Missouri Classical Music News

Leonard Slatkin, former chief baton shaker with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, has agreed to serve as musical adviser for the Nashville Symphony.

Slatkin, musical director at the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, will help the Nashville orchestra search for a replacement for conductor Kenneth Schermerhorn, who died last year.

Put on your dancing shoes (preferably Hungarian) and come dance with us on this Eroica release of "Music in the Hungarian Style," featuring pianist Jane Solose and five composers with a Hungarian twist. . . .

A full serving of Paprika!!!

A native of Niagra Falls, Canada, Jane Solose is of Hungarian-German parentage. She leads an active career as a featured concerto soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, duo-pianist, and master teacher.

• Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue (restored version)
  
• Amy Beach, Fireflies
  
• Fry, Little Whimsy

• Leo Weiner: Fox Dance
  
• Debussy: Bohemian Dance
  
• Liszt: Hungarian Raphsody #13 in a minor

Strict security measures at UK airports are having a "devastating impact" on musicians, says the Musicians' Union.

It says its members "are reporting significant lost earnings" because they are unable to take their instruments on board aircraft as hand luggage.

Many instruments are too fragile to be placed in the hold of an airliner, the union told the BBC News website. . . .

In the meantime, several musicians face potential legal action for breaking contracts to perform abroad, said assistant general secretary of the Musicians' Union, Horace Trubridge.

He says musicians cannot afford to risk putting violins or saxophones into the hold because "their instruments are often extremely valuable, with replacement costs in excess of £30,000".

"Should the current arrangements remain in place, we believe that they will have a devastating impact upon the working lives of professional musicians," he added.

A famed promoter who produces major jazz and general music events in more than a dozen cities around the world is considering launching a music event in Kansas City, possibly as early as next spring.

George Wein, 80, whose projects include launching the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, has been talking about the event to City Manager Wayne Cauthen for more than a year. If details can be worked out, he said the first Kansas City Jazz & Heritage Festival could be launched next spring. . . .

[The promoter] envisions a multi-stage, multi-location outdoor production that will appeal to a variety of music fans.

"It would feature country music, hip-hop, gospel, funk, some rock, folk, and, of course, emphasis on the jazz heritage of Kansas City," Wein said from his New York office. "The festival would become an annual event and, hopefully, like New Orleans, draw tens of thousands of people who would like to make a trip to spend a weekend in Kansas City."

Kushner has returned to the solo romantic repertory, with an album of works by Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann as well as one real rarity - a Sonata in G minor by Clara Schumann, the great muse and mentor for both men and one of the leading pianists and teachers of the 19th century. This last is a sweet, graceful work, filled with potent melodies, written in 1842 but never published until 150 years later.

Kushner's playing is exemplary throughout the album, but I am especially happy with her rendition of Schumann's "Kreisleriana," eight miniatures welling over with fantasy and invention that demand a pianist who will not only read the notes but give herself entirely to the composer's opulent, idiosyncratic cosmos. This is a beautiful disc.

In the Clara Schumann piece, written when she was only twenty-two, the emphasis is again on clarity and grace. Listen, for instance, to the light touch in the Scherzo; this is charm personified. Kushner brings out Clara's lyrical gift throughout the work. The sonata charts no new paths, but is worthy of being heard occasionally (or as often as one wants, with a recording as special as this one) and of being treasured for its modest beauty. . . .

Kushner, possibly best known from her duo-piano performances with the late Igor Kipnis, is a technically assured and musically perceptive performer. This recording is definitely worth having.

• Brahms, Sonata in C major, III
  
• Clara Schumann, Sonata in G minor, II
  
• Robert Schumann, Kreisleriana, Äußerst bewegt

• a worldwide list of universities with music departments maintained by Geoffrey Chew.
  
• Searchable list of music faculties from the College Music Society

Laptops are central to Pamela Z's music but her head is not buried in a computer screen. Instead, the self-described composer/performer and audio artist uses hand movements to create a blend of sung and spoken vocals, samples and delays.

"I want to still have the freedom to be with the audience as I'm performing," she says.

Her setup at the inaugural concert of the Edgetone Music Summit included laptops, faders, an amplified metal music stand, foot pedals and two sensors.

Radiant was an adjective applied frequently to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf by critics and others. It was used with justification. The word well described the famed and inimitable Schwarzkopf interpretations of certain heroines in Strauss operas, such as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier and the Countess in Capriccio. It was altogether appropriate to her performance in lieder, with Wolf and Strauss (again) to the fore, to which she turned when she gave up the stage.

And it was quite right for Elisabeth Schwarzkopf herself, with her mane of hair acting almost like a halo, which remained golden well into old age. She was totally professional in all that she did, right through to her personal appearance. She used to tell the story of her arrival, with her mother, in gloomy, bomb-torn Vienna. They had little or no money, but her mother insisted that their meagre luggage contained one impressive and expensive-looking dress for auditions.

Scholars charge that she ... became part of Joseph Goebbels` Reichstheaterkammer in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and that she made films for Goebbels. She also often gave performances at Nazi events and sang for SS troops. Schwarzkopf asserted until the 1980s that she had never officially joined the party, and famously shrugged off her early involvement with the Nazis as a move "akin to joining a union."

However, her talents on both the opera stage and as a recitalist performing the art songs called lieder were legendary. The coloratura soprano was famed for her interpretations of Strauss (particularly for her turns as the Marschallin in his opera Der Rosenkavalier and Countess Madeleine in Capriccio), Mozart (including roles in Don Giovanni, Le Nozze di Figaro and Cosi fan tutte), Hugo Wolf and Franz Lehar, among others. Stravinsky wrote the role of Anne Trulove in his opera The Rake`s Progress for Schwarzkopf.

John Tibbetts has been an author, professor, film historian, visual artist, and radio and TV commentator.

But nothing the 59-year-old University of Kansas film professor has done in his long career matches the vastness of “The World of Robert Schumann,” a 13-part radio series that is a pioneering approach to biography itself.

The fruit of 20 years of Tibbetts’ life, the series weaves musical excerpts into interviews with scholars, musicians and artists, then spices it up with dramatizations of critical moments in the 19th-century composer’s life — all stitched together with Tibbetts’ resonant, all-knowing radio voice.

It first aired on Lawrence’s Kansas Public Radio in 2003. In October it is headed for international syndication, a project of WFMT Radio Network of Chicago, funded by a $50,000 grant from Park University. . . .

Robinson said that in the United States alone he expects 100 to 150 stations to broadcast “The World of Robert Schumann.” Worldwide cumulative audience will be “certainly at least a million,” he said. “And I’m certainly being very conservative in my estimate.”

For Tibbetts, the series fulfills a lifelong dream of finding the truth about a historical subject through a variety of modern approaches.

people who like classical music well enough — they might listen to it on the radio, and maybe they’ll buy classical CDs or downloads — but don’t go to classical concerts. (Though they might bring a picnic basket when the New York Philharmonic plays free concerts in Central Park.) They’re one big part of that elusive new and mostly younger audience that the classical music world is looking for. There’s even a fancy term for them: “Culturally aware nonattenders.” But why aren’t they attending? If they like classical music, why don’t they buy tickets to hear it live? There are many answers to that (studies have been done), but what’s most stimulating is simply to ask these people why they don’t go to concerts, something that’s easy to do because everybody in the classical music world — or certainly everyone 50 and under — has friends like this. I’ve talked, just for instance, to one of my downstairs neighbors, an old friend of my wife’s, a woman in her 40s, who loves to listen to classical music at home. And while her reasons for not going to concerts are revealing, and even more so her thoughts about what might get her to attend (concerts should be shorter, start later in the evening, and be more informal), I was especially struck by how much these questions intrigued her. She herself thinks that something not quite right is going on, if New York is full of classical concerts and she’s not drawn to any of them.