April, 2016 | Musical America Blogs

Archive for April, 2016

David Harrington: Advice for Musicians? Make Lists!

Saturday, April 30th, 2016

Kronos Quartet founder and 1st violinist David Harrington says that he doesn’t like to give advice. But, in this Noted Endeavors video, David offers profound advice for anyone embarking on a new endeavor. Also featuring Kronos managing director, Janet Cowperthwaite, and Noted Endeavors’ Eugenia Zukerman and Emily Ondracek-Peterson.

Stay tuned for more vidoes with David Harrington!

David Harrington founded the Kronos Quartet in 1973. The quartet has since gone on to become one of history’s most important new-music ensembles, having commissioned over 850 works.

For more about the Kronos Quartet, go to:
kronosquartet.org

For more Noted Endeavors videos, go to:
notedendeavors.com

Posted in Noted Endeavors | Comments Closed

Termination For Convenience

Thursday, April 28th, 2016

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.

Dear Law and Disorder:

I recently received the following clause from a performing arts venue in a contract they sent:

I told them that, in my mind, this makes the contract virtually worthless. They came back with this:

TERMINATION FOR CONVENIENCE: Either party may terminate this Agreement at any time upon written notice to the other party. If this Agreement is terminated before the performance, the University shall have limited obligations to pay Artist, as defined below. If this Agreement is terminated during the performance for any reason other than the Artist’s breach of this Agreement, the University shall compensate Artist on a prorate basis. Under no circumstances will either party be liable to the other for indirect, consequential, or incidental damages, including but not limited to anticipatory profits. The University may from time to time, under such terms and conditions as it may prescribe, make partial payments and payments on account against costs incurred by the Artist in connection with the terminated portion of this contract whenever in the opinion of the University the aggregate of such payments shall be within the amount to which the Artist shall be entitled hereunder.

I feel that I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence as a Manager to sign this, but it’s a very important venue to me and I do quite a bit of business with them. But I think this is unconscionable. Am I wrong?

“Unconscionability” implies a certain level of moral indignation is generally unwarranted in a simple engagement negotiation. The venue is merely proposing terms that are in its own best interest, not demanding that you sacrifice a sack full of kittens! If acting in one’s own self-interest were unconscionable, then most artists would have an incalculable amount of karmic debt. However, you are quite correct that the terms they are proposing are unfair to your artist. I’ve seen more and more presenters and venues trying to give themselves the unilateral right to cancel. I get it. Times are tough. Tickets are hard to sell. But it’s unreasonable and unfair to expect an artist to bear the entire loss of a cancellation. The venue’s proposed compromise is basically to reimburse the artist for any out-of-pocket costs, but not to pay the artist for the lost performance or the fact that the artist may have turned away other engagements. That’s not exactly what I would call an equitable compromise.

Regardless, the point of a contract is not to provide some false sense of security or protection, but, rather, to enable the parties to identify any issues that need to be negotiated, evaluate the pros and cons of a deal, and determine whether or not to proceed. In this regard, this contract has proven to be extremely valuable in that the venue has made it quite clear that they want to have the right to cancel without consequences. You have done your due diligence in reading and evaluating the contract. Now comes the hard part. What to do? You need to determine whether or not to engage in further negotiations, to accept the venue’s terms and sign the contract, or walk away and find another engagement. Ultimately, the decision is up to your artist. Your job as the Manager is solely to evaluate and advise your artist.

All art requires risk. The performing arts business requires a certain amount of risk as well. As the Manager, its your job to help your artist evaluate reasonable risks from unreasonable risks. Obviously, I don’t know enough about your specific artist or the specific venue to render an opinion. However, I can tell you that what is completely irrelevant to the analysis is whether or not the venue is important to you and whether or not you do “quite a bit of business with them.” As a Manager, the focus of all managerial decisions must be what is best for your artist, not you. Is the venue particularly prestigious or important to the artist? Is the fee is particularly large? Does the engagement offer your artist a particularly advantageous opportunity? Then it may be worth advising the artist to take the risk. Otherwise, the artist should decline the engagement. The impact of the artist’s decision on your own relationship with the venue, past or future, is beside the point.

If your ongoing relationship with the venue is more important to you than the relationship with your artist, then you should drop the artist. I have often heard Managers say that artists come and go, but venues are forever. However, I don’t necessarily believe this. In my experience, if an artist is popular and in demand, and especially if an artistic director wants the artist, the presenter or venue won’t care if the artist is represented by Satan himself.

_________________________________________________________________

For additional information and resources on this and other legal, project management, and business issues for the performing arts, visit ggartslaw.com

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

All questions on any topic related to legal, management, 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 and/or posthumously.

__________________________________________________________________

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:breach, cancellation, contract, damages, engagements, Liable, manager, negotiation, payment, presenter, risk, venue
Posted in Artist Management, Contracts, Law and Disorder: Performing Arts Division, Presenters, Venues | Comments Closed

Budget Tours Take a Hit in France

Tuesday, April 26th, 2016

By: Frank Cadenhead

Touring performing arts groups, usually orchestras and ballet companies from Eastern Europe, are a common part of each season in cities and towns throughout France and Europe. They usually feature standard repertory appealing to mass audiences and often have names which seem impressive but, under closer inspection, are of questionable importance. Is this activity, already less often seen, coming to an end?

Last Friday, as reported by the French newspaper Ouest France, a touring group, the Bolshoi of Minsk, was awarded compensation for their wages and conditions of employment while touring France in 2014. The dancers were not involved in this action, only the musicians. The company is the principal dance company in Minsk and It was touring a production of Swan Lake.

In the city of Nantes, the Prud’hommes, the French labor court, awarded twenty orchestra members of the troop 14,000 euros each in compensation (they had asked for 25,000 euros) from Franceconcert, a corporation based in Nantes.

In this complaint they were supported by the CGT (Confédération générale du travail), the largest labor union in France. The complaint listed a monthly salary for the touring musicians of about 300 euros and pointed out that French musicians employed by the same company receive an average 2200 euros. The complaint alleged that they were housed in poor conditions and were obliged to share hotel beds with other musicians. The tour sometimes had 13 consecutive days of performance without a day of rest.

“This is a victory,” said Philippe Gautier of the CGT. “This is the first time that foreign artists have individually pursued their employer and the amount of the penalty, completely new, will help deter others from this course of action.” There is no word about any action to benefit the dancers.

At the hearing on January 21, the attorney for Franceconcert opposed the action: “We are not slave-drivers or an unscrupulous employer.” The French adjective used, négrier, has a root in the word negro to describe using slaves. It is not necessarily related to the history of the port city of Nantes which was an important transit point for the slave trade from Africa to America. Nantes in the home of the major classical music festival, the La Folle Journée de Nantes, at the end of January each year and which is in no way implicated in this action.

One can speculate as to the intention of the CGT which represents a large number of professional musicians in France. This action might have been designed to diminish the number of low budget touring groups. This action dramatically increase the cost to the contractor of an event in 2014 and is now a precedent for future legal actions.

Tags:Bolshoi of Minsk
Posted in An American in Paris | Comments Closed

Paris Protesters Seek a “New World”

Sunday, April 24th, 2016

By: Frank Cadenhead

There is an ongoing protest movement called Nuit Debout in Paris and in other cities around France. Like “Occupy Wall Street” is is mainly frustrated young people. The name “Nuit debout” has been translated into English as “Up All Night”, “Standing Night”, or “Rise up at night.” Young people in the thousands gather in Paris at the Place de la République each night since the movement began on March 31.

It was an immediate response to a proposed modification to France’s labor laws which would make it easier for employers to fire employees, a difficult process and a problem for prospective new business in France. The government’s proposal immediately was opposed by labor unions and other left politicians and groups. Protesters with a variety of other social issues immediately joined the movement. The street protests, which have sometimes turned violent, has lead to this permanent nighttime occupation of one of the most important junctions in Paris.

A young oboist, Clément Lafargue, had an idea for musicians to gather to play Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” as an act of hope. The call went out on social media and on the designated night, April 21, some 350 musicians, both professional and amateur, showed up. After only a couple of hours of rehearsal, the symphony was played. A Youtube sample shows that enthusiasm can trump detail:

The 2011 “Occupy Wall Street” movement made a global impact and movements began in European countries. It did not have much impact in France because of the election of a new Socialist government under President François Hollande created the expectation that the economy and social justice would flourish. Since then, however, with the economy of France flatlined and disappointment with Hollande at the maximum, young people are again at the barricades.

With the disappearance of Occupy Wall Street, my own country’s establishment assumed that the protest and the dissatisfaction of young people was over. This understanding is only a hint of how seriously out of touch with the people “those in the know” were. This complete failure can be seen as alarming and is most clearly demonstrated in recent clueless party politics; clueless to the feelings of both Democrats and Republicans who vote with the resulting “outsider” candidates making the biggest impact so far.

Tags:Antonin Dvorak
Posted in An American in Paris | Comments Closed

500 Years of Pure Beer

Saturday, April 23rd, 2016

Reinheitsgebot of 1516

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 23, 2016

MUNICH — Before there was Food Babe, there was Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria (reign 1508–1550), a man who valued good music and liked his beer free of nettles, sawdust, roots, and other 16th-century “adjuncts,” as unwelcome food ingredients are now termed.

Wilhelm made musical history in 1523 by hiring Ludwig Senfl as musicus intonator after Holy Roman Emperor Karl V wound down the Senfl-led imperial Hofkapelle. The move enabled him to attract top musicians and clone in Munich that standard-setting body, planting the seeds of the Bavarian State Orchestra.

But his most fondly remembered creation was the Purity Order, or Reinheitsgebot, issued 500 years ago today, on April 23, 1516, and still, Gott sei Dank, indirectly in force.

Beer was to be brewed only from barley, hops and water. Malting was understood. (Science did not identify yeast until the 17th century.) Expanding on earlier local laws, the order applied across the state. It set prices too, specifying the sale of beer at no more than one Pfennig per liter in winter, no more than two in summer, and sending echoes down the centuries that beer should be affordable. Today in Germany, 500 ml of beer can cost less than 500 ml of water.

Enforcement of the Reinheitsgebot throughout the newly unified Germany was a condition in 1871 for Bavaria’s joining with Prussia. Only in 1987 did the order technically go off the books, a casualty of E.U. rules of fair trade. Some viewed it as protectionist. Wilhelm’s strictures returned a few years later, though, in the guise of an E.U.-tailored statute: non-compliant German beers could not be labeled “Bier,” but non-German beers could carry that descriptor if they revealed what they were made from.

Such remains the law today, and it is why Food Babe can frame this rhetorical question: “Don’t you find it interesting that AB InBev is required to [list the ingredients of] Corona in Germany but not [in the U.S.]?”

As the North Carolina activist pursues transparency on caramel coloring, chemically altered hop extract, carrageenan, corn, corn syrup, dextrose, E-numbered anything, genetically engineered anything, fish bladder, insect-based dyes, monosodium glutamate, propylene glycol alginate and rice — all present in one or other beer sold now — she can thank music-loving Wilhelm for showing they have nothing to do with pure beer.

Photo © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

Tags:Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Beer, Duke Wilhelm IV, Food Babe, Germany, Ludwig Senfl, München, Munich, News, Reinheitsgebot
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed

Petrenko Hosts Petrenko

Friday, April 22nd, 2016

Kirill Petrenko and Vasily Petrenko

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 22, 2016

MUNICH — Vasily Petrenko’s debut at Bavarian State Opera this weekend prompts a glance at two Russian-born, modestly profiled conductors who have built distinct careers in Western Europe while sharing a last name. The guest from Liverpool will lead Boris Godunov, last revived two years ago by company Generalmusikdirektor Kirill Petrenko.

Inviting Vasily to work in Kirill’s house was sweet, ingenuous. After all, the two Petrenkos are what trademark attorneys call “confusingly similar” marks, a factor that doesn’t vanish just because real names are involved, or because it’s the arts. Are artists products? Their work is, notwithstanding the distance from commerce.

The Petrenkos are not of course the first conductor-brands to overlap, but unlike the Kleibers or Järvis, Abbados or Jurowskis, no disparity of talent or generation neatly separates them. Then, inescapably, there is the matter of dilution: a “Toscanini” needs no specifier.

As it happens, agents have promoted the Petrenkos as if with accidental care over geography. Although both men have enjoyed positive forays Stateside, awareness of them in Europe diverges. For a full decade, Vasily has been the “Petrenko” of reference in Britain. Kirill has been “Petrenko” in Germany.

Kirill has had such minimal renown in Britain, in fact, that retired Bavarian State Opera chief Peter Jonas last summer on Slipped Disc could report the following about the Bavarian State Orchestra’s upcoming European tour: “The [orchestra’s] committee and their management offered themselves to the [BBC] Proms for 2016 … and were sent away with the exclamation, ‘Oh no … . Kirill Petrenko? We do not really know about him over here.’ … The tour will happen all over Europe but without London.” Indeed it will.

In the meantime, Calisto Bieito’s staging of Boris Godunov gets a three-night revival April 23 to 29 with a strong cast: Sergei Skorokhodov’s pretender, Ain Anger’s chronicler and Alexander Tsymbalyuk’s riveting Boris. How will Vasily grapple with the (1869) score? Opera featured prominently in his career only at the start.

	Kirill	Vasily
	Кирилл Гарриевич Петренко	Василий Эдуардович Петренко
born	Feb. 11, 1972, in Omsk — 44	July 7, 1976, in St Petersburg — 39
hair	auburn, curly	blond, straight
eyes	brown	gray
height	5 feet 3 inches	6 feet 5 inches
weight (est.)	145 lbs., trim	180 lbs., trim
training	Vorarlberg State Conservatory in Feldkirch	St Petersburg Conservatory
influences	Bychkov, Chung, Eötvös, Lajovic	Jansons, Martynov, Salonen, Temirkanov
early job	Kapellmeister, Volksoper, Vienna, 1997–99	Resident Conductor, Mikhailovsky Theater, St Petersburg, 1994–97
now	Generalmusikdirektor, Bavarian State Opera	Sjefdirigent, Oslo Philharmonic; Chief Conductor, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic
lives in	refused to disclose	Birkenhead Park, Merseyside
companionship	rumored to have platonically dated soprano Anja Kampe	married to Evgenia Chernysheva, choral conductor and music tutor; Sasha (11), Anna (2)
faith	private	Russian Orthodox
favorite team	refused to disclose	Zenit St Petersburg (soccer)
diplomacy	on Ukraine: “I observe the conditions there with great concern. What is happening there is anything but normal. A political solution [is needed] that does not impinge on Ukraine’s sovereignty.” Speaking at the National Theater, March 6, 2014	on women conductors: “[Orchestras] react better when they have a man in front of them … . A cute girl on a podium means that musicians think about other things.” Quoted in The Guardian, Sept. 2, 2013
humor	while working with Miroslav Srnka on his 2015 opera South Pole: “If the composer is dead, you’d like to ask him questions, but you can’t. If [he] is alive, you can ask him questions, but sometimes you’d prefer he would be already dead.” Reported by Slipped Disc, Jan. 18, 2016	while attempting damage control: “We were saying that because a woman conductor is still quite a rarity … , their appearance [on] the podium, because of the historical background, always has some emotions reflected in the orchestra.” Quoted in The Telegraph, May 8, 2014
distinctions		Honorary Scouser Echo Klassik Award
achievement	survived nine cycles conducting Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth	completed a Shostakovich cycle for Naxos
strengths	Mussorgsky, Strauss, Elgar, Scriabin, Berg	Shostakovich
weakness	Donizetti (and probably Verdi)
what John von Rhein said	“Solidity of technique, quality of leadership, depth of musical ideas and ability to strike a firm rapport with [Chicago Symphony Orchestra] members … [determine whether a conductor] stands or falls … . By all these standards [he] sent the needle off the symphonic Richter scale at his first concert.” March 2012 CSO debut	“His beat is clear and he has a knack for focusing on the essentials, his long fingers fluttering in a highly expressive manner … . He inspired the [Chicago Symphony Orchestra] to go well beyond its normal megawatt virtuosity, and this made for a blistering account of the Shostakovich [Tenth].” Dec. 2012 CSO debut
CDs
	Suk’s Asrael Symphony and Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina for CPO and Oehms	Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony and the Shostakovich Cello Concertos with Truls Mørk for Warner and Ondine
career trajectory	modest inclination	less modest inclination
compass setting	north, tardily	south, east, west

Placing the two Petrenkos side by side here, like baseball cards, meant compiling at least some personal facts along with the musical. So, three questions went to the conductors’ handlers. How tall is he? Where does he live (part of town)? What’s his favorite sports team?

This proved awkward, however, especially on one side, and hitherto-cordial staffers turned as cool as, well, trademark attorneys. Vasily’s people cooperated with partial answers. Kirill’s, deep inside Bavarian State Opera, stonewalled: “Mr. Petrenko generally does not wish to answer any personal questions.”

As it turned out, Vasily was on record with full answers over the years to all three questions for various media outlets. The man is an open book. This left Kirill’s side with unflattering holes. But the opera company’s hands were tied. Apparently under instructions from the artist, nobody could even confirm he lives in Munich (where he has drawn a paycheck for 30 months already). And he may not.

Bavarian State Opera: “What’s not to understand about ‘Mr. Petrenko does not wish to answer any personal questions’? Who puts out the rule that a conductor … does have to comprehend or be willing to be part of public relations? … So, in fact, we do not want to convey anything to anybody. This is the ‘line to be drawn’ from our side.”

Mention of Vasily went over badly. BStO: “What kind of idea is it anyways to compare two artists because they share the same last name?” Prepared descriptors accompanied the rhetoric: “ridiculous” and a “game.” How not to kill a story.

Shown the data for the above table, the opera company took to sarcasm: “Yes, sure, [inventing] height and weight [measurements] is of course totally acceptable.” But Kirill’s height had become public half a year ago* at ARD broadcaster Deutsche Welle. BStO did not either know this or wish to share the knowledge. Its hapless official scanning DW: “Oh, it’s on the Internet! It’s gotta be true!”

[*Earlier actually: Lucas Wiegelmann included it in an excellent 2014 discussion for Die Welt.]

Tags:Ain Anger, Alexander Tsymbalyuk, Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Boris Godunov, Commentary, Kirill Petrenko, München, Munich, Mussorgsky, News, Oslo Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Sergei Skorokhodov, Vasily Petrenko
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed

90 Years and Counting: The Martha Graham Dance Company

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

By Rachel Straus

The Martha Graham Dance Company’s 90^th anniversary season (April 14-18) at New York City Center opened with Graham’s Night Journey (1947) and closed with her Cave of the Heart (1946). In between these masterworks, about Greek tragedy heroines, was a world premiere by the experimentalist Marie Chouinard and the last proscenium work that the venerable Swedish choreographer Mats Ek said that he would ever make. Considering that Chouinard’s Inner Resources reads like an uninspired group of teenage competition dancers trying to look avant-garde and Ek’s Axe was both terrifying and beautiful, it is a tragedy that Ek will not be making more dances for the stage and that Chouinard will.

Axe (2015) was created on Ben Schultz and Peiju Chien-Pott, the most dramatically daring and physically chameleon-esque Graham dancer of her generation. Axe is about a couple in crisis. It was originally made by Eks as a film, featuring his wife and dancing muse Ana Lugana. At City Center, the dance begins with the sound of a heavy object falling, again and again. When the curtain goes up, Schultz wields an ax. He is splitting wood on a tree stump. In the course of the nine-minute ballet, set to a recording of the Albinoni-Giazotto Adagio in G minor, Schultz obsessively chops wood into smaller and smaller pieces—like a woodsman with a compulsive disorder. Because the music has been used in innumerable tragic films, including Gallipoli (1981), we know that this dance is not going to end well. Indeed, Schultz never looks up to notice a haggard Chien-Pott, teetering side to side, like an unsteady piece of brittle wood. She circles around Schultz, but he pays no mind. So Chien-Pott becomes increasingly manic, repeatedly falling to the floor, and extending her legs to all four corners as if trying to dislocate her limbs. Their tragic story, however, has a surprise ending: the petite female dancer fills Schultz’s enormous arms with wood and marches him to the wing. As the curtain falls, Chien-Pott raises the ax—it’s aimed at his head.

Graham (1894-1991) would likely have approved of Axe. It features all of the elements that made her 1940s masterworks radical and potent: a revenging female dancer, a movement vocabulary that sallies between the grotesque and the sublime, a compressed abstracted story, and a large muscular man who is easy on the eyes, and when given a chance, is shown to be a good dancer too.

Since the Graham company’s current mission is to commission choreographers to make works that bear a relationship to Graham’s oeuvre, it is nigh impossible to understand Chouinard’s Inner Resources as bearing any aesthetic relationship to Graham’s. It possesses the quality of an amateur music video, with its half-hearted Vogueing and some clumsy b-boy floor moves. The music by Louis Dufort, who has collaborated with Chouinard since 1996, produces the effect of listening to a DJ club mix that is inside of a food processor. The women upend the heteronormative by sporting big mustaches, but they also strut on the points of their feet like runway models. When they strip off their blue shirts and black pants, they stand inert as if their nudity makes them afraid to move. This last image isn’t exactly a feminist statement. The Graham company’s eight female dancers deserve better than this.

Fortunately, the performance of Cave of the Heart, with Chien-Pott playing the revenging Medea, salvaged the company’s image that night. The Mannes Orchestra, under the baton of David Hayes, supported the dancers in their ability to breathe life into the work’s dramatic personae. Chien-Pott, Abdiel Jackson, Anne O’Donnell and Leslie Andrea Williams’ artistic courage, and inventiveness, made this Graham ballet relevant and worth repeat viewings.

Tags:Abdiel Jackson, Albioni, Anne O’Donnell, Axe. Ben Schultz, Cave of the Heart, David Hayes, Inner Resources, Leslie Andrea Williams, Luis Dufort, Marie Chouinard, Martha Graham Dance Company, Mats Ek, New York City Center, Night Journey, Peiju Chien-Pott, Rachel Straus, The Mannes Orchestra
Posted in The Torn Tutu | Comments Closed

Nadia Sirota: Successful Kickstarter Campaigns

Friday, April 8th, 2016

Violist Nadia Sirota has created several wildly successful Kickstarter campaigns. Here, Nadia shares ideas with Eugenia Zukerman and Emily Ondracek-Peterson of Noted Endeavors about fundraising videos, ask amounts, and how to create a winning projects.

“A one-woman contemporary-classical commissioning machine” (Pitchfork), violist Nadia Sirota is best known for her singular sound and expressive execution, coaxing works and collaborations from the likes of Nico Muhly, Daníel Bjarnason, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Judd Greenstein, Marcos Balter, and Missy Mazzoli. Her debut album First Things First (New Amsterdam Records) was named a record of the year by The New York Times, and her follow-up Baroque (Bedroom Community and New Amsterdam) has been called “beautiful music of a higher order than anything else you will hear this year” by SPINMedia website PopMatters.

Matt Haimovitz: Questions to Ask When Starting an Endeavor

Friday, April 1st, 2016

Cellist extraordinaire Matt Haimovitz presents the questions that any new endeavor needs to ask itself in this short but profound video with Eugenia Zukerman and Emily Ondracek-Peterson of Noted Endeavors.

Haimovitz made his debut in 1984, at the age of 13, as soloist with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic. At 17 he made his first recording with James Levine and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for Deutsche Grammophon. Haimovitz has since gone on to perform on the world’s most esteemed stages, with such orchestras and conductors as the Berlin Philharmonic with Levine, the New York Philharmonic with Mehta, the English Chamber Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim, the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Slatkin and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra with Kent Nagano. Haimovitz made his Carnegie Hall debut when he substituted for his teacher, the legendary Leonard Rose, in Schubert’s String Quintet in C, alongside Isaac Stern, Shlomo Mintz, Pinchas Zukerman and Mstislav Rostropovich.

In 2000, he made waves with his Bach “Listening-Room” Tour, for which, to great acclaim, Haimovitz took Bach’s beloved cello suites out of the concert hall and into clubs across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Haimovitz’s 50-state Anthem tour in 2003 celebrated living American composers, and featured his own arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” He was the first classical artist to play at New York’s infamous CBGB club, in a performance filmed by ABC News for “Nightline UpClose.” Soon thereafter, Haimovitz launched Oxingale Records with his wife, composer Luna Pearl Woolf. Oxingale records have since received wide acclaim for its stunning recordings.

To learn more about Matt, go to:
matthaimovitz.com

For more about Noted Endeavors, go to:
notedendeavors.com