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IN Music News THIS WEEK:
Singer to Head Programs for Young Singers
October 2, 2001
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By Janos Gereben
Twenty-five years after winning the George London Foundation Award for young singers, Sheri Greenawald was named to head what is probably the country's largest organization for opera training. When SF Opera general manager Pamela Rosenberg announced that Greenawald will be the next director of the SF Opera Center, effective next May, the soprano became the first singer to occupy the position in the 20 years of the Center and 44 years since the first of its constituent programs was established. Greenawald succeeds Richard Harrell, who resigned last month.
The Center includes the Merola Opera Program (created by Kurt Herbert Adler in 1957), the Adler Fellowship Program, Western Opera Theater and the Schwabacher Debut Recitals — all involved with training young singers and providing support and performance opportunities for them.
Greenawald is returning to San Francisco, where she lived for five years in the 1980s, calling the move "a return to home." While still in the middle of a successful international singing career (a likely cause of the awkward seven-month delay in starting the job), Greenawald has been involved in teaching and coaching in recent years. First serving as the vocal coach in the Santa Fe Opera Apprentice Program in 1999, she became opera director of the program last year. She is also a professor of voice and opera at the Boston Conservatory, and has given master classes at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and elsewhere.
Davis Quits Lincoln Center Presidency
Gordon J. Davis just up and quit as president of Lincoln Center last weekend, after only nine months on the job. Beverly Sills, the center's board chair, announced formation of a search committee to find somebody to run New York City's art center operating on an annual budget of $71 million. Davis, who has served on the center's board for 20 years, offered no explanation for his departure beyond writing to Sills that "things are not working in the way either of us hoped or expected." Sills had been receiving many complaints from staff about Davis, whose salary was reputed to be in the neighborhood of $500,000.
Diemecke to Long Beach Enrique Arturo Diemecke, principal conductor of Mexico's National Symphony, has been named music director of the Long Beach Symphony, after the orchestra's 2 1/2-year search to find a successor to JoAnn Falletta, who spent 12 years on the job. (She now heads the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Virginia Symphony, while still an advisor in Long Beach.) Diemecke will remain music director both in Mexico City and with the Flint (Michigan) Symphony.
MusicNet Makes Its Move The new conglomerate MusicNet is trying to corner the upcoming holiday online music market. First described in this column on August 8 ("US Scrutiny of Online Music Behemoths"), MusicNet represents AOL Time Warner, EMI and BMG, among others. The plan is offer access to recordings and download permission for 50 works for a flat fee of $10 per month. Another alliance, Pressplay - owned by Vivendi and Sony - is gearing up to compete in the rush of online-music merchandising and selling. Napster, which started the online music business with free downloads until shut down by the courts, itself is going into a fee arrangement. And, for several months now, onlineclassics.com, which started with free access to classical music on the Web, has been charging $10 per month. Suddenly, all this Napster-envy is beginning to look like the run of the dotcom lemmings. Coming next: radio stations restricting online broadcasts or trying to charge for them? (You can still get some free access at onlineclassics.FreeSamples.)
Park to andante Elena Park, formerly San Francisco Opera public relations director, and more recently, director of communications at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is now editor in chief of the online music publication andante.
From Grim Glasgow to Lovely London From an interview by Martin Hoyle on musicweb with David McVicar, an angry youngish Turk, whose directing exploits run from St. Petersburg to London, with many stops in-between: "Far from being an escape into fantasy from what McVicar recalls as a grim, lower-middle-class family background with no artistic interests, theatre and opera - starting with Glasgow's Tramway and Citizens' Theatre - provided the breakthrough to self-awareness and reality. 'I may work on a piece 100, 200, 300 years old but I'm talking about the society we live in'. "Despite his recent huge successes in opera - culminating in an ecstatically acclaimed production of Britten's problem piece, The Rape of Lucretia, for ENO, McVicar has worked in theatre and wants to do more. What can we expect? 'Address that question to Trevor Nunn and Adrian Noble. They know I exist. I'm ready and available. I'm fed up with Michael Billington saying no young directors can use the big stage. I'm pissed off with them for carving up the Lyttleton. There's f...-all wrong with the Lyttleton - it's a fabulous proscenium theatre and I know how to use that stage without them carving it up so less talented directors can pretend they're in a studio. What's the difference between opera and theatre? They sing. The plot of Cymbeline is no more or less ridiculous than Rigoletto. They're both about human truths.'" [Merola/Adler veteran Laura Claycomb, who has a skyrocketing international career, made her debut as Olympia in McVicar's production of Les Contes d'Hoffmann at the Vlaamse Opera. Claycomb, who made her Carnegie Hall debut with Esa-Pekka Salonen's Five Images After Sappho, is singing Gilda next month in the Houston Opera's Rigoletto.]
Rewriting the Tchaikovsky Concerto in the Armory William Harvey, a freshman at the Juilliard School, is a violinist. He joined a group the school organized to play in the Armory where families of those missing at the World Trade Center have been waiting for news. The following is from Harvey's account of music-making you can never learn in class. "Entering the building was very difficult emotionally because the walls were all covered with posters of the missing. Thousands of posters, spread out up to eight feet above the ground, each featuring a different, smiling, face. I made my way into the huge central room and found my Juilliard buddies. For two hours we sightread music. "At 7 p.m., the other two players had to leave; they had been playing at the Armory since 1 and simply couldn't play any more. I volunteered to stay and play solo, since I had just got there. I soon realized that the evening had just begun for me: a man in fatigues who introduced himself as Sergeant Major asked me if I'd mind playing for his soldiers as they came back from digging through the rubble at Ground Zero. "So at 9, I headed up to the second floor as the first men were arriving. From then until 11:30, I played everything I could do from memory: Bach B Minor Partita, Tchaikovsky Concerto, Dvorak Concerto, Paganini Caprices 1 and 17, Vivaldi Winter and Spring, Theme from Schindler's List, Meditation from Thais, Amazing Grace, My Country 'Tis of Thee, Turkey in the Straw... Never have I played for a more grateful audience. Somehow it didn't matter that by the end, my intonation was shot and I had no bow control. I would have lost any competition I was playing in, but it didn't matter. The men would come up the stairs in full gear, remove their helmets, look at me, and smile. "When I couldn't play anymore, I asked the Sergeant Major if it would be appropriate if I played the National Anthem. He shouted above the chaos of the milling soldiers to call them to attention, and I played the National Anthem as the 300 men of the 69th Division saluted an invisible flag. After shaking a few hands and packing up, I was prepared to leave when a private told me the Colonel wanted to see me again. He took me down to the War Room, but we couldn't find the Colonel, so he gave me a tour of the War Room. It turns out that the division I played for is the Famous Fighting Sixty-Ninth, the most decorated division in the U.S. Army. He pointed out a letter from Abraham Lincoln offering his condolences after the Battle of Antietam... the 69th suffered the most casualties of any division at that historic battle. Finally, we located the Colonel. After thanking me again, he presented me with the coin of the regiment. 'We only give these to someone who's done something special for the 69th,' he said. "As I rode back to Juilliard, I was numb. Not only was this evening the proudest I've ever felt to be an American, it was my most meaningful as a musician and a person as well. At Juilliard, kids are hypercritical of each other and very competitive. The teachers expect, and in most cases get, technical perfection. But this wasn't about that. The soldiers didn't care that I had so many memory slips I lost count. They didn't care that when I forgot how the second movement of the Tchaikovsky went, I had to come up with my own insipid improvisation until I somehow (and I still don't know how) I got to a cadence. I've never seen a more appreciative audience, and I've never understood so fully what it means to communicate music to other people. Words only go so far, and even music can only go a little further from there." (Janos Gereben is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group and technology editor for www.the451.com. Contact him at janos451@earthlink.net). ©2001 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved |
