Archive for April, 2014

« Older Entries

“Elisir” in inglese at the Deutsche Oper

Tuesday, April 29th, 2014

By Rebecca Schmid

transformEFVFTPA2

A new production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore at the Deutsche Oper turned out to be a very Anglophone evening. Staged by Irina Brook (daughter of the legendary director Peter Brook), the opera starred young American singers Heidi Stober and Dimitri Pittas. And for the first time, the company introduced English subtitles alongside German above the stage. With Americans and Brits comprising most of foreign visitors—and 22% of the overall audience—some buzz was noticeable in the theater. “I was able to follow by going back and forth!” said an American behind me.

The West Berlin house may have long lost its status as the city’s wealthiest opera company, offering only three new productions next season, but it remains the principal destination for Italian repertoire and can still boast stars such as Joseph Calleja and Joyce DiDonato (even if only in concert stagings). While the young cast of Elisir might seem lightweight when held up against the roster of the Staatsoper’s most recent new production, a Tannhäuser starring big names in the Fach such as Peter Seiffert, Rene Pape and Anne Petersen, Brook’s production met with not a single boo—something I cannot remember during my four years’ time in Berlin.

Credit of course also lies with the ledes’ talent and energy. Stober is developing into a local star, singing with the Deutsches-Symphonie Orchester and Radiosymphonie Orchester alongside high-profile appearances at the Deutsche Oper, where she has been an ensemble member since 2008. She combines a pretty but ripe lyric soprano with a generous stage presence, and her grasp of the bel canto idiom has steadily improved. Brook casts the heroine Adina, a wealthy landowner is betrothed to the soldier Belcore, as the director of a theater who is, rather than a coquette, literally running the show. Stober executed the role with charm, her voice growing even richer in the final scene when she and Nemorino—here a cleaning man who woos Adina after acquiring the elixir of love (really, a bottle of wine)—finally kiss.

Pittas was stronger in solo than ensemble numbers, when his voice tended to sound thin, but he executed the critical third-act aria, “Una furtiva lagrima,” with affecting emotion and impressive breath control. One imagines he will only improve in the coming years. It was the Italian bass Nicola Alaimo, however, who stole the show as the itinerant medicine man Dr. Dulcamara. Addressing the audience from a catwalk in front of the orchestra, his final barcarole boasting the powers of his magic potion carried effortlessly above the orchestra with a natural sense of rubato and beautiful diction. The German baritone Simon Pauly found himself in less familiar waters, his coloratura in the opening scene lacking any sense of style not to mention legato, but he evoked the macho Belcore with emphatic tone and a touch a humor that fit well with Brook’s direction. As the peasant girl Gianetta, Alexandra Hutton impressed with lithe dance moves and a clean soubrette.

The chorus of the Deutsche Oper was in typically fine form (preparation by Thomas Richter), and choreography by Martin Buczkó exploited the house stage’s wide dimensions to fine effect with ensemble scenes such as the Act One finale on the village square. In Brook’s production, there is not one stage but two, the latter part of the Teatro Adina (sets by Noëlle Ginefri). This stage-within-a-stage concept pays no attention to Regietheater precedents, however, existing simply as a place where the villagers can observe numbers such as the classic duet of Dulcamara and Adina about a rich senator or a troupe of dancers rehearsing. The troupe’s rustic red caravans provided the perfect welcome for Dulcamara with an eccentric, gypsy-like cart.

Down in the pit, regular guest conductor Roberto Rizzi Brignoli coaxed spritely rhythms from the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper and achieved an excellent balance with the singers. But the instrumentalists were not able to match his intuitive understanding of the music’s finer details. The woodwinds in particular sounded unenthused and lackluster.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed

Big Week for ECM

Monday, April 28th, 2014

 

This is a big week for ECM — the label is releasing four new CDs of concert music, including CDs featuring Duo Gazzana, Erkki-Sven Tűűr, and Tigran Mansurian. All of these discs are worthy of scrutiny, but the one that I have spent the most time with is a recording of chamber music by English composer Harrison Birtwistle. It includes his recent Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano (2011), a piece that combines pointillism, expressionism, and Birtwistle’s fascination with corruscating, out-of-sync clock-like rhythms. Violinist Lisa Batiashvilli, cellist Adrian Brendel, and pianist Till Fellner give a taut, highly charged reading of the piece. Elsewhere, baritone Roderick Williams and soprano Amy Freston supply controlled, nuanced, and often ethereal performances of settings of Niedecker and Rilke, all from the nineties and aughts. These pieces show a tendency towards concision, lithe linear writing, and, in places, an affecting lyricism that one does not always find in Birtwistle’s earlier music. Recommended.

 

Posted in The New Classical | Comments Closed

LeeSaar’s Dancing Tongues

Monday, April 28th, 2014

By Rachel Straus

Toward the end of LeeSaar’s Princess Crocodile, seven female dancers line up, open their red-painted mouths and—like it’s the most mundane thing in the world—wildly wag their tongues at the audience. This culminating act lasts a good minute. It’s oddly fitting, and it becomes the theatrical highlight of the husband-wife team Saar Harari and Lee Sher’s newest work, seen April 10 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Howard Gilman Performance Space.

LeeSaar The Company

In the previous 50 minutes of Princess Crocodile, the dancers juxtapose gracefulness and grotesquery, anger and happiness, feminine wiles and sangfroid—in second-by-second alternations. Consequently, when all of these contrasting, expressive modes fuse in the imperiously aggressive, tongue wagging lineup, it’s a huge relief.

These princess crocodiles seem to be saying, “Fetch me my crown. Or I’ll eat you!”

The lineup felt like the most authentic event in the show, perhaps because the dancers knew that it was silly and straightforward (instead of complex and profound). The wagging underscored the troupe’s strength too: its dancers’ tongues are as limber and expressive as their limbs, and that’s something to talk about.

Princess Crocodile, according to the press release, is about the “contradictions of female identity.” Created in two residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, the choreography is influenced by the movement style Gaga, created by Ohad Naharin. Though the choreographers never danced with Naharin, the artistic director of Batsheva Dance Company, they are friends with him and teach Gaga classes, rooted in improvisatory, sensed perceptions to explore range of movement. Like Naharin, Sher and Harari also set their work to a collage of music, which is also assembled to create juxtapositions. In Princess Crocodile, an excerpt from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 precedes the song Good Times by Animal House.

The most provocative use of music occurs in the work’s opening. Under a pool of luminous light (designed by Avi Yona Bueno), dancer Hyerin Lee sits on the floor in a swastika position (for dancers it’s called Graham fourth). She sharply gestures in response to the solo violin in the prologue of Stravinsky’s Apollo. For anyone acquainted with Balanchine’s pre-1978 Apollo, its prologue to Stravinsky’s music featured a lone figure: the mortal Leda. She gives birth to her immortal son. When Balanchine cut the Leda role, his Apollo became that much more male centric. It’s no accident that by quoting Leda, Harari and Sher are making a feminist statement. Their decade-long, New York-based troupe has always been all female, and much of their repertoire investigates Western image-making of women. When Lee dances angry and laughs like a madwoman, Balanchine’s disappeared Leda returns to the New York stage.

This feminist approach is admirable, but for all of Princess Crocodile’s good intentions, the dance seems to build rather than dismantle patriarchal presentations of women. LeeSaar dancers aren’t figures of agency who act with definitiveness. They are constantly changing their minds about which direction to travel through space, how to extend their limbs, and to look at the audience. The structure of the vignettes, let alone the sheer number of them, becomes a viewing challenge, particularly because they end ambiguously (such as when two women smell, nuzzle and kiss each other. Is this a lesbian scene? Are they schoolgirls? Are they crocodiles sharing the sun?). The emphasis on ambiguity in Princess Crocodile, and the frontal approach in much of the choreography, brings to mind the stereotype of the fickle woman, unable to decide how a piece of clothing looks on her in a dressing room mirror. So, she looks and looks. This idea is enforced  by Bueno’s set design, which resembles a high-end dressing room, with its opalescent silken curtains. The curtains fall on three sides of the stage. Is the proscenium supposed to be a mirror?

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

While Princess Crocodile leaves one wondering what Harari and Sher think they are expressing, there is no doubt that they beautifully develop their dancers. Their off- kilter balances, gravity rich squats, and waving spines are physicalized versions of introspective humming. When Candice Schnurr takes gigantic walks on invisible high heels to the flamenco song Que Sen Ven Desde El Conquero (translation: Just Coming from the Conqueror), she magically embodies a gazelle genetically crossed with a defiant gypsy dancer.

 

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in The Torn Tutu | Comments Closed

Sweeney, Perahia, and Honeck

Thursday, April 24th, 2014

By Sedgwick Clark

I often attend some 20 concerts a month, with many going unreported. The death on April 2 of my long-time friend and colleague Harris Goldsmith occupied my thoughts completely, and my tribute to him appeared as a Musicalamerica.com news story on April 7. Instead of several separate reviews, last week’s blog dealt with a single conductor I admire, Gianandrea Noseda, who led three orchestras in different venues in the New York area: The Met Orchestra in two Met productions, the Israel Philharmonic in Newark, and the Philadelphia Orchestra on its home territory, Verizon Hall. So let’s try to catch up some of those concerts I’ve neglected in the past month, beginning with three in March.

The NYPhil’s Sweeney Todd

Some old poops think the Philharmonic should stick exclusively to the symphonic repertory. That’s balderdash—at least regarding classic American music theater, which is so much a part of our heritage. When the Phil can gather the superb likes of Bryn Terfel (Sweeney), Emma Thompson (Mrs. Lovett), and Audra McDonald (the Beggar Woman), along with a topnotch supporting cast, marshalled by Music Director Alan Gilbert at his best, in a semi-staging of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney, I’ll savor that any day over another Dvořák “New World,” which the orchestra has been playing to death for the past 25 years. (I know the Phil has a certain imprimatur on the symphony, as it premiered it in Carnegie Hall in 1893, and it is a great piece, but come on, guys.) Sweeney was taped for a Live from Lincoln Center broadcast on PBS, soon to be announced. Don’t miss it.

Murray Perahia

Once again, Perahia offered the most satisfying recital I heard all year, on March 9 at Avery Fisher Hall, a venue whose drier, more focused acoustics I prefer for solo recitals over Carnegie Hall. Among the American pianist’s exquisite performances were a reflective Bach French Suite No. 4, a Beethoven “Appassionata” Sonata with expressive hills and dales yet all the requisite fire one could desire, a playful Schumann Papillons (over which I recall Harris especially enthused; he always loved Perahia’s playing), and three Chopin Etudes and the Scherzo No. 2 that benefitted from the pianist’s refusal to overpower the works’ virtuosity. There was a time when Perahia unfortunately reacted adversely to critical descriptions of his performances as “small scale” by playing more forcefully, which may have led to the injuries that caused a temporary suspension of his career. For the third season in a row such tendencies appear happily to be in the past. There is no other pianist I would rather hear.

Honeck, not Dudamel, at the Phil

What a spate of conductor cancellations in New York of late. At Carnegie Hall’s Vienna Festival, Daniele Gatti cancelled Wozzeck on February 28 due to “acute inflammation of the tendon in both shoulders,” with Franz Welser-Möst stepping in [blog 3-14-14]. Gatti’s appearance in a Vienna Philharmonic concert on March 15 was also cancelled, with Christoph Eschenbach subbing. Two weeks ago, Lorin Maazel cancelled two Munich Philharmonic all-Strauss concerts at Carnegie due to “illness” (after he had stood in for Gatti in a Vienna Phil concert in Los Angeles). Valery Gergiev, Maazel’s controversial successor as music director in Munich next year, flew in from London for one day to conduct the first Carnegie concert, cancelling a concert in Siberia in the process. Fabio Luisi, in town to rehearse the Met’s La Cenerentola, led the second Carnegie concert.

At the end of March, Gustavo Dudamel cancelled a highly anticipated (for once the phrase is accurate!) engagement at the NYPhil due to “severe flu,” not long after a Los Angeles Philharmonic American tour that included a pair of Lincoln Center concerts [blog 3-20-14]. In his stead was Pittsburgh Symphony Music Director Manfred Honeck leading Dudamel’s program, Claude Vivier’s Orion and Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. I’ve been waiting for Honeck to impress me as much as he apparently does my colleagues. This time I walked out thinking he must be deaf, or at least soon will be. The ferocity with which he unleashed the Philharmonic brass in Avery Fisher Hall was unmerciful to the audience, the players’ longevity, and to Bruckner’s reputation.  The night I attended, an audience member let go with a loud “whew” during the long silence following the triple-forte onslaught before the third-movement coda.  A couple of sensitive moments, such as the velvety string attack in bar 155 of the finale, were reminiscent of the 1966 Karajan recording, but otherwise I yearned for Erich Leinsdorf, who knew how to get a warm, idiomatic tone from this traditionally anti-Bruckner orchestra. I enjoyed the Vivier piece, despite or perhaps because of its nods to Varèse, Messiaen, and the opening of Das Rheingold and would not mind hearing it again.

 

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

4/25 Metropolitan Opera at 7:30. Rossini: La Cenerentola. Fabio Luisi, cond. Joyce DiDonato (Cinderella), Javier Camarena (Don Ramiro, the prince), Alessandro Corbelli (Don Magnifico, the wicked stepfather), Patricia Risley and Rachelle Durkin (Tisbe and Clorinda, the wicked stepsisters), Luca Pisaroni  (Alidoro).

4/28 Symphony Space at 7:30. Cutting Edge Concerts/Victoria Bond. Performances by Sequitur, loadbang, and Mivos. New works by Harold Meltzer, Andy Kozar, Carlos Cordeiro, Jeffrey Gavatt, William Lang, Victor Lowrie, Josh Modney, Olivia De Prato, and Mariel Roberts.

4/29 Zankel Hall at 6:00. Augustin Hadelich, violin; Steven Schick, percussion; Paul Lazar, actor. David Lang: Mystery Sonatas (world premiere). John Cage: Indeterminacy and 27’10.554” for a percussionist.

4/30 Carnegie Hall. Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Robert Spano. Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Evelina Dobracheva, soprano; Anthony Dean Griffey, tenor; Stephen Powell, baritone. Britten: War Requiem.

5/1 Carnegie Hall. Richard Goode, piano. Janáček: On the Overgrown Path, Book I (selections). Schumann: Davidsbündlertänze. Debussy: Préludes, Book I.

5/2 Carnegie Hall. Philadelphia Orchestra/Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor; Lisa Batiashvili, violin. Barber: Adagio for Strings. Bartók: Violin Concerto No. 1. Bruckner: Symphony No. 9.

5/5 Carnegie Hall at 7:30. Spring for Music. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Jacques Imbrailo, baritone; Westminster Symphonic Choir; Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Christopher Rouse: Requiem (N.Y. premiere).

5/6 Carnegie Hall at 7:30. Spring for Music. Seattle Symphony/Ludovic Morlot. John Luther Adams: Become Ocean (N.Y. premiere). Varèse: Déserts. Debussy: La Mer.

5/7 Carnegie Hall at 7:30. Spring for Music. Rochester Philharmonic/Michael Christie; singers from the Eastman School of Music Opera Department. Hanson: Merry Mount (complete concert performance).

5/8 Avery Fisher Hall at 7:30. New York Philharmonic/Bernard Haitink; Leonidas Kavakos, violin. Webern: Im Sommerwind. Berg: Violin Concerto. Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (Eroica).

Posted in Why I Left Muncie | Comments Closed

How Much Is That Artist In The Window?

Thursday, April 24th, 2014

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.   

Dear Law and Disorder

My ensemble has been approached by a composer/musician who would like them to do two days of recording for music that she is composing for a theater company. My understanding is that this theater company does quite a bit of touring. Do musicians typically get royalties each time the recording is performed or would this just be a buyout situation with the composer?

As, typically, most musicians rarely get paid what they deserve, I’d rather find a better standard.

We don’t often like to think of performing artists as a commodity, but it situations such as this that remind us why show business is a “business.” Like pricing any other product or service, it always comes down to how badly the buyer wants what you’re selling and how badly you want to sell it to them. In this case, you’ve got two things to sell: (1) the time and talent of the artists to show up for two days and perform whilst being recorded and (2) the right to use the recording of their performance. You can sell them together or separately. You can sell all of the rights or only some of the rights. You can also include any restrictions, limitations, or conditions that you feel might be beneficial to the ensemble. Unlike selling used cars, there’s no Blue Book where you can look up pre-determined values.  Nothing is standard.  Figuring out what to charge and how to charge ultimately depends on an analysis of the specific circumstances of how the recording will be used:

Will the recording be used as background music or as a featured part of the theater company’s production? Will there be other recordings by other prominent artists used during the same performances or as part of the same production? Will the theater company be using the recording for performances at commercial venues or PACs? What is the commercial potential of the production? Do they intend to use the recording to produce and sell a soundtrack or just use the recording for performances? Does being associated with this particular composer or the theater company bring any value or heightened exposure to your ensemble? Is your ensemble more interested in the exposure or the money? Would the recording be something the ensemble would like to use for its own purposes?

Personally, some of the terms I’ve negotiated myself in similar situations as yours have included:

  • Granting the rights to use the recording only for live stage performances, but not for soundtracks, CDs, or digital downloads, each of which would require additional fees and payments.
  • Granting the rights to use the recording for live stage performances except for Broadway, Off-Broadway, or 1st class runs.
  • Granting the rights to use the recording only for a specific period of time, after which, if they wanted to continue using it, they have to re-negotiate.
  • Granting the rights to use the recording in exchange for booking the artists to perform live for a specific number of performances.

Such arrangements can include, where warranted, flat fees or royalties, or a combination of both, or even a percentage of box office from each performance. You can also request that the ensemble be credited in all programs or liner notes, or request that the ensemble get the rights to use the recording for its own promotional purposes. Like any negotiation, the other side may refuse, or propose its own terms, but you need to start somewhere–and, like any good auctioneer, you never want to start the bidding too low.

While it’s certainly tempting to keep things simple and just do a buyout where you charge a flat fee consisting of the engagement fee for the performance and a fee for the rights to the recording, you may be missing out on an opportunity to get creative and explore the possibilities to look beyond the fees and maximize the potential of the entire project to benefit your ensemble.

__________________________________________________________________

For additional information and resources on this and otherGG_logo_for-facebook legal and business issues for the performing arts, visit ggartslaw.com

To ask your own question, write to lawanddisorder@musicalamerica.org.

All questions on any topic related to legal and business issues will be welcome. However, please post only general questions or hypotheticals. GG Arts Law reserves the right to alter, edit or, amend questions to focus on specific issues or to avoid names, circumstances, or any information that could be used to identify or embarrass a specific individual or organization. All questions will be posted anonymously.

__________________________________________________________________

THE OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER:

THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE!

The purpose of this blog is to provide general advice and guidance, not legal advice. Please consult with an attorney familiar with your specific circumstances, facts, challenges, medications, psychiatric disorders, past-lives, karmic debt, and anything else that may impact your situation before drawing any conclusions, deciding upon a course of action, sending a nasty email, filing a lawsuit, or doing anything rash!

 

 

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Agents, Artist Management, Arts Management, Contracts, Copyrights, Law and Disorder: Performing Arts Division, Licensing, Music Rights, Recordings | Comments Closed

This Week: Yeahwon Shin in Concert in the US

Monday, April 21st, 2014

Vocalist Yeahwon Shin is appearing in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore this week, performing material from her ECM recording Lua Ya. Joined by versatile pianist Aaron Parks and accordionist Rob Curto,  Shin crafts elegant lullabies (many of the pieces incorporate Korean children songs) that are one part classical music, one part free improvisation, and one part folk music. There is a delicate elegance to the music on Lua Ya that prevents the material from ever feeling cloying or sentimental. On the contrary, the long lyrical lines and supple interplay explored by these musicians leave a most favorable impression.

Event Details
April 23 – NYC – Rubin Museum: http://www.rubinmuseum.org/events/load/2550
April 24 – Baltimore – An Die Musik Live!: http://andiemusiklive.com/
April 25 – Philadelphia Museum of Art: http://www.philamuseum.org/calendar/?id=25&et=0&dt=April_2014

Posted in The New Classical | Comments Closed

Gianandrea Noseda Scores in the Outskirts

Friday, April 18th, 2014

By Sedgwick Clark

My introduction to Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda was his emotionally devastating performance of Britten’s War Requiem with the London Symphony Orchestra at Lincoln Center in October 2011. Since then I’ve made a point of hearing as many of his New York concerts as possible. He has been hereabouts for the past three months, leading a glowing, ambitious new edition of Borodin’s unfinished Prince Igor and a warmly expressive Andrea Chénier at the Met, a revelatory Israel Philharmonic tour concert on March 29 at NJPAC in Newark, and Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony (“Organ”) with the Philadelphia Orchestra on home territory in Verizon Hall on April 13, which I happily heard for the first time with a genuine pipe organ.

Let’s deal with the revelation straight off—the first time in my experience that the Israel Philharmonic, of which Noseda is principal guest conductor, has sounded like a decent orchestra. What is an orchestra supposed to do: play together, right? For at least 35 years, to my ears, the IPO has sounded like an orchestra at odds with itself—a group of aspirant soloists, to be kind; or as a fellow music lover used to say, a ragtag bunch of gypsies. With coarse, arid tone besides. Wonder of wonders, Noseda had these musicians playing an all-French program not only precisely but also beautifully in NJPAC’s warm, clear acoustics.

I arrived late for Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande suite (an indication, perhaps, of my trepidation at hearing the IPO after years of avoidance). But Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) suite and the second suite from Daphnis et Chloé instantly put me at ease with their excellent ensemble, transparent textures, and tonal beauty. The IPO’s heretofore unruly strings positively shimmered under their conductor’s leadership. Now, Maestro Noseda, how about Ravel’s complete ballet scores of these works with the Israelis?

Pungent woodwinds and dynamic timpani were only some of the welcome details in Noseda’s Berlioz Symphonie fantastique. He took the first-movement repeat but not the usually ignored one in the brief March to the Scaffold; I would have loved the repeat because of the delightfully grotesque blat of the trombone (or was it an actual opheclide, as Berlioz requests?). I heartily approve that he included the optional cornet in the second movement, but I thought the player too reticent to fully register the cackling ostinato rhythms and military color of the instrument. The balance was the same on a live recording Noseda made with the IPO in January, released by Helicon in time for the tour, so it was evidently what he intended. If the malevolence of the Witches’ Sabbath finale seemed a bit tame to me, I nevertheless found much instrumental detail to savor. Noseda’s accomplishments with this orchestra remain amazing.

Two weeks later he was on the podium of one of the world’s great ensembles, the Philadelphia Orchestra, leading Saint-Saëns’s “Organ” Symphony. Astonishingly, neither of New York’s major concert halls has a real organ. One must travel to Philly or Boston to hear one in a proper-size hall. Noseda certainly has the measure of this glorious Romantic masterwork. Moreover, no recording ever made, in any living or listening room I know, no matter how capacious and acoustically treated, can beat the Verizon Hall pipe organ’s fortissimo outburst in the flesh.

In the program’s first half, Noseda led Symphonic Fragments from the opera La donna serpente by Alfredo Casella. The conductor has performed and recorded works by Casella and other lesser-known 20th-century Italian composers. The music is tuneful and pleasant when so expertly performed. But Respighi he is not, except when parts of Fountains of Rome creep into the beginning of the second fragment.

Canadian violinist James Ehnes’s reputation for beautiful tone was vividly on display in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, a lyrical work contemporaneous with Romeo and Juliet. Where some fiddlers find traces of diablerie and sarcasm from the composer’s earlier style, Ehnes emphasized the creamy melodies and long line to luscious effect, ideally accompanied by Noseda. The two have recorded all of Prokofiev’s violin music for Chandos.

Noseda will conduct Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (“Choral”) in New York at the Mostly Mozart Festival in August, and on December 7 at Carnegie Hall he will lead the Teatro Regio Torino, of which he has been music director since 2007, in a concert performance of Rossini’s William Tell.

 

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

4/21 Symphony Space at 7:30. Cutting Edge Concerts/Victoria Bond. Blue Streak Ensemble. Robert Paterson: Sextet. Margaret Brouwer: Inner Voices (premiere). Victoria Bond: Clara (excerpts). David T. Little: descanso (waiting). Jonathan Tunick: Trio (premiere). Margaret Brouwer: Shattered Glass (N.Y. premiere).

4/23 Zankel Hall at 6:00. Tuvan Throat Singing. Pärt: Passio.

Posted in Why I Left Muncie | Comments Closed

Beware of Easy Solutions

Thursday, April 17th, 2014

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.

A conductor we manage has been invited to conduct one of the orchestras of a University in the United States later this year. He has worked there once before when he conducted performances when he had a J-1 visa. On this occasion however due to the short length of the engagement (6 days), they have suggested that he should apply for a B-1/WB Business Status. The advantages of this is that the artist can do it himself, online, up to 72 hours before his departure and that the cost is approximately $4. The person I am dealing with at the University sent me “guidelines” which say that a person can enter the US on B-1/WB Business Status Visa, and receive an honorarium, as well as be reimbursed for travel and a per diem, if they will be a “lecturer or speaker” at a university or academic institution. They also told me that because our conductor is a citizen of a country that participates in the visa waiver program, he doesn’t even need to apply for such a visa and that it will be granted at the airport when he arrives. All he needs to do is register online for ESTA. This sounds too good to be true! I am very worried that this will not work. Otherwise, the university says we will need to get another J-1 visa.

Unfortunately…or, fortunately…your instincts are correct. The process for getting artists approved to perform in the United States can be so daunting to some that it is understandable that they look for easy or simple answers. With any legal issues—not just visas, but taxes, licenses, contracts, insurance, etc.—if something sounds too good to be true, that’s often the case.

B-1/WB Business Status (which, more accurately, is simply referred to as a B-1/B-2) is just the more formal name for “visitor status.” A B-1/B-2 (“visitor”) visa allows individuals to enter to the United States for visitor activities (touring, shopping, etc.) as well as certain business activities (meetings and conferences). B-1/B-2 status also permits an individual to be a lecturer or speaker at a university or academic institution, and receive an honorarium as well as travel reimbursement and a per diem.

A B-1/B-2 (“visitor”) visa can only be issued by a US Consulate. However, if an individual is a citizen of a country that participates in the Visa Waiver Program, then, by registering on-line with ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization), he or she does not need to obtain an actual visa and are allowed to enter the US as visitors with only a valid passport. All of the restrictions applicable to visitors will apply—including the too often overlooked fact that an artist can never perform in visitor status, regardless of whether or not the artist is paid or unpaid.

Contrary to the “guidelines” you were provided by the university, your conductor is NOT a “lecturer or speaker.” If he is being engaged to conduct an orchestra then that is considered a “performance”, not a lecture or speech, and he is required to have an O-1 visa. The school is also wrong about the J-1 visa. This is not applicable. That is for an “exchange” program, which is also inapplicable in the case. Your conductor needs to obtain an O-1 visa.

 

_________________________________________________________________

For additional information and resources on this and other GG_logo_for-facebooklegal and business issues for the performing arts, visit ggartslaw.com

To ask your own question, write to lawanddisorder@musicalamerica.org.

All questions on any topic related to legal and business issues will be welcome. However, please post only general questions or hypotheticals. GG Arts Law reserves the right to alter, edit or, amend questions to focus on specific issues or to avoid names, circumstances, or any information that could be used to identify or embarrass a specific individual or organization. All questions will be posted anonymously.

__________________________________________________________________

THE OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER:

THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE!

The purpose of this blog is to provide general advice and guidance, not legal advice. Please consult with an attorney familiar with your specific circumstances, facts, challenges, medications, psychiatric disorders, past-lives, karmic debt, and anything else that may impact your situation before drawing any conclusions, deciding upon a course of action, sending a nasty email, filing a lawsuit, or doing anything rash!

 

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Artist Management, Law and Disorder: Performing Arts Division, Touring, Visas | Comments Closed

An Extraordinary Musical Pilgrimage

Thursday, April 17th, 2014

By: Edna Landau

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

House concerts are a wonderful way to discover new talent. My friend Michael Reingold, who is the founder and Artistic Director of New York House Concerts, recently invited me to hear a young American cellist by the name of Dane Johansen in a concert consisting of two Bach solo suites and a solo suite by Gaspar Cassadó. I knew very little about Mr. Johansen upon arriving at the concert but quickly ascertained that Michael Reingold’s advance words of praise were well-deserved. What really captured my attention, apart from the very fine playing, was the following note in the program:

Dane’s Walk to Fisterra: In May 2014, Dane Johansen will travel to Spain and walk close to 600 miles – with his cello – along the Camino de Santiago and record Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello in ancient historic sites along the route. To learn more about Dane’s journey to Spain and to help him with a contribution, please visit WalkToFisterra.com.

As someone who rarely walks more than two miles a day (without a cello), you can imagine my fascination with the prospect of Dane’s journey. Was this a stunt designed to attract media attention? I introduced myself to him after the concert and had an opportunity to meet with him over coffee a few weeks later.

Dane explained to me that El Camino de Santiago is a famous pilgrimage route dating back to medieval times, which culminates in Santiago de Compostela and Fisterra in northwestern Spain. It attracts thousands of walkers a year, some of whom are ardent hikers and others who welcome the spiritual reflection that the historic route inspires. For Dane, the idea of undertaking this journey dates back to 2008 when he was talking to a friend at the Marlboro Music Festival who had just walked 2000 miles along the Appalachian Trail and whose next adventure was to be the Camino de Santiago. A native of Alaska, Dane’s passion for the outdoors has always taken a close second to his passion for the cello. He had been studying the Bach suites for many years and was seeking a way to experience them, and eventually record them, in a new and meaningful way. The historic spirituality of the route seemed to be a perfect match for the spirituality he has always derived from his daily commitment to music and the cello, as well as these suites in particular. He writes on his website:

Generations of cellists have considered mastery of the Suites a pinnacle of artistic achievement and a rite of passage. A life spent in pursuit of such a singular goal is like a pilgrimage; it is endless and requires extreme effort, daily commitment, and absolute resolve.

Realizing that there are hundreds of churches along the route, Dane began to envision a project that would not only allow him to perform and deepen his mastery of this music but to meet young musicians in Spain and offer them master classes along the way.

Dane’s plans have now blossomed into a six-week journey that will see him traveling with an eight-member team including audio engineers, award-winning filmmakers and a three-time Grammy Award winning music producer, perorming in 36 churches along the way and teaching at regional conservatories. Their goal will be to merge the narrative of Bach’s cello suites, the Camino de Santiago, and memorable moments of human interaction into what should be a visually stunning and compelling documentary film. They will be equipped with state of the art equipment that will enable them to capture the particular acoustic of each venue and recreate it in the film, allowing the viewer to be sonically transported to the original locations while watching footage that will accompany Dane in live recitals upon his return.

The beauty of Dane’s Walk to Fisterra is that it incorporates every aspect of what is important to him as a musician and a person. He will be traveling on foot to new locations every day where he can share his fascination and passion for Bach’s music with other people.  A dedicated teacher, both privately and at the Juilliard School, he has reached out to cellists in Spain via colleagues at various conservatories to help him organize master classes and mentoring sessions with young cellists along the way. He told me the poignant story of his special relationship with cellist Bernard Greenhouse, a treasured mentor with whom he spent considerable amounts of time during the last five years of his life. Dane had asked himself, “if you could study with anyone in the world, who would it be?”  The answer was clear – Bernard Greenhouse – but he had no idea how to get to him. Menahem Pressler kindly provided Mr. Greenhouse’s address after a coaching of Schubert’s E-flat Major Piano Trio at the Steans Institute in Chicago.  Dane wrote to him – one letter every month for ten months! One day, as Dane was mowing the lawn at his parents’ house, he received a call from Mr. Greenhouse who said he’d love to hear him play. He mentioned that he was giving a master class in Frankfurt and Dane jumped at the chance to participate. He subsequently played for him on a regular basis and spent several weeks at a time with him at his home in Cape Cod.  Greenhouse, who himself felt privileged to count the great cellist Pablo Casals as his mentor, seemed to welcome the chance to continue the tradition with the young Dane Johansen.

As I write this article, Dane is launching a Kickstarter campaign through his fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, to raise the money he needs to bring his team to Spain. I have no doubt that he will be successful in this endeavor, just as I have no reservations about his ability to walk 100 miles a week. (He has been training for a while by walking the length of Manhattan  with his cello.) This project could be described as “long distance” in more than one way. Dane conceived of it six years ago and it was part of his proposal to the Artist Diploma Committee at Juilliard, in which he described what he hoped to accomplish during his time in the program. It could have been derailed at various times along the way and he hopes that the realization of this odyssey will encourage others not to give up on their dreams. He is grateful for the support of many, including his colleagues in the Escher String Quartet, who gave their blessing to this project two years ago.

I look forward to following Dane on his journey through a blog he will be posting on www.walktofisterra.com.  I also fervently hope that the excellent team that will accompany him will create such an exemplary film that it will be singled out as “Best Documentary Film” at a future Academy Awards ceremony. That would be a thrilling culmination to this musical pilgrimage, bringing honor to its visionary creator and the incomparably profound and beautiful six cello suites of Johann Sebastian Bach.

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

© Edna Landau 2014

Posted in Ask Edna, Listening to Your Inner Voice, Uncategorized | Comments Closed

“Tristan” and “L´Italiana” in Paris

Wednesday, April 16th, 2014

28165_256[1]By Rebecca Schmid

While Berlin is famous for its three-house opera system, Paris boasts at least as rich a cultural landscape. Last week, Opéra Garnier revived an Andrei Serban production of Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri while Cecilia Bartoli starred in another Rossini opera—Otello—at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. At the Opéra Bastille, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde returned in Peter Sellars’ 2005 take featuring video art by Bill Viola. Parallel to the event, Viola was featured in an exhibit at the Grand Palais—the first video art retrospective in the history of France’s national galleries.

Sellars’ Tristan, commissioned as it was under the tenure of Gerard Mortier, took on its own historic importance, prompting a moment of silence for the late impresario before the first performance on April 8. The production proves a living memory of Mortier’s risk-taking, with scenery consisting exclusively of Viola’s videos and a simple black platform on the Bastille’s enormous stage. The setting, much like the Passions Sellars has staged for the Berlin Philharmonic, draws attention to the director’s mastery of interpersonal dynamics (in German, Personenregie ), while the video art—at its best— serves to immerse the viewer in characters’ emotional worlds. Although it took a few scenes to become accustomed images such as those of Viola and his partner dunking their faces in water before Kurwenal’s entrance in the four scene, the artwork ultimately allows the characters to emerge as universal emblems of a passion that, in a very Schopenhauerian sense, transcends their physical forms.

Sellars also plays with the entire dimensions of the theater to give the audience a more active experience. After submerging most of the first act in darkness, he brings up all the lights at Kurwenal’s line, “Heil, Tristan,” as if to expose the entire experience as artifice, making voyeurs out of those both off and onstage. Throughout the evening, singers and select wind instruments are placed on the balconies—such as the young sailor who opens the first scene and the solo English horn at the onset of the third act which transports Tristan. While his ascension as a rising stream of bubbles in which the body levitates from a tombstone (a video portrait which is at the end of the Grand Palais exhibit) risks being too explicit, the repeated images of water serve to engulf the viewer much as the orchestra creates an ocean of endless time.

Music Director Philippe Jordan created sensuous waves of tension and release with the orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris, with particularly elegant playing in the woodwinds, while the brass was less homogenous. Violetta Urmana remained a powerhouse in the role of Isolde despite some screechy high notes. As Tristan, Robert Dean Smith did not possess the same volume but gave a performance of moving vulnerability. The bass Franz-Josef Selig was indomitable in the role of the betrayed König Marke, and Janina Baechle and Jochen Schmeckenbecher gave fine performances as the lovers’ confidantes, Brangäne and Kurwenal. Raimund Nolte was a nasal-voiced, menacing Melot; the performance of Pavol Breslik, as the young sailor and shepherd, bordered on the mannered but there is no denying the seductive qualities of his tenor.

The following evening, at the Opéra Garnier, brought together a stellar cast for L’Italiana in Algeri. I have been sceptical of the baritone Ildebrando D’Arcangelo in roles such as Don Giovanni, but he seems born to sing the role of Mustafà, the Bey in Rossini’s opera who is duped into the phony rite of “Pappataci” (roughly, father of silence) which allows the enslaved Lindoro and his lover, Isabella, to flee back to Italy. The mezzo Varduhi Abrahamyan was sovereign as the Italian seductress from her first aria “Cruda sorte! Amor tiranno,” with smooth coloratura and excellent comic timing. She was more than well-matched by the Lindoro of Antonino Siragusa, whose technical assurance could blow several commercially-known tenors out of the water. The soprano Jaël Azzaretti was charming as Mustafà’s spurned wife, Elvira, leading the zany Act One stretta “Va sossopra il mio cervello” with sharp musicianship. In the role of Taddeo, Isabella’s accompaniment, the baritone Tassis Christoyannis at times stole the show with his understated physical humor even if his voice is on the less voluminous side.

Credit of course goes to Serban for capturing the spirit of Rossini’s comedy in a modern context. The Bey is cast a terrorist hooligan—with furs and a golden pistol to match—while the “Pappataci” scene is portrayed with dancers dressed, respectively, as a giant bottle of wine, a pizza pie and a bed (sets and costumes by Marina Draghici). From the ape which greets Isabella and Taddeo after their ship crashes to the dancers which insinuate themselves into ensemble scenes (choreography by Niky Wolcz), there is always a great deal happening onstage, but never at the expense of distracting from the story. The male chorus—now pot-bellied eunuchs, now suited Mafiosi—were always on the mark (preparation by Alessandro di Stefano), and Riccardo Frizza propelled the orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris with high energy and clean attacks, even if rubato was wanting to create dramatic emphasis in scenes such as Mustafà’s initiation.

Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed

« Older Entries