The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music education: The Green Lake Festival of Music opens the 17th year of its Chamber Music Camp, with FREE public concerts, this week.
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear’s friends at the Green Lake Festival of Music write to tell us about a program important to music education – which means a program important to the future of classical music:
Here is the press release:
On Sunday, July 5, at the Thrasher Opera House (below bottom) in Green Lake, The Green Lake Chamber Players open the 17th annual Green Lake Music Festival Chamber Music Camp, as string and piano students (below top) from nine states, ages 11 to 20, convene at Ripon College for two weeks of stimulating music-making along with just plain fun.
Part of the fun includes a trip to Larry Miller’s farm and a shopping scavenger hunt at K-Mart.
The daily schedule includes coaching sessions by Thomas Rosenberg (Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition Director, cellist and the Camp’s Artistic Director); Samantha George, Associate Professor of Violin at Lawrence Conservatory of Music; Karen Kim, Grammy Award winning violinist; David Perry, Professor of Violin at the UW-Madison and first violin of the Pro Arte String Quartet; Renee Skerik, Instructor of Viola at Interlochen Arts Academy; Andrew Armstrong from the Amelia Piano Trio; James Howsmon, Professor of Instrumental Accompanying at Oberlin College Conservatory; and guest artists, including Shen Lu, 2014 Hilton Head International Piano Competition Winner, the Jupiter Quartet (below top), and the Bergonzi String Quartet (below bottom).
Jupiter Quartet at Studio Theatre, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. From left: Liz Freivogel, Nelson Lee, Daniel McDonough, and Meg Freivogel
Join us for the first of several Green Lake Chamber Players concerts on Sunday, July 5, at 3 p.m. This concert is a “BUY ONE, GET ONE” ticket concert. The Green Lake Chamber Players includes the Green Lake Festival Chamber Music Camp faculty and guest artists who will perform music by Alexander Scriabin, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. This is also the first concert in a series of matinees that offer a special package for bus pick up and ticket from Appleton, Oshkosh, and Beaver Dam. Call the Festival office for more details on this package.
The 2014 Hilton Head International Piano Competition Winner, Shen Lu (below) will perform Thursday, July 9, at 7:30 p.m. at the Thrasher Opera House, along with teaching a piano master class on Friday, July 10, at 10 a.m. John O’Conor, the Jury Chair from the 2014 Hilton Head International Piano Competition, says, “Shen Lu is a young Chinese pianist with an exciting future. His interpretations have great depth, his technique seems effortless and he communicates wonderfully with his audience.”
Students will attend master classes and five Festival concerts, and perform a variety of community service engagements in such facilities as nursing homes, service clubs, and libraries.
The program includes three public concerts – a Chamber Camp Student Recital on Saturday, July 11, and the popular “Circle of Sound” string orchestra concert at the Boston Barn on Tuesday, July 14, as part of the Boston Barn Concert package that includes appetizers and music by the Bergonzi String Quartet, and the final Chamber Music Celebration at Rodman Center for the Arts, Ripon College, on Saturday, July 18.
Please visit www.greenlakefestival.org for information about these and other artists performing throughout July at the Festival or to purchase tickets. Tickets are also available by calling the office at 920-748-9398. You can also stop by one of the following ticket outlets: Green Lake Bank (Green Lake) and Ripon Drug (Ripon).
The Green Lake Festival of Music is supported in part by the Arts Midwest Touring Arts Fund, a program of Arts Midwest, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional funding from the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Crane Group, and General Mills Foundation. Additional support comes from the Horicon Bank, Oshkosh Area Community Foundation, Agnesian Healthcare, Wisconsin Department of Tourism, Oshkosh Area Community Foundation, and private and corporate donations.
Chamber Workshop FREE Public Events
Get the inside story on the rehearsal process as you watch these artists work with talented students. All master classes will be held at the Rodman Center for the Arts at Ripon College.
- Piano Master Class with Shen Lu. Friday, July 10, 10 a.m.
- Cello Master Class with The Jupiter Quartet. Monday, July 13, 10 a.m.
- Violin Master Class with The Bergonzi String Quartet. Thursday, July 16, 10 a.m.
Chamber Workshop Concerts
- Chamber Camp Recital. Join us for this FREE community concert at the Rodman Center for the Arts, Ripon, Wisconsin on Saturday, July 11, at 2 p.m. No tickets are need for this event; seating is first come, first served.
- “A Circle of Sound” Tuesday, July 14, 6:30 p.m. at the Boston Farm, Green Lake, Wisconsin. Be in the center of the music as The Bergonzi String Quartet, faculty and students encircle the audience in a historic Wisconsin barn. This concert is preceded with cocktails and appetizers with an Italian flair. This concert is offered only as a package.
- Chamber Music Celebration Showcase Performance. Saturday, July 18, 3 p.m., Rodman Center for the Arts (below), Ripon, Wisconsin. Hear the stars of tomorrow as the talented students perform in trios, quartets and quintets, concluding with their trademark Circle of Sound strings. A student-led preconcert conversation begins at 2:30 p.m.
Tags: Amelia Piano Trio, Arts, Arts Midwest, barn, Beethoven, Bergonzi String Quartet, Boston, Brooklyn Academy of Music, camp, Cello, Chamber music, Classical music, Education, Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, Green Lake, Green Lake Festival of Music, Hilton Head International Piano Competition, Horicon, Interlochen Arts Academy, Jacob Stockinger, Johannes Brahms, John O'Conor, Jupiter String Quartet, Lawrence University Conservatory of Music, Ludwig van Beethoven, master class, Music, Music education, National Endowment for the Arts, NEA, New York City, Oberlin College, Oberlin College Conservatory, Oshkosh, Pennsylvania State University, Piano, Pro Arte Quartet, Ripon, Ripon College, Rodman Center for the Arts, Scriabin, Shen Lu, tourism, United States, University of Wisconsin Arboretum, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Viola, Violin, Wisconsin, YouTube
Classical music: Which contemporary composer is Bach and which one is Handel? And is it peace or a truce? Philip Glass and Steve Reich appear together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Which one do you prefer?
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By Jacob Stockinger
The New York Times referred to them as Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel getting back together as contemporaries.
The Ear likes that comparison, although the older Baroque composers will doubtlessly remain a lot more influential than either of the newer contemporary ones.
The two “new guys” are the celebrated living American composers Steve Reich (below top) and Philip Glass (below bottom), both of them now 77 years old and considered pioneers of New Music and Minimalism.
The have apparently been estranged for quite a few years. But then they appeared last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to help mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of Nonesuch Records, a pioneering label that has been home to both of them. (Below is a photo of Philip Glass, left) and Steve Reich, by Betana Sikoria for The New York Times.)
By all accounts it was a momentous event, with sold-out houses, that stirred audiences to loud cheers when they played, including Steve Reich’s “Four Organs,” which is featured at the bottom in a YouTube video of the original 1970 recording that also featured Philip Glass. (Below, the two are performing the same work in a photo at BAM by Chad Batka for The New York Times.)
Here is a story from the Deceptive Cadence blog by National Public Radio (NPR):
And here are two stories — one is a preview for background and the other is a review — that compared their friendship to a piece of music by Reich -– from The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/arts/music/philip-glass-and-steve-reich-reunite-at-bam.html
The Ear tends to like the music of Philip Glass more than Steve Reich, but not always.
Still, there is no getting round the influence of both men.
Which composer do you generally prefer and why?
And what is your favorite piece by each?
The Ear wants to hear.
Tags: Arts, Bach, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Chamber music, Classical music, Compact Disc, Early music, George Frideric Handel, Glass, Glimmerglass Festival, Handel, Jacob Stockinger, Johann Sebastian Bach, minimalism, Music, National Public Radio, New York City, New York Times, Nonesuch Records, NPR, organ, Philip Glass, Reich, Steve Reich, Unbreakable (film), YouTube
Classical music: The well-named Nonesuch Records turns 50 –– and keeps being a pioneer in music from budget baroque, electronic music and contemporary classical music to folk, ragtime, rock and world music.
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By Jacob Stockinger
If you judge solely by the size of an operating budget and the number of albums released in a year, Nonesuch Records surely does not rank among the industry titans like Deutsche Grammophon, Decca or Sony Classical.
But what the label does, it does exceptionally well.
Of late, I am especially taken with Nonesuch because they feature two of my favorite pianists -– Richard Goode and Jeremy Denk (below) –- and of one my all-time favorite singers, soprano Dawn Upshaw, as well as the great Kronos Quartet.
Here is a link to the label’s website with forthcoming releases and a list of recording artists:
In addition, I find the sonic engineering Nonesuch provides is also top-notch. Much as I loved the old Emerson Quartet, when it moved from DG to Sony, it received inferior sonic engineering that favored an echoing or overly resonant ambient sound. Myself, I prefer a clean and close-up microphone that lets my own living room provide the performance space acoustics.
Anyway, I was listening to National Public Radio Wednesday afternoon last week and heard this terrifically informative report on the 50th anniversary of Nonesuch, which is based in New York City and the anniversary of which is being celebrated with special concerts and special releases.
The story particularly emphasized the foresight of the label’s longtime top boss Robert Hurwitz (below, on the left next to Kronos violist Hank Dett and producer Judith Sherman, who also recorded the world premiere commission of the Pro Arte Quartet centennial at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music.)
Using his own taste and instinct, Hurwitz anticipated the best-selling popularity of electronic music, Cuban music, ragtime music and many other genres. (Below in an interview he did at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that can be found on YouTube.) One person, it seems, can make a huge difference.
I do wish Hurwitz had offered a fuller explanation of why the wonderful and cheap budget recordings of Baroque music and early music that Nonesuch issued in the 1960s and 1970s -– the ones with the great art on the covers and the ones that hooked so many of us on relatively littkle-known works as well as masterpieces –- have not been remastered and reissued on CD.
But in any case, the NPR story provided a fascinating look at how a record company continued to expand and branch out – not by following listeners’ tastes and desires, but by ANTICIPATING them. It is kind of like what happened with Sony and the success of the Walkman.
Some things you just cannot judge by polls and surveys, no matter what the branding and PR experts say. They take personal vision and leadership and risk-taking. That is what the Nonesuch way.
Anyway, here is the link to the NPR story. I hope you find it compelling as The Ear did.
http://www.npr.org/2014/09/10/347155810/nonesuch-at-50-a-record-label-without-borders
Tags: Arts, Baroque, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Chamber music, Classical music, Cuban music, Dawn Upshaw, Deutsche Grammophon, Early music, Electronic music, Jacob Stockinger, Jeremy Denk, Kronos Quartet, Music, New Music, New York City, Nonesuch, Nonesuch Records, NPR, Piano, Pro Arte Quartet, Ragtime, Richard Goode, Singing, song, SONY, soprano, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Viola, vocal music, YouTube
Classical music: The final curtain falls tonight on the “People’s Opera – the City Opera of New York while across town the Metropolitan Opera launches the new season of the globally successful “Live in HD” satellite broadcasts.
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By Jacob Stockinger
This will be a memorable and historic day, especially in New York City, for opera.
It is memorable on two counts.
It is ironic that this afternoon marks the opening of the new season, the eighth since it started in 2006, of “The Met Live in HD,” a spectacularly successful program, that will open this season of 10 Metropolitan Opera productions with soprano superstar Anna Netrebko and globe-trotting conductor Valery Gergiev in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.”
The very profitable “Live in HD” series helps to explain the financial success of the world-famous Metropolitan Opera. The series, show in thousands of cinemas around the world, has changed the opera scene world-wide.
Here is a story from this blog with links to other stories:
(In Madison, the live satellite broadcast starts at 11:55 a.m. at Point Cinemas and Eastgate Cinemas. Admission is $24 for adults, $18 for children.)
But by far the more memorable and historic event will no doubt be the final curtain falling on the historic 70-year-old City Opera of New York. That will come tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music — lately the City Opera has left its home venue in Lincoln Center and traveled around the city to perform in a vain attempt to save money and fundraise from new audiences — where the company will give a performance of the new opera “Anna Nicole” (below) by Marc-Anthony Turnage, which some critics see as a fast-food, high calorie and low nutrition, work of art that helped cause the fall of City Opera. (See the YouTube video at the bottom.)
By all accounts, the City Opera has been plagued with financial problems for a few years. But the immediate cause of the failure was the company’s inability to raise $7 million by last Monday.
The Madison Symphony Orchestra’s longtime music director and conductor, maestro John DeMain (below, in a photo buy Prasad) has had a long history with the City Opera, ever since he was a student at the Juilliard School, as he discussed in an interview last summer with The Ear:
Here are three pieces I think that will giver you a good ideas of the City Opera and the fallout from its failure.
Here is a link to the story by Jeff Lunden that aired on NPR:
Here is a background story from The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/arts/music/new-york-city-opera-files-for-bankruptcy.html?_r=0
And here is another New York Times story with recollections of the opera company by staff and performers reported by senior music critic Anthony Tommasini (below is a 1976 photo with star soprano Beverly Sills on the left, stage director Sarah Caldwell in the center and City Opera then-director Julius Rudel:
There are a lot of devoted opera fans in the Madison area an around the world and especially in New York City.
What do they think of the demise of City Opera?
I hope they will leave an observation in the COMMENT section.
The Ear wants to hear.
Tags: Anna Netrebko, Anna Nicole Smith, Beverly Sills, Brooklyn Academy of Music, City Opera, Eugene Onegin, Jacob Stockinger, John DeMain, Julius Rudel, LIncoln Center, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Met Live in HD, Metropolitan Opera, New York City, New York City Opera, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Valery Gergiev, YouTube
Classical music news: For the next two weeks Madison will again become the summer capital of Cello World – and this time the public is invited to participate.
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By Jacob Stockinger
Attention, all cellists and cello lovers! Madison, Wisconsin is about to become the temporary Cello Capital of the world.
The cello (or violoncello, below) has been, is and will remain very popular, largely, The Ear suspects, because its beautiful sound so resembles the human voice and because it uses total body involvement and has a wonderful repertoire. Just go to Google Images and check out how many schools, colleges, universities and conservatories have a Cello Choir. You will be amazed at how many exist.
Starting this Friday, June 1, the biennial National Summer Cello Institute will take place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It will run through June 16, when it cuminates with a FREE and PUBLIC concert at 8:30 p.m. in Mills Hall. It will feature music by Bach, Bloch, Bruch and Villas Lobos,
Once again, the sessions will be under the general guidance of UW-Madison cellist and institute founder Uri Vardi (below top) and his wife Hagit Vardi (below bottom), who is a trained practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method and was a professional flutist in her native Israel. Another important figure is the institute site administrator, Cathy Spann, a UW alumna who is a cello teacher and performer and helped found the Wisconsin Cello Society with Uri Vardi.
And here are links to a two-part Q&A the Vardis did for The Ear last summer:
Famous cellists and teachers – including the well-known performer Ralph Kirshbaum, who now teaches at USC — will teach, many come from such prestigious music schools as Juilliard, Mannes and the University of Michigan among others. Students highly praise the results.
This year – for the first time – the public will be allowed to audit the clinics and master classes for $15. There will also be a FREE public concert by the Cello Choir on June 16 at 8:30 p.m. in Mills Hall. For a full schedule of events with times and places, visit:
http://www.music.wisc.edu/calendar?eventcategory_id=0&ensemble_id=0&faculty_id=0&month=6&year=2012
In addition from June 1-6 there will be on-going sessions and workshops called “Your Body Is Your Strad” — great title, no? Make me wonder: Is My Body My Steinway? Anyway, the sessions teach the Feldenkrais Method to help cellists relax and use their bodies to play more efficiently and make them less prone to injury.
The NSCI is co-sponsored by the UW-Madison School of Music and The College Music Society (CMS), and this year received additional grants from the UW Chancellor’s office, the Evjue Foundation (the charitable branch of The Capital Times newspaper) and the UW Anonymous Fund.
For more details about the Feldenkrais sessions – which are NOT open to the public for auditing – and about the National Summer Cello Institute, visit:
http://www.yourbodyisyourstrad.com/main/Home.html
And listen to the YouTube videos included in this posting:
Here is a schedule of highlights – where auditing fees apply:
June 3: Seminar with Dr. Mark Erickson: “Kinesiological Considerations for Musicians”
June 4: Seminar with Dr. Raymond Purdy: “Brain Plasticity and its Relevance to Musicians”
June 8: Seminar with Timothy Eddy (below): “Natural Resources”
June 11, 12: Seminar with Richard Aaron: “Teaching Young Children”
Cello master classes include:
June 7 and 9: Timothy Eddy
June 3, 4 and 8: Uri Vardi
June 12 and 13: Richard Aaron (below)
June 14 and 15: Ralph Kirshbaum
All events are at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music Mills Hall or Morphy Hall.
Here is the program for the FREE concert at 8:30 p.m. on June 16 in Mills Hall by the NSCI CELLO CHOIR, conducted by German Marcano: the “Chaconne” from Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor BWV 1004 by J.S. Bach (1685-1750) as arranged by Laszlo Varga; “Pájaro Guaracha” for cello ensemble by Paul Desenne (1959); “Rochela” for cello ensemble by Ricardo Lorenz (1961); “Kol Nidrei,” Op. 47, by Max Bruch (1838-1920) with soloist Uri Vardi and arranged for cello ensemble by Gunther Rinke; the “Bachianas Brasileiras” No. by Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959).
If you wonder about the credentials of the participants, here are a couple of impressive biographies:
PAUL DESENNE: The 2009 Guggenheim Fellow Paul Desenne (below) began composition studies at the age of 14 under Greek composer Iannis Ioannidis, and as a cellist, he became a founding member of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra in 1977. He moved to Paris and studied cello with Michel Strauss and Philippe Muller; composition with Marc-Olivier Dupin and Luc Ferrari. He won first prize in cello performance at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris – the dean of the jury was the great Pierre Fournier.
His works are performed around the world, with venues and festivals including Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York, Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Juilliard, MoMA‘s Summergarden series in New York, the Sonic Boom Festival, Focus! Festival, Caramoor, Faneuil Hall in Boston, among many others.
His works have been performed by the Simón Bolívar Symphonic Orchestra, Kremerata Baltica, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas, Boston Classical Orchestra, the Bogotá Philharmonic, I Musici de Montréal, the Miami Symphony, Nederlands Blasers Ensemble, the New Juilliard Ensemble, by various artist such as the Verdehr Trio, pianist Gabriela Montero, clarinetists Paquito d’Rivera and Jorge Montilla, flutists Luis Julio Toro, Marco Granados, Javier Montilla, and Jacques Zoon, violinists Alexis Cárdenas, Virginie Robilliard, and Jennifer Curtis, violinist/violist Nicholas Mann, and cellist Iseut Chuat, with conductors including Tania Léon, Olivier Grangean, Joel Sachs, Yuli Turovsky, among others
RICARDO LORENZ: Venezuelan-born Ricardo Lorenz has served as Composer-in-Residence in several programs and presenting organizations, such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Armonía Musicians Residency Program (1998-2003), the Billings Symphony (1998-1999), and Music in the Loft chamber music series (1999-2000).
Lorenz has also been the recipient of several other distinctions and awards from American Bandmasters Association, National Flute Association, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Organization of American States (OAS), Concert Artists Guild, Meet-the-Composer, Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Newhouse Foundation, Illinois Community College Trustees Association, and ASCAP.
Although Ricardo Lorenz has resided in the United States since 1982, he has always maintained close ties with Latin America. Between 1987 and 1992, Ricardo Lorenz held the position of Interim Director of the Indiana University Latin American Music Center.
During this time he established a network of composers from the continent and compiled the sourcebook Scores and Recordings at Indiana University’s Latin American Music Center (Indiana University Press, 1995) nominated to receive the 1996 Best General Reference Source Award by the Association of Recorded Sound Collections. Ricardo Lorenz holds a Ph.D. degree in composition from the University of Chicago and a Master of Music degree from Indiana University. He studied composition under Juan Orrego Salas, Shulamit Ran and Donald Erb.
He has taught at Indiana University, The University of Chicago, City Colleges of Chicago, and he is currently Associate Professor of Composition at Michigan State University.
Lorenz’ compositions are published by Lauren Keiser Music and Boosey & Hawkes. They can also be heard on the following record labels: Arabesque Recordings, Albany Records, Indiana University LAMC Series, Doublemoon Records (Turkey), Urtex Digital Classics (Mexico), SOMM Recordings (UK), Cedille Records, and Navona Records.
Tags: Alice Tully Hall, Bogotá Philharmonic, Boston Classical Orchestra, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Capital Times, Carnegie Hall, Cello, Faneuil Hall, Feldenkrais Method, Gabriela Montero, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Laszlo Varga, Madison, Michel Strauss, Michigan University, Orchestra, Philippe Muller, Pierre Fournier, Ralph Kirshbaum, Seminar, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin, Wisconsin-Madison, YouTube
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