The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: Spend a week in the Age of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I when the 17th annual Madison Early Music Festival is held, starting this Saturday. Part 1 of 2.
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By Jacob Stockinger
Starting this Saturday, the 17th annual Madison Early Music Festival will take place on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
The theme this year focuses on music in the work of William Shakespeare and the Age of Queen Elizabeth I.
You can check out all the details of the festival at: http://www.madisonearlymusic.org
The co-directors of the festival – the wife-and-husband team of singers Cheryl Bensman Rowe and Paul Rowe (below, in a photo by Katrin Talbot and signaled in the answers by the initials CBR and PR) took time out from the hectic preparations to answer an email Q&A with The Ear:
How successful is this year’s 17th annual weeklong festival (July 9-16) compared to others in terms of enrollment, budgets, performers, etc.? How well established is MEMF now nationally or even internationally?
CBR: Enrollment is up this year, with over 100 people enrolled in the workshop. Shakespeare (below) and the Elizabethan era is a great draw.
Other exciting news it that MEMF is one of five organizations that was chosen to be part of the “Shakespeare in Wisconsin” celebration, which includes the touring copy of the first Folio of Shakespeare’s plays from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. It is The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare, and it will be at the Chazen Museum of Art this fall. https://shakespeare.library.wisc.edu/
MEMF is definitely on the map in the early music world due to our great faculty and our concert series that features musicians from all over the country, Canada and Europe.
We are also excited to be a part of the Arts Institute on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The institute is bringing us into the modern world of Facebook, e-letters, Twitter and so much more. We also have a new program director, Sarah Marty, who is full of fresh ideas and has many new contacts in the UW and the Madison community.
What is new and what is the same in terms of format, students, faculty members and performers?
CBR: Our format has stayed the same because, after 17 seasons, it seems to be working. We are excited about everything that will be happening during the week. https://artsinstitute.wisc.edu/memf/concerts.htm
New to MEMF this year is the ensemble New York Polyphony (below). They will be performing their program “Tudor City,” featuring the music of the Church, including the sacred music of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, Christopher Tye and Walter Lambe. Their recording of this program, Tudor City, spent three weeks in the Top 10 of the Billboard classical album chart. You can read more about them on their website: http://www.newyorkpolyphony.com/
To get a preview of what you will hear please visit: http://www.newyorkpolyphony.com/media2/
MEMF goes to the Movies! The Newberry Violin Band (below top) will be performing as a live accompaniment to the silent film, Elizabeth I, made in 1912. Sarah Bernhardt is the star, even though she was 68 years old when the movie was made. The music is a great sampler of many of the most famous Elizabethan composers. Ellen Hargis (below bottom) will also be singing some classic John Dowland songs. An early movie with early music! http://newberryconsort.org/watch-listen-2/
Also, we have several unique programs that have been created just for this 400th “deathaversary” year.
The Baltimore Consort (below) is returning to MEMF with a program created especially for this anniversary year, The Food of Love: Songs, Dances and Fancies for Shakespeare, which has musical selections chosen from the hundreds of references to music in the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare had directions in his plays for incidental music used for dancing, interludes and ceremony.
Specific songs are included in the text of the plays, and these texts were set to the popular songs of the day. Very few of these were published, but there are some early survivors which were published and from manuscripts.
Watch the YouTube video “From Treasures from the Age of Shakespeare” by the Baltimore Consort.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soqw5oSdkVs
On Friday night we have a very unique program, Sonnets 400, a program that actor Peter Hamilton Dyer, from the Globe Theatre, conceived to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
The program is a pairing of Shakespeare’s words with Anthony Holborne’s music. Holborne was one of the most respected lutenists of his and Shakespeare’s time. Madison actor Michael Herold (below) will be reciting the narrative arc of the selected sonnets, and the music of Holborne will be played as interludes, or softly under the narration.
Recorder player and MEMF favorite, Priscilla Herreid, brought this program to our attention. Several years ago she performed with Peter in the Broadway production of “Twelfth Night,” and he told her about this pairing of music and sonnets from the Elizabethan era. Lutenists Grant Herreid and Charles Weaver will be joining Priscilla on Friday, July 15, at 7:30 p.m. The pre-concert lecture –“Repackaging Shakespeare’s Sonnets” — will be given by UW-Madison Professor of English Joshua Calhoun.
Tomorrow: Part 2 of 2 — What makes Elizabethan English music special and what will the All-Festival wrap-up concert include?
Tags: 400, Actor, anniversary, Anthony Holborne, Arts, Baltimore, Baltimore Consort, Billboard, Broadway, budget, Canada, Cello, ceremony, Chamber music, Chazen Museum of Art, Cheryl Bensman Rowe, choral music, Christopher Tye, church, Classical music, community, Compact Disc, consort, dance, dances, death, drama, Early music, Elizabethan England, Elizabethan music, Ellen Hargis, email, enrollment, Europe, Facebook, festival, fiom, First Folio, Folger Shakespeare Library, Globe Theatre, Grant Herreid, interludes, international, Jacob Stockinger, John Dowland, Joshua Calhoun, lecture, lute, Madison, Madison Early Music Festival, manuscript, Michael Herold, movie, Music, narration, national, New York Polyphony, Newberry Consort, Newberry Violin Band, opera, Paul Rowe, performer, plays, Poetry, Queen Elizabeth I, recorder, regional, sacred, sacred music, Sarah Bernhardt, secular, secular music, Shakespeare, Singing, Sonata, song, sonnets, text, Thomas Tallis, Top 10, Tudor, Twelfth Night, Twitter, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, UW-Madison Arts Institute, video, Viola, Violin, vocal music, Walter Lambe, William Byrd, William Shakespeare, Wisconsin, YouTube
Classical music: Farley’s House of Pianos announces its Salon Piano Series for this season and offers subscription tickets for the first time. It opens on Sunday, Oct. 4.
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear’s friends at Farley’s House of Pianos write:
The Salon Piano Series offers inspiring performances in an intimate salon setting. Each concert is followed by an artist’s reception and some performances include introductions by music scholars and commentators.
Season tickets are being offered for the first time this year and they provide substantial savings as well as the assurance that you won’t be left out. You can buy tickets at www.brownpapertickets.com
Here is the lineup:
DANIEL DEL PINO – Sunday, Oct. 4, 2015, 4 p.m.
Daniel del Pino (below) returns to play music by Felix Mendelssohn, Cesar Franck‘s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, and Twelve Etudes, Op. 10, by Frederic Chopin. (You can hear him perform a transcription of the “Ritual Fire Dance” by Manuel de Falla during a concert at Farley’s House of Pianos in January of 2013.)
ALESSIO BAX and LUCILLE CHUNG (below) – Sunday, Jan. 17, 2016, 4 p.m.
This concert will include pieces for one piano-four hands and for two pianos. The two-piano pieces will be played on rare “twin” pianos restored by Farley’s House of Pianos: a 1914 Mason & Hamlin CC and a 1914 Mason & Hamlin BB.
CELLIST AMIT PELED (below) – Saturday, Feb. 27, 2016, 7:30 p.m.
Hear the exact program that famed cellist Pablo Casals performed 100 years ago, played on Casals’ own 1733 Goffriller cello with Noreen Polera accompanying on a 1914 Mason and Hamlin piano restored by Farley’s House of Pianos.
DICK HYMAN, Jazz Clinic-Lecture, Saturday, May 7, 2016, 4 p.m.
Jazz legend Dick Hyman presents his third clinic at Salon Piano Series.
Dick Hyman – Jazz Concert – Sunday, May 8, 2016, 4 p.m.
Dick will play solo piano for half the concert. Then bassist John Schaffer and drummer John Lombardo will join Dick in a jazz trio.
Since he began his career in the early 1950s, Dick Hyman has been a pianist, organist, arranger, music director and composer while recording over 100 albums under his own name.
Hyman is a masterful improviser with a unique style of piano that spans from early jazz such as Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton to George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and beyond. He is one of the first people to record on the Moog synthesizer and his track “Minotaur” landed on the Billboard magazine’s US Top 40.
Hyman has served as composer, arranger, conductor and pianist for 12 Woody Allen films. He also won an Emmy for his original score to the daytime drama “Sunshine’s on the Way” and for musical direction of a PBS special on Eubie Blake. His recording, Dick Hyman’s “Century of Jazz Piano” is an encyclopedic series of solo performances that covers the last 100 years in jazz over the course of 121 performances.
All concerts are held at Farley’s House of Pianos, 6522 Seybold Road, on Madison’s far west wide near West Towne.
See complete concert programs and more at www.salonpianoseries.org
Salon Piano Series Tickets Available Online at www.brownpapertickets.com
Tickets cost $45 in advance, $50 at the door. The Jazz Clinic is $20.
Buy the series for $160, and save $40. Tickets are also available at Farley’s House of Pianos and Orange Tree Imports. Service fees may apply.
Tags: African American, Album, Alessio Bax, American Society of Composers, Amit Peled, Arts, Authors and Publishers, Bach, Baroque, bass, Billboard, Cello, Cesar Franck, Chamber music, Chopin, Chorale and Fugue, Classical music, Compact Disc, Daniel del Pino, Dick Hyman, double bass, drum, Duke Ellington, Emmy, etude, Eubie Blake, Farley's House of Pianos, film, George Gershwin, Gershwin, improvisation, Jacob Stockinger, Jazz, Jelly Roll Morton, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Lombardo, Lucille Chung, Ludwig van Beethoven, Madison, Manuel de Falla, Mendlessohn, Moog synthesizer, Movies, Music, Pablo Casals, PBS, Piano, Prelude, Ritual Fire Dance, Scott Joplin, solo, soundtrack, trio, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Woody Allen, YouTube
Classical music: Good news! The Metropolitan Opera season will open on time, now that it has settled disputes with its labor unions.
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By Jacob Stockinger
A week ago, The Ear offered readers an update on the labor strife at the Metropolitan Opera (below), which had been partially resolved.
The final results, and successful settlement, came in earlier this week.
And the news is good.
Here is a wrap-up of what happened from several major media outlets, plus a link to the Met so you can check into its various seasons and productions.
First, here is link to the back story about the first settlements between general director Peter Gelb (below top), who sought even bigger salary rollbacks, and the unions (below bottom):
Now here are links to three stories that wrap up the labor disputes and the final outcome:
From The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/arts/music/metropolitan-opera-labor-talks.html?_r=0
From The Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/metropolitan-opera-reaches-deal-with-stagehands-1408526766
From the Associated Press via Billboard magazine:
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/6221948/metropolitan-opera-reaches-deal-with-stagehands-union
Last but not least, here is a link to the Met’s own website, where you can see the schedule of productions for the regular Met season -– which opens on Oct. 27 with Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida” (below, the opera’s show-stoppping Act 2 Triumphal March from a 1989 Met Opera production in a YouTube video) –- and for the productions for “The Met Live in HD,” which are shown locally at the Eastgate and Point cinemas:
Tags: Aida, Arts, Associated Press, Billboard, Classical music, Giuseppe Verdi, Jacob Stockinger, labor unions, Madison Opera, Met Live in HD, Metropolitan Opera, Music, National Public Radio, New York City, New York Times, NPR, Peter Gelb, Stagehand, Wall Street Journal, YouTube
Classical music: It was the best of years and the worst of years. Here is NPR’s year-end national wrap-up of the state of classical music in 2013.
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By Jacob Stockinger
As I said in yesterday’s post, even though we are now into 2014 there is some unfinished business to wrap up for 2013 for reasons that I also explained yesterday. Here is a link:
Most media outlets, from old-fashioned newspapers to high-tech blogs, tend to take a year-end look back at the high points and low points of classical music as well as other forms of art and culture. But they tend to favor local performances and trends – even the venerable and first-class New York Times, the national newspaper that sets the media’s agenda, nonetheless generally focuses on The Big Apple as the center of the cultural universe.
So imagine my delight when I found a really good wrap-up of national trends, and even international events, on NPR’s great classical music blog “Deceptive Cadence.” It even opens up your eyes to what The Industry considers to be classical music by revealing the “classical” music that made it onto the Billboard charts of best-sellers.
The post was compiled and documented on by the blog’s director, Tom Huizenga, (below top) with, I suspect, help from the always informed and creative Anastasia Tsioulcas (below bottom).
What is especially praiseworthy is that it is comprehensive with much food for thought; it also seems to The Ear to be fair and balanced, neither boosterish nor alarmist; and it includes a lot of photos and a lot of links to develop any particular story that grabs you even further.
So here it is — from the mixed state of symphony orchestras (the locked out Minnesota Orchestra, which lost its conductor Osmo Vanska to labor strife, is below top) to the demise of the New York City Opera with the world premiere of the new opera “Anna Nicole” (below bottom) to the issue of bullying LGBT teenagers to various anniversaries of works and composers including the centennials of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and of the birth of Benjamin Britten.
It should easily provide you with some fine reading on what promises to be a bitterly cold and mean January weekend and work week.
Enjoy. And now it is onward to the high notes and low points of 2014!
Classical music: Is it a Christmas miracle? Monastic chant outsells “Fifty Shades of Grey” music compilation as well as Taylor Swift and Alicia Keyes as Benedictine nuns from Kentucky top Billboard’s Classical Traditional chart for one whole month with “Advent at Ephesus.” Hear the NPR interview with the head sister Mother Cecilia and selections on public radio stations on Christmas Day. Plus, listen to different version;s of Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio” this afternoon on Wisconsin Public Radio.
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ALERT: Wisconsin Public Radio host Marika Fischer Hoyt, an accomplished professional violist who plays both baroque and modern viola, will do something The Ear loves to hear; a comparative listening session that samples different interpretations of a great work. Today from 2 to 4 p.m. on WPR (88.7 FM in the Madison area), Fisher Hoyt will sample six different versions of J.S Bach‘s magnificent “Christmas Oratorio” — The Ear’s favorite holiday choral work that too often gets overlooked in favor of Handel’s “Messiah.” I say: Thank You, Marika, and Tune in, listeners, as part of a Happy Holiday!
By Jacob Stockinger
Still looking for a last-minute music gift for the holidays? You might consider the following unusual item, which comes to The Ear thanks to the publicist at Decca Records and which seems to mark a renewed interest in medieval chant that also swept the US in the 1960s and 1970s.
Dec. 19, 2012 – (New York, NY) — The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles in Missouri continue their reign at the top of Billboard magazine’s Classical Traditional Chart for the fourth straight week in a row, holding the No. 1 position heading into the Christmas holiday with their recording, “Advent at Ephesus.”
American Public Media’s “Performance Today” calls “Advent at Ephesus” “remarkable,” and has featured the recording twice on their program in December, with additional music airing on Christmas Day. Hailed as one of America’s most popular classical music radio programs, the show has more than 1.3 million weekly listeners, and is heard on more than 260 stations around the country. To find stations carrying the program click here: http://performancetoday.org/stations.
People Magazine recently featured the Nuns on their “People Pinboard” page which highlights “celebrity news, photos and trends” in their Dec. 17th issue, noting that “Advent for Ephesus” “outsells the “Fifty Shades of Grey” classical anthology (below) that author EL James listened to while writing the bestselling trilogy. Can it really be true that God outsells sex — at least at Christmas?
The Salt Lake Tribune says the disc is “divinely beautiful,” while The St. Louis Post-Dispatch aptly notes the album is “quietly cutting through the blare and noise of commercial Christmas” and “an ideal remedy for jingle-itis.”
Mother Cecilia of the Benedictines of Mary was also recently featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” following their No 1 debut, making waves across the Internet and resulting in their record shooting to the Top 5 of both Barnes & Noble.com and Amazon.com rankings, ahead of such superstars as Taylor Swift, One Direction, Katy Perry and Alicia Keys.
To hear the “All Things Considered” story, click here:
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/30/166260517/nuns-top-50-shades-in-classical-music-smackdown
“ADVENT AT EPHESUS” features 16 tracks including traditional English and Latin hymns, polyphony, Gregorian chants, medieval harmonies, and one original work from the sisters themselves. The record represents a rare and often forgotten approach — one that focuses on music celebrating the quiet, introspective anticipation of the Nativity that is the foundation of the Advent season, celebrating the four preceding Sundays leading up to Christmas.
Founded in 1995 and hailing from Missouri, the sisters are young, contemplative and extremely musical. They do not set foot beyond their Northwest rolling farmland, focusing solely on living an austere, yet joyful life set apart from the world. Working on their farm and mostly living off the land, they sing together eight times a day as part of their daily monastic schedule, lifting their hearts to God through music.
Tags: Advent, All Things Considered, American Public Media, Benedictines of Mary, Billboard, Christmas, Decca Records, Ephesus, God, Gregorian chant, Johann Sebastian Bach, Missouri, New York City, Queen of Apostles, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, United States, wisconsin public radio
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