Anthea Kreston’s weekly diary:

I am in bed, surrounded by an ocean of books, papers, electronics, coloring supplies, with a cup of tea precariously balanced upon the corner post of the tall, queen-sized upper deck of a loft. I am supposed to be staying down, giving my incision a chance to fully heal this week. Quartet starts up again soon, with a schedule which puts last year’s to shame. We will be pounding out the new repertoire, as well as recording our next (my first) album for Warner. In the mean time, I am taking full advantage of my time stuck in bed, getting a long laundry list of overdue items taken care of, one painful item at a time.

On this list is our US taxes, German taxes (both had extensions which are expiring soon), working to get my Professorship at the University of the Arts turned into a concrete, long-term appointment, cramming German grammar (my tutor comes three times a week), working to extend our work visas for the next 5 years, and turning our Oregon Vacation Home over to a rental company for long-term rental (gutters repaired, heating and power wash, new furniture).

Also, this past Tuesday Jason and I had our debut of the Kennedy String Quartet – three of us are parents to JFK students, and we put together a concert for a National Public Radio tour passing through Berlin, performing on the top floor of a deluxe hotel, a wall of windows overlooking the Berlin Dome, and on the other side the famous Radisson Blu 4-story aquadome (the elevator slices through an amazing vertical aquarium). The only rules we had were that we weren’t allowed to talk about bowings or intonation. Oh my god, I need a break from all that “Quartet” stuff!

In the mean time, Jason and I are beginning a concert series at the JFK school – a mix of formal concerts and family-friendly concerts (which I would also like to present at the US Embassy – I am working on it). Besides the Kennedy Quartet and the Beethoven Sonata concert, I could do everything else this week from bed.

There are endless emails for quartet – rehearsal schedules, travel choices, meetings being organized – and as I see my google calendar for November turn dark with obligations, I am steeling myself for my toughest year yet. I have had time to reflect on my mistakes from this past year, from my unrealistic expectations, think about what realistic expectations might be, and to think of ways that I can anticipate struggles and head them off before they become solid and permanent. With this in mind, I have jotted down some ideas for basic intonation preparation – intonation being a constant issue which can easily create tension and misunderstandings.

Intonation

The third pillar of the three-legged stool of quartet playing – the other two being interpretation and analysis.

Goal:

To make sure we are working with as much fundamental group consensus as possible.

1- list of keys and general rules for each – this can serve as our flexible “intonation bible”

2- decide on several ways of practicing tuning, then specify which way we will be practicing

3- warm up as a group in a certain key, to start to build a library of intonation. Bach Chorales work well for this.

4- remain humble, flexible, patient with oneself and others, fix your own house before fixing others, agree on group ideals of intonation (expressive vs. just, horizontal vs. vertical, as the situation calls for)

5- frustration and tension are the enemies of technique and will affect all technique, including intonation, negatively

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

I’m about to break an iron rule and review a kid playing the violin. And, no, I haven’t given in to peer pressure, though there has been plenty of it from the London agency that signed her at 15, and the record label that followed up. The kid’s 16 now, old enough to take a bit of criticism and interesting enough to warrant adult consideration….

Read on here.

And here.

Anne Jeffreys, who sang Rose Maurrant in the January 1947 Broadway premiere of Weill’s Street Scene, has died at a great age.

She went on to become a fixture in the 1980s TV soap opera“General Hospital”.

The composer Walter Arlen, born in Vienna and forced to leave after Hitler’s 1938 Anschluss, attended a tribute concert last night at the Konzerthaus by the Wiener Symphoniker.

Never too late to say sorry.

Music Theatre Wales is performing The Golden Dragon by Peter Eotvos. It is set in a Chinese restaurant and has a cast of five, including ‘Chinese mother’, ‘Chinese aunt’, ‘Old Asian’ and ‘An Asian’.

All are played by European singers.

Cries are being heard of ‘another frankly disappointing and incomprehensible case of yellowface casting’.

MTW say the opera is a non-literal fantasy.

Read here.

photo: Music Theatre Wales

Among the long-serving staff sacked by the Met’s general manager in his current round of cuts is, we hear, Linda Shene, the very well-liked staff nurse who is first on the scene for all injuries, great or small.

We have been informed of her dismissal by company members. There has been no confirmation.

The city auditor has issued a highly critical report on the Wiener Symphoniker, finding that the finances are a mess and many of the musicians are not fulfilling the number of services required.

The orchestra’s current deficit stands at 64 million Euros, apparently.

Report here (in German).

Jacob Shaw tells us:

Terrible KLM turns into another anti-cello airline: On the way to concerts at the Salida Del Sol festival in Marbella,I have been stranded in the airport today as KLM refusing to rebook my cello after they cancelled my flights this morning.

Their system “doesn’t allow cellos to be re-booked after cancelled flights on the same day”…. I had to buy flights with Norwegian for 700 euros in order to make it for tonight, with no guarantee from KLM to pay it back as “it’s your own choice to travel with a non-KLM partner”.

Charles Pikler, principal viola of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), is playing his last concerts this week, after 39 years in the orchestra.

Pikler was originally appointed to the violin section by Sir Georg Solti in 1978, winning the viola audition eight years later on the retirement of Milton Preves.

A student of Bronislaw Gimpel, he has also played in the Minnesota Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic  and the Boston Symphony.

There has been a torrent of speculation about the composer’s paternity. Michael Lorenz has found new documents of the composer’s parents and their financial circumstances.

Read here.

Sample:

 
In 2004, in an article titled “Schubert: Family Matters“ in 19 th -Century Music XXVIII/1(2004), Maynard Solomon presented thehypothesis that Bishop Joseph Spendou was the biological father of Franz Schubert’s elder brother Ignaz. This theory remained unsupported by primary sources and turned out to be the sole product of Solomon’s imagination.Undeterred by his limited knowledge of the actual sources, his ideas soared,but were forced back to the ground by the same two problems that had been plaguing this particular field of Schubert research for decades:1) the fragmentary and outdated status of Otto Erich Deutsch’s Schubert  Dokumente, which resulted in the neglect of a large number of sources, and 2) the specific method of not accommodating a hypothesis to the documents,but rather, of interpreting the sources according to a preconceived opinion…