God Save the Queen’s Composer

July 28th, 2011

by Keith Clarke

The Master of the Queen’s Music is at it again. Republican-turned monarchist Sir Peter Maxwell Davies likes nothing more than upsetting the apple cart with his views on life and the universe, and now he has shared with Daily Telegraph readers his thoughts on the British national anthem. “Booooooring,” he says. Nothing controversial about that, you might think, and it would take a Daily Telegraph reader to disagree. The paper’s Tim Walker gets into the spirit of things, referring to “comments which some may regard as tantamount to treason.”

It’s not the first time Mad Max has been fingered for treason. Six years ago he was visited by the constabulary after he took home a dead swan to make a terrine. By law, British swans all belong to Her Majesty the Queen, so when police with a search warrant raided the composer’s Orkney home and seized the swan carcass as evidence, he told the Times: “I was cautioned and told that anything I said could be given in evidence. Naturally I’ve informed Buckingham Palace. Now I’m just hoping I’ll not be locked up in the Tower of London.”

Maybe his views on the national anthem are fuelled by a desire to write a better one. It probably rankled that despite his courtly duties he was not asked to write so much as a bar of music for this year’s royal wedding.

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It’s not the only pasting the national anthem has taken this week. Formula 1 racing driver Lewis Hamilton was asking for a longer one – not for musical reasons, but because he felt he should have been given a longer opportunity to savour his moment of glory at the German Grand Prix last Sunday.

The longer drivers are kept from all that idiotic champagne spraying the better, but a new anthem is not the only answer. The Telegraph’s Ivan Hewett pointed out that God Save the Queen could be doubled in length by including the second verse. It is not much sung nowadays, perhaps because even the most bulging-eyed, red-faced, stiff-upper-lipped patriotic of Britishers would struggle to reconcile the jingoism with these multicultural times.

All together now:

Lord, our God, arise
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall.
Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all.

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A Möst Rewarding Partnership

July 28th, 2011

By Edna Landau

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

In March of this year, I was invited to speak to a wonderful group of arts supporters in Pasadena, California, by the name of Metropolitan Associates. They were interested in hearing about my career in artist management and in having the opportunity to ask questions about it. In preparing for the talk, I asked what questions I was likely to be asked. Among them was, “What were the most satisfying experiences in your career over the past thirty years?”

Last week, I had occasion to add such an experience to an already sizeable list. As I sat in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall for three nights of works by Bruckner and Adams, magnificently performed by the Cleveland Orchestra and its music director, Franz Welser-Möst, my mind wandered back to 1981, only two years into my association with Hamlen/Landau Management, when Charles Hamlen and I decided that I would go to Ft. Worth, Texas, to see if there were any pianists in the Van Cliburn Competition whom we might wish to sign. As it turned out, I was totally smitten with the playing of a young pianist by the name of Jeffrey Kahane, who we were very proud to sign after the competition and who has gone on to a brilliant career as both a pianist and conductor. An unexpected by-product of that trip was meeting a manager from Liechtenstein who raved about a twenty-year-old conductor he was mentoring, for whom he predicted a major career. He was intent on giving him to an American manager who would develop his career slowly and intelligently. At the end of the competition, fortunately for me, he decided that I was such a manager and since I felt that this conductor needed to gain more experience before embarking on an international career, he said he would wait until I was ready.

Five years passed, during which I periodically received reviews, all in German, mostly from youth orchestra concerts. One day I was having breakfast with a leading London agent who told me that an amazingly gifted young conductor by the name of Franz Welser-Möst had just stepped into a cancellation situation and conducted a rather brilliant Mozart Requiem with the London Philharmonic. My heart skipped a beat and I nearly ran back to my office after breakfast, fearing that I would now be too late to sign Mr. Welser-Möst to our roster, since news spreads like wildfire in our industry. Fortunately, that was not the case.

After seeing Mr. Welser-Möst conduct the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich later in 1986, we formally agreed to work together and subsequently settled on a first North American season (1988-89) that would ease him into the orchestra system over here while still providing him with a high-level artistic experience. His debut was scheduled with the St. Louis Symphony, followed by weeks with the Toronto and Atlanta symphonies. We gradually built the American career while taking great care to balance it with Mr. Welser-Möst’s increasingly busy schedule and commitments overseas. His debut with the Cleveland Orchestra took place in February of 1993 and he returned nearly every season until he assumed the music director position in September 2002.

This coming season is Franz Welser-Möst’s tenth with the Cleveland Orchestra. There were certainly many highlights along the way in Cleveland, in New York and on tour both here and abroad, but I doubt that anyone present in New York last week who has heard his concerts over the years would disagree that these were among the most sublime. The unlikely combination of Bruckner and Adams seemed not only revolutionary but increasingly logical by the end of the week, and both the cheering ovations and the superlatives of the critics demonstrated the artistic impact of this mini-festival in New York during the hot days of summer. As for me, no longer Mr. Welser-Möst’s manager, I had the luxury of sitting back in my seat at each concert and marveling at the mastery and ease that he brought to the performances, as well as the commitment and virtuosity of the players who seemed totally invested in this special undertaking, confident in the results of their nine year association with their music director, and inspired by the opportunity to play Bruckner symphonies with a conductor who shares the composer’s birthplace and tradition. I reflected on the fact that even a truly great artist’s career develops gradually, and that there is no substitute for the hard work and artistic, intellectual and personal growth that propel it to ever higher levels of success. I felt immensely proud to have had the privilege of sharing that experience with Mr. Welser-Möst over the course of 21 years.

Why, you might ask, am I relating this experience in my blog? It is because I consider myself extremely fortunate to have enjoyed a long career in artist management and I fervently hope that young people with training in music might consider the rewards of such a career. The world of artist management is smaller than the number of deserving artists seeking representation. Very few agencies have sprung up in recent years. I recognize that these are difficult times in which to launch such an enterprise but I believe it is possible to succeed. The first step is to learn the trade by working in (or at least interning at) an established agency and thereby seeing how artists’ careers are managed and developed. (While a degree in arts administration or an MBA can certainly prove helpful, especially if one has hopes of starting one’s own agency, there is no substitute for this type of hands-on experience.) Patience will be required in abundance, as this learning experience is gradual; however, I have seen gifted, enthusiastic individuals, still in their 20’s, advance in their responsibilities from logistical to managerial in only three to five years. Some who seem more destined for a career in sales have become booking representatives in an equally short time. What are the most important characteristics of such people? A knowledge and love of music, excellent organizational and writing skills, healthy self-confidence, good psychological instincts, and sensitivity in dealing with people, openmindedness, perseverance and humility. Above all, they seem to exhibit a sense of joy that derives from feeling privileged to work with some of the world’s most gifted performers and giving them the behind-the-scenes support they require in order to rise above the rigors of a life on the road and reach ever higher levels of artistic success. The thrill of sitting in the audience and knowing that you enjoy such a professional partnership with the artist, or that you booked the concert that enabled the artist to earn the adoration of a cheering audience is an indescribable reward for a job well done. The beauty of it is that it can be repeated many times over in the course of a long and meaningful career.

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

© Edna Landau 2011

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Sour note at music college

July 21st, 2011

by Keith Clarke

News that three visitors and two members of staff at the Royal Northern College of Music were hospitalized last week after eating dodgy salad only serves to confirm my suspicion that eating salad, like exercising, is a risky activity. A catering worker has been suspended after it came to light that the salad dressing, instead of boasting balsamic vinegar and fresh-pressed olive oil, contained that little used culinary ingredient, dishwasher liquid.

As the five stared at the ceiling of the Manchester Royal Infirmary, they may have contemplated the wisdom of salad-shunning musicians, like celebrated chanteuse Edit Piaf. After all, she was known worldwide for her great hit, Non, Je Ne Vinaigrette Rien.

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It must have been a happy moment in Birmingham city council’s music library when hundreds of silent-movie scores were uncovered in a dusty corner. They include a theme tune used in early Charlie Chaplin films. It was written by Cyril Thorne, but of course Chaplin himself provided the music for many of his films, an aspect of the filmmaker that gets little attention. At the Ojai Festival three years ago, Modern Times was shown, with the Ojai Festival Orchestra playing Chaplin’s score live, and jolly good it was too.

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It seems to be high season for artistic punch-ups. First we have Claudio Abbado and Hélène Grimaud displaying “artistic differences,” with the pianist walking out of this year’s Lucerne
Festival, then Gidon Kremer lets fly at the Verbier Festival for suggesting that he was pulling out for health reasons, rather than a dislike for self-aggrandizing artists looking to boost their careers through hype.

I like Kremer’s tell-it-like-it-is approach. In a business larded with PR spin, it is great to see someone stepping out of line from time to time. After all, despite all the platform smiles, working in music provokes strong feelings. It is usually conductors that create the most heat, as explained by one orchestral player outlining the difference between a bull and an orchestra: “A bull has the horns at the front and the asshole at the back…..”

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Taking Chances in the Spring

July 15th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

It seems odd that Carnegie Hall’s 2010-11 season concluded in mid May and that the New York Philharmonic continued into the last week of June, with the final concert of its Summertime Classics coda at the end of last week. It also seems to me that the official seasons in both halls concluded in fine fettle — good news for orchestras that wholeheartedly deserve their community support in these parlous times.

Carnegie’s Provocative Season Roundup

The first thing to point out about Carnegie’s seven-concert “Spring for Music” series is that it cost a paltry $25 a ticket for some of the most riveting programs of the year. Several of the orchestras and their music directors were a welcome discovery, being virtually unknown in these parts and proving that not all concerts break the bank.

The first of the three concerts I heard, played by the Albany Symphony under its music director, David Alan Miller, included Copland’s popular Appalachian Spring but in its rarely heard complete orchestral version. When arranging the ballet’s well-known suite, Copland judiciously tightened connective passages and eliminated an entire anti-slavery pantomime section (nearly one-quarter of the ballet, timing out to 8:20 in this performance). Stylistically it harks back to his angular Stravinsky-influenced works from the 1920s and really belongs in another score, but it was good to hear for a change. Also on the program was a group of eight spirituals, each arranged for orchestra by different composers — a big success for the fine young baritone Nathan De’Shon Myers, of whom the standing and cheering audience demanded and was rewarded by an encore. Miller and his players also deserve praise for their recordings of American music for the enterprising Albany label.

Jaap van Zweden and his Dallas Symphony took the biggest chance of the series with composer Steven Stucky and librettist Gene Scheer’s “concert drama,” August 4, 1964. Commissioned by the orchestra to commemorate the 100th birthday of Texas-born President Lyndon B. Johnson, Stucky and Scheer settled on the subject of two fortuitous events on that particular day: the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which resulted in the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the discovery of the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers. Serious stuff, this, and ultimately a rewarding musical experience, but obviously not what many prematurely departing audience members expected. The music isn’t overly challenging harmonically, and that pertaining to the civil rights matters is particularly moving. Still, most of it is slow and somber, with a good deal of sustained pianissimo chords underpinning quiet singing and declamation. Stucky recalls in the excellent program notes that he consciously tried to avoid writing another Britten War Requiem, which is ironically the work that keeps poking through musically. All the singers and the excellent Dallas Symphony Chorus acquitted themselves proudly, supported by orchestral players of extraordinary concentration, superbly conducted by the ensemble’s Dutch music director.

My favorite concert of the series — and, as it turned out, the entire season — was by a conductor and orchestra making their New York debuts: the Oregon Symphony under its music director of eight years, Carlos Kalmar, in a remarkably imaginative program. Ives’s The Unanswered Question, John Adams’s The Wound-Dresser, and Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem were played without pause, an often pretentious practice but one that in this instance worked stunningly. After intermission came a positively searing Vaughan Williams Fourth Symphony, with fearless edge-of-seat tempos in the third and fourth movements, breathtakingly negotiated by all, the strings in particular. Kalmar and his virtuoso Oregonians will return to “Spring for Music” in 2013.

“Spring for Music” is the brainchild of classical-music biz veterans Mary Lou Falcone, David Foster, and Thomas Morris, in partnership with Carnegie Hall, and deserves a long life. Next season includes concerts by the symphony orchestras of Houston, Edmonton, New Jersey, Alabama, Milwaukee, and Nashville.

June at the Philharmonic

June 2. Music Director Alan Gilbert led the best performance of a Bruckner symphony I’ve ever heard from the Philharmonic. While the players’ supercharged style is perfect for Mahler’s open wounds, Bruckner’s serene mysticism has been largely alien to them. But under Gilbert, the Second Symphony had that rapturous, long line and richly textured glow of all successful Bruckner performances, with the broadly paced Andante a standout. Only a few unmarked ritards detracted from an already structurally episodic work. Earlier in the evening, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter was soloist in the world premiere of Sebastian Currier’s Time Machines, a subdued half-hour piece that was hopelessly sabotaged by coughers and sneezers.  

June 9. David Robertson equals stimulating programs. His Shostakovich First Symphony swaggered with brightly lit mirth, and Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead was appropriately dark and moody, with an impassioned middle section. Schoenberg’s nightmarish monodrama Erwartung (1908) concerns a distraught woman combing a forest for her missing lover, whom she may have killed. At one point she stumbles over a tree stump (ah, Sigmund!). This fascinating half-hour work was on Robertson’s first Philharmonic concert, in 2001, equally masterfully on all parts. Deborah Voigt appeared a bit casual at first, but she sang well and was infinitely more subtle than Jessye Norman at the Met in 1989, who was bonkers from the outset.

June 16. The young French conductor Ludovic Morlot doesn’t tarry. I missed his highly praised Philharmonic debut last season, but I won’t make that mistake again. Mussorsky’s Prelude to Khovanschchina, Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante défunte, and Ravel’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition moved along smartly at refreshingly old-school tempos, shaving off two and four minutes, respectively, from the last time I endured the latter two works in concert. The high point, however, was Gil Shaham’s dazzling traversal of Walton’s Violin Concerto, an engagingly melodic, virtuosic showpiece written for Heifetz. It was the most recent in the violinist’s imaginative project to perform the wealth of concertos composed in the 1930s by such masters as Stravinsky, Berg, Prokofiev (his second), Bartók, Hindemith, Barber, and Britten, among others. No less accomplished was the New Yorkers’ colorful, spot-on accompaniment. Morlot succeeds Gerard Schwarz as music director of the Seattle Symphony next September, and in 2012 becomes chief conductor of Belgium’s opera house, La Monnaie/Da Munt, which I hope won’t keep him from more Philharmonic appearances.

June 22. Alan Gilbert capped off his first season last year with a stunning presentation of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre and this year chose Janáček’s magical opera The Cunning Little Vixen as a grand finale. Once again, Gilbert’s Harvard buddy Doug Fitch commandeered a thoroughly winning, all-but-fully staged production, luminously sung by a huge cast and warmly played by the Philharmonic under the music director’s sympathetic leadership.

Economic realities appear to have taken their toll on Gilbert’s plans next season. Despite purported sold-out houses for both of these operas in concert, next season’s final subscription concert is a standard all-Mozart affair. The spin is that Gilbert and the Phil will repair a week later to the cavernous Park Avenue Armory for two performances of a fascinating program that exploits spatial layouts for multiple orchestras: Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Boulez’s Rituel, the party scene from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Ives’s The Unanswered Question. Perhaps this will help to mollify those who find Gilbert’s third season less adventurous than his previous ones.

Frank Milburn (1927-2011)

I hope you read the moving memorial to Frank Milburn last week (7/8) on MusicalAmerica.com by New York Philharmonic archivist Barbara Haws. Frank was p.r. director and artistic administrator of the orchestra for over three decades. He was also an assistant editor of Musical America in the 1950s. I interviewed with him soon after arriving in New York, fresh out of college in September 1968. I didn’t get the job, but afterwards he kindly let me in to hear the Friday afternoon concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Are you ready? Haydn’s Symphony No. 87, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Talk about why I left Muncie!

Frank was peripherally involved later that season in one of my favorite anecdotes. I was at the long-gone Footlights cafeteria at Lincoln Center (in the job I eventually did get, p.r. gofer at The Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center), and Bernstein was finishing lunch with a group at a nearby table. They got up to join Frank who was at the door and left, and two girls walked hesitantly over to the table. They stood next to Bernstein’s chair, looked at each other and giggled, and one of them picked up the pie crust he had left, wrapped it in a napkin, and put it in her purse.

Frank Milburn, New York Philharmonic music administrator, and Leonard Bernstein on the orchestra's 1968 European tour. Photo: New York Philharmonic Archives.

A word about that unassuming title, “artistic administrator”: He or she coordinates all aspects of the programming and advises the music director on works to be played. Frank had that job during the tenures of Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, and Zubin Mehta. Barbara relates in her memorial that just before Frank died, Mehta called him and said that he would dedicate his evening’s performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony to him. It can’t have been lost on Frank that Dimitri Mitropoulos had died while rehearsing the Third in Milan in 1960, that Bernstein conducted it at his final concert as Philharmonic music director in 1969, and that Boulez conducted it at the first concert held in Avery Fisher Hall after the 1976 renovation.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

7/16 Avery Fisher Hall. Lincoln Center Festival. Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst. Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 (original 1887 version).

7/17 Avery Fisher Hall. Lincoln Center Festival. Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst. Adams: Doctor Atomic Symphony. Bruckner: Symphony No. 9.

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Summer Doldrums

July 15th, 2011

by Cathy Barbash

As mid-summer approaches, US-China cultural exchange continues its lopsided dance. No American performers participate in festivals in Xinjiang and Guangdong. Meanwhile, in Beijing, a consortium of U.S. conservatories attempts to woo Chinese students with their own show-and-tell festival.

Way out in Urumqi, Xinjiang Province, the second annual China Xinjiang International Folk Dance Festival will present 14 local, national and international troupes in nearly 80 performances from July 20 through August 5. In keeping with current national priorities, this year’s festival is themed “Harmonious China, Colorful World”. As the press conference stated in the inimitable Chinese fashion, “The Dance Festival will showcase the development of the current boom in Xinjiang, civilized and harmonious new image, let the World know Xinjiang.”

Programming will include artists from Hong Kong, Russia, North and South Korea, India, Algeria, Russia, Pakistan, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Spain. Domestic groups include the Central Ballet of China, the Hunan Provincial Song & Dance Company, and the People’s Liberation Army Song & Dance Company. (http://www.f-paper.com/). Unfortunately no Americans. Xinjiang’s local troupes will showcase their World Intangible Cultural Heritage forms of maqam and manasi, but my suspicion is that most folk dances will have been sanitized and fetishized. The Festival will also market to a tech-savvy audience with an online dance audition. Contestants will compete for awards for Best Creativity, Best Stage Performance, People’s Choice, Best Group and Most Promising etc, with votes cast via internet, voice, and SMS.

Back east, the 8th Guangdong Modern Dance Festival (produced by City Contemporary Dance Company’s Willy Tsao) will offer one more season from July 24-29 before taking a sabbatical year to find a more sustainable operating model. Since 2004, the festival has focused on the development of Chinese dance-makers, premiering almost 300 original works, and featuring artists from over 20 provinces and regions in China. The festival has been unusual in that it operates on box office income and donation from the community without government subsidy.

While offering several international troupes (but alas, again nothing from the U.S.), this last festival before the hiatus will focus inward, reviewing China’s dance development over the past decade, and gathering from all over China (including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) about 80 dance groups featuring over 300 Chinese artists in its “Youth Dance Marathon (YDM)”, “Springboard” and “Mainstage” performances. Together with more than a dozen visiting companies from overseas, the Festival will present over 100 creations for an audience that will include over 30 international festival directors, curators and guests. For general program information, see http://www.gdfestival.cn/en/

Meanwhile, the U.S. still searches for Chinese “customers.” This summer’s notable American performances may not be direct public diplomacy exchanges, but represent a savvy marketing effort for American-style music education. A consortium of American music conservatories will showcase themselves in the “2011 First U.S. Music Schools Piano and Violin Music Festival,” co-hosted by Oberlin Conservatory and the Beijing Concert Hall at the Beijing Concert Hall from August 18-22.  Other schools participating include Eastman, Manhattan School, Ithaca, Peabody, and Boston University. No Oberlin staff were available to give me more information over the phone, but more details for Chinese speakers are available at usaschoolsofmusic.org and bjconcerthall.cn/festival. I will be curious about the festival’s effectiveness as a recruiting device: This same consortium of schools, plus N.Y.U., will hold auditions in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou this coming October. A bigger question: with orchestra jobs and general arts funding shrinking in the U.S., will Chinese graduates of American conservatories stay or return home?

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Hogwarts here I come

July 14th, 2011

By Keith Clarke

The 117th season of the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts gets underway tomorrow with Jiří Bĕlohlávek conducting the BBC Singers, Chorus and Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere of a BBC-commissioned work by Judith Weir, a Brahms overture, Liszt’s second piano concerto with the Proms’ youngest ever soloist—19-year-old Benjamin Grosvenor—and Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass.

The first night of the Proms is always a hot ticket, and one that the BBC is kindly proffering in my direction, so I had better line up my excuses for absenting myself from the Royal Albert Hall. Can I ever hold my head up in cultured society if I admit that I’m going to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part Two instead?

Is this old music hack finally losing his marbles? Not entirely. Truth to tell, my 14-year-old son is playing the part of the Young Snape in this final outing for Harry Potter and chums, and since I haven’t been able to get into any of the preview screenings for the cast (good boy—he took his sister instead), wild horses will not stop me seeing my boy on screen come the official opening night.

Strangely, he won’t be with me, Warner Bros having flown him to Florida for the week to take part in a massive Harry Potter fan convention and to try out the spooky rides at the HP theme park. At last week’s London premiere, as I watched a live stream of him signing autographs in London’s Trafalgar Square, I couldn’t help thinking that a few nights’ camping in a wet field in Cornwall would no longer cut the mustard as a vacation excitement.

Young Snape signs autographs at the premiere with co-star Ellie Dalden (Click for animation)

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It is a brave thing to commit “Jiří Bĕlohlávek” to cyberspace in the hope that it comes out with a full set of accents, and we’re all displaying the same amount of courage in welcoming the arrival of Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård as principal conductor designate of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

While we still live in fear that it will all come out looking like gobbledygook, getting computers to trade in left-field character sets used to be a whole lot more difficult. Microsoft ruled the world of software, but it had a bland disregard for the fact that much of its market indulged in a whole range of wild and wacky accents. In the early days of computerized typesetting, we sometimes had to resort to adding the more obscure accents to the artwork by hand, which was a precarious process, especially after a few drinks.

In 1987, when Libor Pešek was made music director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, I found myself sitting next to him at an awards dinner, and said that while I welcomed his appointment, in some respects it was a complete pain in the butt, since one of the many things Bill Gates & Co did not offer at that time was a letter “s” sporting a háček. The maestro considered this at some length before replying: “Mr Clarke, I admire your sense of humor.”

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Making a Name for Yourself

July 14th, 2011

By Edna Landau

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

Dear Edna:

I am a student at a music conservatory in the U.S. with a strong interest in chamber music. This coming year will be my last one at the conservatory. Several friends of mine and I formed a string quartet this past February and we would like to devote serious time to it this coming year, in hopes of maybe entering some competitions. We have yet to choose a name for our quartet. Do you have any advice for us?  —Alison

Dear Alison:

Thank you for submitting this question, which has given me an opportunity to do a little research that I found both fascinating and entertaining.  Hopefully, my explorations will fill your quartet’s minds with many great ideas.

Let’s start close to home (for me) with the Calidore Quartet, which formed at the Colburn Conservatory and a few months ago won the Grand Prize and Gold Medal in the Senior String Division at the Fischoff Competition. One of their violinists, Pasha Tseitlin, told me that he started out by going through a complete list of artists and poets on Wikipedia but any interesting name was already taken. When the group was exhausted from rejecting a massive number of ideas, their cellist, Estelle Choi, came up with Calidore, after reading a poem by that name by John Keats. The group admired the poem and particularly loved the idea that Cali could also be a reference to California,  where they are based, and d’or in French means of gold. (The choice of name seems to have been prescient in light of the recent competition.)

It seems that some groups arrive at a name for themselves rather easily and others agonize over it. If they studied or formed their ensemble in a location that lends itself to an ensemble name, that may provide a simple solution. Examples would be the Juilliard Quartet, the Tokyo String Quartet, the Shanghai Quartet, the Colorado Quartet, and the Borromeo Quartet, who played their first concerts together in northern Italy (lucky them!), where the Borromeo islands emerge from Lago Maggiore. The Jasper Quartet did some brainstorming about things they mutually enjoyed, which led them to the outdoors. Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada, brought to mind extraordinarily beautiful vistas. The decision was clinched upon the realization that Jasper contained the first initial of the first names of all of the quartet members!

Sometimes an ensemble has chosen a particularly memorable landmark associated with the city in which they studied, such as the Parker String Quartet, who studied at New England Conservatory and named themselves after the famous Parker House Hotel in Boston. The Pacifica Quartet’s members all hail from the West Coast of the U. S. and explain that they take their name from “the awe-inspiring Pacific Ocean.”  The Amstel Saxophone Quartet met while touring with the Dutch National Youth Orchestra. According to their website, they chose to name themselves after Holland’s Amstel River (not after Amstel beer!) because “it is not only the historical birthplace of the city of Amsterdam, but also an ever-changing waterscape, reflecting the changes in life along its shores. It was an obvious choice for a quartet grounded in the traditions of chamber music but ready to meet new and ever-changing creative challenges.”

Another popular choice for ensemble names has been composers, writers and artists who proved a source of inspiration.  Among such groups are the Borodin Quartet, the Emerson String Quartet, and the Vermeer, Miró, Calder and Rossetti quartets. Often, the work of the artist or writer has particularly resonated with the ethos of the ensemble. The Escher String Quartet’s bio states that they chose to name themselves after the Dutch artist, M.C. Escher, because they “drew inspiration from the artist’s method of interplay between individual components working together as a whole.” Things become a little less obvious when it comes to groups such as the Afiara Quartet, the Chiara Quartet and Imani Winds. The Afiara takes its name from the Spanish fiar, meaning to trust, which they feel “is a basic element that is vital to the depth and joy of their musicmaking.” Chiara is an Italian word meaning clear, pure or light—all adjectives that typify the finest quartet playing. In the case of Imani Winds, their founder, flutist Valerie Coleman, had the name in mind even before the group was formed. Imani  in Swahili means faith. It characterizes the spirit in which Ms. Coleman set about forming the group and the strength of purpose that has guided them throughout the years. Mariam Adam, clarinetist of Imani Winds, told me that “even though people sometimes want to call us ‘Armani Winds’ (keep dreaming!), the fact that the name is slightly unorthodox seems to have been an advantage in reaffirming the group’s slightly off-the-beaten-path angle.”

When a group’s name does not bring to mind any obvious association, it can work to their advantage since they stand out from the pack and may thereby gain a slight marketing edge. Take, for example, the quartet Brooklyn Rider, who explain that “their name is inspired in part by the creators, interests and cross-disciplinary visions of the Blue Rider group, an artistic association comprised of artists and composers including Vassily Kandinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Scriabin. The quartet also draws additional inspiration from the exploding array of cultures and artistic energy found in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, a place the quartet calls home”. The JACK Quartet, who first played together as students at the Eastman School of Music, chose a name that is an acronym for the first letters of their first names. Their violist, John Richards, has said: “There is something so American about it. Four American guys named JACK.”  The name of another individualistic string quartet, ETHEL, was elucidated as follows by one of its violinists, Cornelius Dufallo: “ We call ourselves ETHEL because it’s just a name. When the group started, they wanted to have a name that didn’t put them in a box. They wanted to name it like you name a rock group.”

So, Alison, the totality of names from which to choose is unlimited and ranges from the artistic, to the philosophical, to the whimsical. (Fortunate is violinist Philippe Quint who was able to call his group the Quint Quintet!). In the end, I think it is important to choose a name that is meaningful to your group. It will enhance the quartet’s profile by giving you a story to tell and it might help to distinguish you from other ensembles. Having said that, the most memorable ensembles are the ones who distinguish themselves time and again through their superb playing. The much admired new music ensemble, eighth blackbird, is known for having derived their name from the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” which had personal meaning for them, but their true originality and artistic identity have been defined through consistently impressive performances over many years.

If at any point in your quest for a name you still feel you need even more ideas than have been provided above, take a look at Alarm Will Sound’s Facebook post entitled

We Were This Close to Being Called Ear Chow, where you will find a fascinating and even hilarious list of 147 possibiities from which they chose their current name.

Good luck!

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

© Edna Landau 2011

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The Copacetic Boat Ride

July 13th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

It’s not easy tapping aboard a moving vessel. But every year in celebration of Tap City! one-hundred plus tap dancers do just that on the deck of the Circle Line in celebration of a 62-year-old tradition: The Copasetic Boat Ride. The historical event kicks off the annual, week-long, internationally-attended tap dance festival, organized by American Tap Dance Foundation director Tony Waag.

On the ship’s main deck on July 5, a circle of dancers formed in front of a jazz band. Some stars of the tap world welcomed the swaying and rocking of the ship as a challenge. Despite the boat’s occasional lurches and vertiginous tilts, their hard hitting styles never softened. Watching Jason Samuels Smith and Tamii Sakurai hit the deck with their taps (rather than their faces) was as thrilling as seeing Lady Liberty up close and against the setting sun.

Despite the fact that tap is an American art form—whose development reflects the country’s evolution from colonial rule to slave nation to super power—the dance form has gotten short shift. Primarily developed through black dancers, its popularity has ebbed and flowed like the tide. Its high water mark of popularity came with the rise of film and America’s embrace of Hollywood musicals: 1910-1950. Then tap went into near extinction. But starting in 1949, a 21-strong ensemble of black male tap dancers, calling themselves The Copasetics, began performing on TV shows, back room bars, and river boats. While Broadway and Hollywood hired fewer and fewer tap dancers, The Copasetics helped keep the art form alive, hoofing it on land and sea.

In the 1970s, tap experienced a renaissance in concert with the American dance boom, which was catapulted by the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts (1965) and the Ford Foundation’s large grants to dance. During that time aging members of The Copasetics helped teach a new generation, which included Gregory Hines, Brenda Bufalino and Savion Glover. Hit Broadway shows like “Black and Blue” (1989) and Savion Glover’s  “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk” (1996), which celebrated and delineated the history of tap, further fostered tap’s revitalization. Then in 1986 the American Tap Dance Foundation formed. Founders Brenda Bufalino, Tony Waag, and the late Charles ‘Honi’ Coles recognized that the tap dancing world needed a home, just as New York City Ballet fought for and established one at Lincoln Center in the 1965. The organization headquartered itself in lower Manhattan not far from the Circle Line pier.

The Circle Line isn’t an ideal place to see tap dancing. But to witness tap dancers, of all ages, abilities, and from far flung places, tap aboard a rocking ship has a certain poetic fitness. Tap dance’s history hasn’t been smooth sailing. Regardless, tap flows from generation to generation despite the fact that the art form has never been given its own theater or has been sanctioned by the power elite, as is the case with ballet and opera. Tap has been kept alive through the efforts of key individuals, like Tony Waag.  As he taught a tap class for beginners on The Circle Line boat, Waag’s sunny demeanor echoed tap great Bill Bojangles Robinson’s famous observation that “everything is copasetic,” or perfect. Perfection, according to Waag, isn’t about a perfectly executed phrase. It’s about finding a rhythmic groove and riding it for as long as you can.

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Waiting in the Wings

July 7th, 2011

by Keith Clarke

It is good to see that Opera North’s controversial community opera Beached is to go ahead regardless of the huffing and puffing that has surrounded some gay content. The whole fuss generated more heat than light, and highlighted the fact that homophobia is always waiting in the wings. The episode put Opera North’s Richard Mantle in an impossible position, and he seems to have done a brilliant job of behind-the-scenes negotiations to reach a sensible conclusion.

The story brings up memories of the furor surrounding the notorious Clause 28, a piece of legislation that dictated that local authorities should “not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

One result, back in 1988, was that Glyndebourne Touring Opera canceled performances of Britten’s Death in Venice at a schools festival, and everywhere, local authorities were on the look-out for any artistic endeavor that seemed a little light on its feet.

After a vigorous campaign, the clause was dropped, but if left a bad taste.

>>>

Summoned by a friend to hear her choral society dishing up the Brahms Requiem I found myself in Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, in London’s Chelsea. It’s a terribly posh venue, yet for all the choir’s very considerable efforts, the event might as well have taken place in the local swimming baths.

The Brahms was prefaced by the world premiere of a new piece, Genesis, by Peter Foggitt, one of the young men playing the two pianos for the Requiem. It is probably fair to say that it contains some beautiful music, but that was virtually impossible to judge, since nearly all the sound careered off into the lofty vaulted roof of the church, leaving behind just an aural sludge. It didn’t help that the choir’s helpers thought that a useful accompaniment to the piece would be some enthusiastic bottle opening and glass chinking a few yards from the audience.

It’s a pity that so often, it is the details that let down amateur performances. Here is a choir that can make a great sound and has the inclination and wherewithal to commission new work. It no doubt put tremendous energy into planning the Big Event. Yet in the end, the result could only have been satisfying to the choir itself and its hangers-on.

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ABT Bids Farewell to José Manuel Carreño

July 5th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

Most dancers’ careers last a little more than a decade.  José Manuel Carreño’s reached the quarter century mark this year. The Cuban-born and trained principal dancer announced his retirement with American Ballet Theatre in September 2010. On June 30, to a full-capacity audience at the Metropolitan Opera House, Carreño made his farewell performance, dancing Prince Siegfried in Kevin McKenzie’s staging of Swan Lake.

Carreño’s departure from ABT marks the passing of a notable generation of performers. Their task was not easy. They danced at the end of the American dance boom in works by renowned ballet choreographers who had made or were making their last dances. Carreño never worked with George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, Antony Tudor, and Jerome Robbins, though he danced their ballets exquisitely. He modeled himself after Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rudolph Nureyev, and Eric Bruhn (who danced with Carreño’s teacher Alicia Alonso, longtime director of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba). Carreño, however, never attained these male dancers’ beyond-the-ballet-world stardom. “Shit—why didn’t I keep playing baseball?” Carreño recently said to Time Out dance columnist Gia Kourlas. Carreno’s comment was a joke. His calling card has been his unswerving passion for ballet.

In an era marked by critics, choreographers, and dancers looking over their shoulders at a passing golden age, Carreño’s confident, uncomplicated stage presence reassured. He gave himself to his roles and his partners completely. As Prince Siegfried, Carreño demonstrated his gallant charms. They include his virtuoso technique (following four pirouettes, he balanced in near stillness before lowering his working leg to the floor), his panther-like grace (turning in mid air, his legs scissored behind him, then in front), and his winning smile.

Like most farewell performances, Carreño’s was as much about honoring his career as highlighting the careers of dancers who are in their prime. Carreño presented each of these performers to the audience with a graciously extended arm. Up first was Joaquin De Luz (as Benno, the prince’s friend). A New York City Ballet principal, De Luz’s guest artist appearance marked the first time he has danced with ABT since he left the company in 2003. In Act I’s Pas de Trois, De Luz, Sarah Lane and Yuriko Kajiya rode the full-bodied symphonic quality of Tchaikovsky’s music (under the baton of Ormsby Wilkins) with a what-me-worry charisma.

Other dancers in their prime, who performed, were David Hallberg (as the evil sorcerer von Rothbart) and Gillian Murphy. Both wowed. Murphy danced Odile (the black swan) while veteran ballerina Julie Kent performed Odette (the white swan). This splitting of Swan Lake’s lead female role isn’t unknown. It was, however, made through Carreño’s suggestion and casting. The contrast between Murphy and Kent’s performances was the most interesting part of the evening. Kent, who like Carreño has 16 years with ABT, unfolded her limbs as though they were tendrils. Her delicacy is her signature quality. It is also a product of her age. Murphy, in contrast, eats up space. She dances with a juicy, full-bodied, fearless quality. This ballerina is no waif.

But it was David Hallberg’s presence that radiated the strongest, if acting as much as dancing is the Geiger counter test. Appearing in Act III, Hallberg as Von Rothbart bore into his fellow performers eyes’ like kryptonite. He danced with each of the four Princesses, luring them into his orbit like a menacing rake that you just can’t help but like. With the Queen Mother (Susan Jaffe), he led her back to her throne and impudently sat in Prince Siegfried’s throne. Hallberg’s comic chutzpah stood in stark contrast to Carreño’s noblesse oblige, which is all to the good, if one believes that von Rothbart and the Prince are foils to Odile (who is imprisoned into the body of a swan by Rothbart and is further condemned by the Prince’s pledge of love to Odette).

Unlike Hallberg, Carreño’s performance wasn’t that memorable. Perhaps it was because McKenzie’s staging of Swan Lake, after Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, isn’t that satisfying. There are too many choreographic and visual elements that don’t gel. One occurs when Carreño and Kent leap to their deaths. They look like flying fish rather lovers sacrificing their mortality to be with each other in the afterlife. Another concerns Zack Brown’s Cecil B. DeMille style backdrop from Act III. It bears resemblance to the technicolor scene in The Ten Commandments when Moses parts the Red Sea. Hollywood’s bombastic sensibility rules in Mckenzie’s version, which Carreño has performed since its 2000 New York premiere.

As flowers rained down onto the stage, Carreño took his final bows. A Moses-like parting of the ways occurred. While his colleagues will continue their ballet performance careers, Carreño will cross over to teaching and coaching. He will help usher in the next generation. No doubt he’ll do it with unswerving dedication.

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