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IN Music News THIS WEEK:
Also in this issue:
Mahler in Stockton
Bay Area Giving Down Precipitously
Picture Is Cloudy in Rochester
Musical Schism in Russia
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By Janos Gereben
Berkeley Edge
Cal Performances is announcing today the first "Berkeley Edge Fest: a Festival of Contemporary Performance," to be followed by similar future events every two years, alternating with the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition of early music, which has been running in odd years.
The four-day festival, beginning June 5 in Hertz Hall, will pay tribute to the late Lou Harrison with world premieres for gamelan, the Javanese gong orchestra whose sound was often incorporated in Harrison's compositions. The festival will feature works by John Adams, Edmund Campion, Cindy Cox, Daniel Lentz, Ingram Marshall and Terry Riley.
Cal Performances and Edge festival director Robert Cole said the purpose of the fetival is "to illuminate important 20th and 21st century contributions to music, theater and dance." He announced that performers will include composers Riley, Lentz, Cox and Marshall, along with Steve Lacy, George Lewis, David Wessel, the SF Contemporary Music Players, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, and pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera.
Cahill is one of the curators of the 2003 Berkeley Edge Fest, along with composer and Berkeley music professor Jorge Liderman, and David Wessel, director of the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley. For detailed information about the festival, to be posted soon, see www.calperfs.berkeley.edu.
Mahler in Stockton The Monday edition of The New Yorker gleefully reprints a correction from the Sacramento Bee: "Gustav Mahler will not play with the Stockton Symphony this season, as reported on Page E-5 on Sunday. He died in 1911."
Bay Area Giving Down Precipitously A survey by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has looked into fund for arts programs at 16 Bay Area foundations for the last three years. Over $55m was given to arts groups in 2001, according to the survey, reduced to about $44m in 2002. The really bad news: projected giving level from all foundations for 2003 is about $25m. The decreased funding is mainly due to declining endowments, according to Moy Eng, program director at the Hewlett Foundation. The San Francisco-based Irvine Foundation was excluded from 2003 calculations because it is undergoing a "strategic review," and it is not clear if it will continue contributions to the arts. A dramatic indication of reduced funding is a proposal by Gov. Gray Davis to cut the grants budget for the California Arts Council in half from $16.4m to $8.1m.
Picture Is Cloudy in Rochester The combination of $550,000 deficit and nearly $1 million cash shortage is threatening the existence of the once-wealthy Rochester Philharmonic, founded by George Eastman 80 years ago. A report in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle says $350,000 in administrative cuts last year helped the orchestra's survival, but there is not much left to cut in the $7.8m budget, and musicians and vendors may not get paid as early as next month. Causes of the financial crisis should sound familiar to almost every performing-arts organization: a drop in government subsidy, ticket sales and donations down, and nose-diving earnings on investments. The orchestra's three endowments, which were worth as much as $15m a few years ago, have lost as much as $3m. "There's hardly any wiggle room at all,' said the RPO board chairman. "We all knew this was going to be a tough year, but none of us expected that all of the financial challenges would accelerate so quickly."
Musical Schism in Russia The Russian National Orchestra, conducted by Berkeley's Kent Nagano in last month's news-making release of The Wolf and Peter (see Music News, February 18, 2003), is in the midst of an awkward bit of transition. The orchestra's formerly featured conductor-violinist Vladimir Spivakov, left in a tiff, and now announced formation of an orchestra, to be called, no, not the Russian National Orchestra, but the Russian National Philharmonic Orchestra. The original (and only) RNO — which is also supported by a San Francisco philantropist — didn't take the news kindly. RNO chief executive Sergei Markov messaged SFCV: "When we informed Mr. Spivakov last fall that his contract with the RNO would not be renewed, we knew he was keen to continue his conducting career. We expected that he should be able to find a position with one of the existing orchestras in Russia. In Moscow alone, there are more than 20. "Instead, Mr. Spivakov is trying to form a new orchestra with a name confusingly close to the RNO. We find it odd that any professional would try to start a new venture by appropriating the name of the one that had dismissed him. We are surprised that the Ministry of Culture (which for years has voiced the need to reduce the number of orchestras depending on it) would do the very opposite by creating one more for Spivakov. This demonstrates that old-style cronyism, rather than good sense, still carries the day within Russia's cultural establishment. "The Russian National Orchestra is well known throughout the world. While imitation is the highest form of flattery, this attempt to create another Russian National Orchestra cannot be serious. Any party choosing to infringe the RNO's trademark, which is registered and protected worldwide, will be met with the appropriate legal response." Spivakov continues to be carried on the RNO roster as one of the orchestra's conductors . . . along with Nagano, Paavo Berglund and others. Mikhail Pletnev is founder and chief conductor.
(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.)
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