The next chief of the Dallas Symphony, following Jaap Van Zweden, is to be Fabio Luisi, the stylish and meticulous Italian conductor.
Luisi, 59, will start work in 2020. He will need to shed some other commitments.
He is presently music director of Zurich Opera, Danish National Symphony Orchestra (where he renewed just two weeks ago) and the Maggio Musicale in Florence, where he succeeded Zubin Mehta.
He has served as principal conductor at the Metropolitan Opera during James Levine’s absence for health reasons. But Luisi, a man of strict ethics, could not get along with Peter Gelb and the residency petered out.
His first encounter with Dallas in March proved exceptionally productive, as video released today testifies.
He told the local paper today: ‘I knew it was a good orchestra, but the quality of the orchestra, and the spirit in the orchestra, went way beyond my expectations.’
Dallas can count itself lucky.
Musicians in world-class orchestras are genuinely fond of Fabio, a dedicated artist and a very decent man.
Hip-hop is also apparently a module in the music degree at the University of Southampton.
…. obviously, Sibelius’s violin concerto.
But what’s the second most performed?
We think you’ll never guess.
Clue #1 It’s by a living composer
# 2 It’s for percussion and orchestra
# 3 It’s being performed 15 times in 2017-18. By three different soloists: Colin Currie, Martin Grubinger and Alexei Gerassimez.
Any warmer?
The composer is the chap on the left.
*
Kalevi Aho’s percussion concerto will have its 50th performance this year. That makes it #2 behind Sibelius.
Joe Horowitz has been reading old Encounter articles by Nicolas Nabokov, a Russian emigré composer and CIA-funded propagandist who made it his business to attack the music of Soviet composers.
Sample:
“It is difficult to detect any significant difference between one piece and another. Nor is there any relief from the dominant tone of ‘uplift.’ The musical products of different parts of the Socialist Fatherland all sound as though they had been turned out by Ford or General Motors.”
This October 1953 assessment of contemporary Soviet music, by Nicolas Nabokov in the premiere issue of Encounter Magazine, is fascinating for three reasons. The first is that Encounter, which became a prestigious organ of the Anglo-American left, was covertly founded and funded by the CIA via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, itself a CIA front. The second is that Nabokov, a minor composer closely associated with Stravinsky, was the CCF music specialist. The third is that his article “No Cantatas for Stalin?” imparts blatant misinformation. And yet Nabokov was shrewd. charming, worldly, never obtuse. He was also laden by baggage of a kind that was bound to skew his every musical observation.
Nabokov’s verdict came weeks before Evgeny Mravinsky premiered Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 with his peerless Leningrad Philharmonic. Some two years before that, Shostakovich completed a cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano. Neither work sustains a dominant tone of uplift. In fact, both are imperishable monuments to the complexity of the human spirit, arguably unsurpassed by any subsequent twentieth-century symphonic or keyboard composition….
The Georgia Symphony Orchestra is seeking help for one of its clarinettists who lost everything in a car theft.
Shaquille Southwell is a 2015 Juilliard graduate.
Here’s his story:
This year on a night at the end of February, someone smashed in my car window and stole what represented my whole heart. My clarinets were my expressive voice, my sole means of income, and they’ve been with me through countless hours of practice and performances all over the world (Japan, Argentina, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Atlanta, etc).
Since the theft, my life has been put on hold because I haven’t been able to audition for orchestras or even perform locally to earn a living. I spent 4 years working toward a degree in a field that I can only pursue with proper equipment. The 2 instruments I had (Bb and A) were high-school graduation gifts from my grandmothers, the French leather double case they were in was an off-to-college gift from my high school teacher who plays in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, so they meant quite a lot to me and since having the instruments they’ve undergone several upgrades and additions to ensure they performed at the highest level. Everything that was stolen totaled out to $15,400, and though I’m usually uncomfortable asking for hand-outs, the people close to me have convinced me that my friends and colleagues would be interested in helping because they understand how damaging this has been on my career and my well-being.
The instruments themselves weren’t insured (they will be from now on) but my parents’ homeowners insurance was only willing to contribute $200 toward replacing them, so obviously that was frustrating and didn’t even scratch the surface in terms of what it would take to get back what was taken from me.
UPDATE: Delighted to see that Slipped Disc readers have responded immediately.
Both music director and CEO have signed simultaneous contract extensions at the Phoenix Symphony in its 70th anniversary year.
Tito Muñoz, former assistant conductor with the Cleveland Orchestra, is nearing the end of his fourth season and is looking to build. He says: ‘I look to grow artistically with the orchestra and our community and to continue to perform celebrated orchestral masterworks as well as music of our time, as we showcase upcoming works by young American composers.’
Jim Ward joined as a volunteer when the Symphony was going bust in 2010. Now driving record ticket sales he says, ‘We are just getting warmed up.’
He’s the Doctoral fellow in music education at NYU who regards classical music teaching as a symptom of white supremacism.
Now he has written another carefully considered paper:
Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer 2009, 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music teaches the competencies of European-descended classical music: performing acoustic instruments in ensembles, reading notation, and following a conductor. Youth culture, meanwhile, values recorded music descending from the vernacular traditions of the African diaspora, substantially produced using computers. Hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States (Nielsen 2018), and by some measures, in the world (Hooton 2015). Yet it is vanishingly unusual for hip-hop to be addressed in an American music classroom. Even when educators want to do so, they rarely have the necessary experience or knowledge….
Why is it so important that music education embrace hip-hop when students are already immersed in it outside of school? There are three main reasons. First, if music educators wish to foster students’ own musical creativity, then students must be free to create in the styles that are meaningful to them. Second, while many young people enjoy listening to hip-hop, few know how to produce it. Third, and most important, music is a site where social and political values are contested, symbolically or directly. The Eurocentrism of school music sends a clear message about whose cultural expression we value. While the white mainstream loves hip-hop, America showers the people who created it with contempt (Perry 2004, 27), and sometimes violence. By affording Afrodiasporic musics the respect they deserve, we will teach students to similarly value the creators of those musics….
Results of the Alaska International Piano-e-Competition 2018:
FIRST PRIZE – KaJeng Wong, Hong Kong
SECOND PRIZE – Timur Mustakimov, Russia
THIRD PRIZE – Su Yeon Kim, South Korea
Between the ages of 13 and 15, we read, KaJeng Wong gave up the piano and registered at the Curtis Institute as a violin student.
His c.v. doesn’t explain why he went back to the piano, but violinists might have a hunch…
The Italian pianist Robert Prosseda put his Chopin skills to the text against a mechanical robot in front of a critical Beijing audience.
