|
IN Music News THIS WEEK:
All the Concerts Fit to Print
NEA Budget Decision Soon
K-Mozart Is Now K-Middlebrow
|
By Janos Gereben
'Priceless Music' from SFCO
Benjamin Simon's San Francisco Chamber Orchestra is doing something brave, gracious, unprecedented . . . and probably suicidal. The venerable organization will open its upcoming 52nd season to one and all with free admission. That's right: all seven SFCO concerts in 2004-5 will be free to the public. You don't even need a ticket; see www.sfchamberorchestra.org.
You may remember that "something like this" happened before, orchestras giving some concerts (although certainly not a whole season) for free, under the sponsorship of the Music Performance Trust Fund, created in 1948, under agreements between the recording industry and the American Federation of Musicians. There were limitations under that scheme. The concert had to be free and the MPTF only paid for one rehearsal. The performing entity had to pay for any additional rehearsals. The Chamber Orchestra, which did offer some Performance Trust Fund concerts in the past, is going solo this time, without support from the Fund.
Trust Fund concerts were "dwindling," Simon told Classical Voice, "and their restrictions were unacceptable." SFCO's two previous seasons were based on paid admission. So how does the "free season" work? "We are taking a gamble," the music director admits, "hoping to attract a new audience, and those willing to sign up as members." Members, you see, pay for membership and get preferential seating, and that's one source of income. The other is from corporate sponsors, such as the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, which has given $50,000 to SFCO.
Will the Chamber Orchestra scale back its programming? On the contrary, it will offer world premieres and commissioned works along with classic and contemporary works. Featured on the December and January concerts, Harold Meltzer's Concerto for Two Bassoons will premiere, performed by Peter Kolkay and Rufus Olivier; in March, the attraction is the SFCO-commissioned world premiere of a work by Paul Dresher. Among the more "old-fashioned" events, note a Schubertiade in February with mezzo Zheng Cao and pianist Mack McCray. For the season's programs, see www.sfchamberorchestra.org.
All the Concerts Fit to Print ACSO, the Association of California Symphony Orchestras, has set up an Internet listing mechanism for all the state's orchestra performances each month. For the November calendar, see www.acso.org. (Room for improvement: the page now comes up in the slow and awkard PDF format, one hopes for a more user-friendly form in the near future: text or HTML.)
NEA Budget Decision Soon Attending the Boise, Idaho, premiere of Alva Henderson's Nosferatu for which he wrote the libretto, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia told Classical Voice last weekend that a decision on the NEA budget by Congress is expected on November 15. That's when a crucial House-Senate conference meeting is scheduled to deal with the always-controversial money question, and this time, right in the middle of Washington's post-election pandemonium. The figures: after the Bush Administration proposed an $18 million increase over the last budget (of $122 million), the House cut back the back the addition to $10 million, so the conference committee has a total figure of $132 million to discuss. (For comparison: if the budget is fully funded, the nation's per-capita cost of supporting all the arts will be 45 cents; the city of Berlin alone, with a population of 3.3 million (and a unification-induced debt of $25 billion), spends $26 million just on its three opera houses, with a per-capita cost of $7.88.) Gioia, a Santa Rosa resident and music critic for San Francisco magazine for seven years until his NEA appointment at the beginning of 2002, refrained from predicting the outcome of the budget process, but said opposition to funding the agency at all has diminished. "We have gone beyond the Mapplethorpe phase," he said, "and now focus on the millions of children who have received no arts or music education" since the death of the controversial photographer 15 years ago. The NEA's cost of operation is about 15% of the budget, and Gioia responded to the interviewer's comment that it sounds like a normal figure by saying that he is "horrified by government overhead," with its rules and regulations he cannot modify. He has improved agency operation and morale, Gioia said, by introducing more electronic processing "to save time, tree and money," while cleaning out "rooms full of stacks of applications" and having "dumpsters take away piles of paper clogging the hallways," administrative debris turning the agency's "beautiful old building into a rats' warren." Gioia has been encouraging the participation of private organizations in the work of the NEA, such as the Dana Foundation ("no relation") research project into the effect of the arts on young children. The idea of the "Mozart Effect," Gioia said, is worth exploring, although he views the cause of that buzz just "bad research." Arts education and experience, he said, do create measurable biological and psychological changes in the very young, and it's important to understand that process.
K-Mozart Is Now K-Middlebrow The question published in the last column about possible programming change at KMZT, an AM station at 1510, featuring classical music as "K-Mozart," has been answered by reader Ruth C. Jacobs, who called the owner, Mt. Wilson Broadcasting. She was told that "the station did not have enough listenership and could not get sufficient advertising, so went to 'oldies'." Jacobs suggests using KDIA, 1640 AM, instead to listen to the Met broadcasts on Saturday when the season opens in December. The only FM station for the Met in the area, KUSF, 90.3, has a signal too weak to pick up much beyond the University of San Francisco campus.
(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the
Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janosg@gmail.com.)
|
