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IN Music News THIS WEEK: Young Singers Get the Word on Real Life
February 19, 2002
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By Janos Gereben
Young Singers Get the Word on Real Life
Between a San Francisco Performances recital in Herbst Theater Saturday night and a master class for amateurs Sunday afternoon, soprano Barbara Bonney gave a morning presentation on the business of music. She told young singers about the realities of singing as a career — "figure on 30% of your income cleared after international/US taxes (56% in Germany alone) and make sure your expenses and living costs are covered by what remains, good luck to you!" — and she peppered her eminently practical advice with fun bits of information:
The Last of the Class of 1912 Günter Wand, who turned 90 in January, died Thursday in Switzerland. The last of great conductors born in 1912 — Sergiu Celibidache, Erich Leinsdorf, Ernst Ludwig Leitner, Sir Georg Solti among others — Wand did not have an international, jet-setter career, but his work in Cologne and Bern over the years was much appreciated by music lovers. Late in life, his recordings began to make a name for him everywhere, especially his superb Bruckner performances.
Terfel Slows Down Bryn Terfel, the Sydney Morning Herald reports, cancelled his planned appearance with Opera Australia next year "in the title role" of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In fact, it's the role of Hans Sachs that's at issue, but apparently the report of cancellation is correct. Only 36, Terfel has now cancelled all engagements outside Europe, in order to spend more time with his family. "Singing isn't everything," he said. "Life and family are." The Sydney company's general manager, Adrian Collette, did not celebrate Terfel's change of heart. "This production was central to our planning for 2003," he said, "and no one is going to bring to it the box-office clout of Bryn Terfel." That clout is badly needed because the Wagner opera's production cost is A$2 million there, which is $1 million "in real money."
East Coast Inferiority Complex "The stodgy New York Philharmonic is all but stagnating under the lame-duck leadership of its Old World maestro, Kurt Masur, and the immediate future under Lorin Maazel looms ominous," writes Martin Bernheimer in the February 18 Financial Times by way of setting the scene for the report on the San Francisco Symphony's visit to Carnegie Hall last week. Applauding Michael Tilson Thomas's direction and Thomas Hampson's performance in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (but not happy with tenor Michael Schade), Bernheimer concludes that Esa-Pekka Salonen in Los Angeles and MTT in San Francisco are gaining on the band in New York - "... a couple of symphonic mavericks are making interesting music, their way, in the not-so-wild west."
And an Oops in Philadelphia Thomas Zehetmair was advertised as the Philadelphia Orchestra's soloist last week in Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 4, but — according to Peter Dobrin's report in the Philadelphia Inquirer — he went for a stroll on Friday before the evening concert scheduled in the new Kimmel Center Verizon Hall. But this was no evening concert: the matinee started at 2 p.m., without the soloist to be found anywhere. Neeme Järvi went on to conduct the concert's other scheduled work, Gliere's Symphony No. 3, and the audience of 2,500 ended up Mozart-less. Zehetmair said he was miserable about the mixup, he apologized, but offered an excuse which doesn't seem entirely acceptable: "I have been performing for 24 years or something, and it's really the first time this has happened." How many concerts can a soloist miss before the problem becomes obvious?
(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janos451@earthlink.net.) ©2002 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved |