme choral pieces, but they aren’t performed at your church or the high school down the street. . . . A fair percentage of the world probably knows the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus well enough to sing along.”

The oratorio’s wide and lasting appeal is “a tribute to the overwhelming effect of the ‘Messiah,’ which is a feat of sustained inspiration arguably unsurpassed in the canon of Western classical music,” Swafford writes. “ ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my People,’ the libretto opens, pulling us in at the beginning, its flow of compelling melody and stirring choruses enthralling us for the next two hours and leaving us singularly exalted.”

Swafford’s essay also will introduce many readers to Charles Jennens, the “rich squire and crabbily conservative political dissident” who assembled (and tinkered with) biblical texts to produce the oratorio’s libretto:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/handels-messiah-origins-western-music-classic/680398/

Swafford extensively quotes “Every Valley: the Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s ‘Messiah’ ” by Charles King, a historian at Georgetown University. King writes in The Washington Post that Handel’s oratorio “was born of — and built for — a world awash in political turmoil, social unrest and fear about the future. It has endured because every generation has found its own travails mirrored in the striking combination of ancient prophecies and irresistible songs and choruses. At its core is a hidden method for thinking our way toward hope.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/04/handel-messiah-political-turmoil/