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MUSIC SHORTS
News Briefs
January 9, 2001
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By Janos Gereben
"Other Minds" in high gear
Charles Amirkhanian, Mr. Really New Music, is returning from a year-long Rockefeller Foundation residency in Italy, to direct the seventh annual Other Minds Festival, one of the few composer-based musical events in the world.
Preparations have been going on since last fall for the festival, to run in Woodside, March 3-6, and then in Fort Mason's Cowell Theater, March 8-10.
Invited composers include Chris Brown (Oakland); Gavin Bryars(Great Britain), Alvin Curran (Oakland/Rome); Andrew Hill (New York), Hi Kyung Kim (Santa Cruz, born in Korea), James Tenney (Los Angeles), Glen Velez (New York), Aleksandra Vrebalov (Ann Arbor, born in Yugoslavia).
Music by Ezra Pound
Robert Hughes will conduct some rarely heard musical works by Ezra Pound at the Other Minds festival (see above). The concert includes the world premiere of Fiddle Music Suite No. 1 Pound wrote in 1924 for Olga Rudge, to be performed in Fort Mason by violinist Nathan Rubin
El Nino on the Web
The entire 60-minute Paris production of John Adams' "El Nino" (coming to Davies Hall this week) can be heard and seen on www.onlineclassics.com. Given the usual extra-musical Peter Sellars weirdnesses (a mix of the Bernstein Mass and some confusing stories projected behind the singers), you may get more out of it if you only listen. No good news there either: the music, on first hearing, sounds as if Adams went way back to an early phase of minimalism.
High Sticking On The Podium Forbes magazine of January 22, 2001 reports the following top salaries for U.S. music directors. Note that these figures are for one position only while the conductors named here all have additional gainful employment:
James Levine, Metropolitan Opera, $1,857,000 Christoph von Dohnanyi, Cleveland Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim, Chicago Symphony, $695,427 Johannes Vonk, St. Louis Symphony, $531,536
The Attorney-General Nominee and the "Pore" Country Music Folk Bush's nomination for Attorney General might just have an investigation of the NEA's support for opera on his agenda, if he holds to his sentiments of three years ago. In a 1997 interview, Sen. John Ashcroft told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "I tend not to be an individual who has invested a great deal of my life in opera," noting that his musical tastes run to gospel and country. "Now the opera gets a subsidy from the National Endowment for the Arts, but, by and large, Willie Nelson and Garth Brooks don't. Those of us who drive our pickups to those concerts don't get a subsidy, but the people who drive their Mercedes to the opera get a subsidy."
January opera
The San Francisco Opera's extension of the season into January is new enough to warrant a reminder. It's The Magic Flute in the War Memorial on January 9, 10, 12 and 14; The Elixir of Love on January 11 and 13. Both works have had cast changes since the fall-season performances. Flute features young Donita Volkwijn as Pamina on January 9 (Mary Mills at the other performances), Mary Dunleavy as Queen of the Night, Raymond Veary as Tamino, Jochen Schmeckenbecher as Papageno, Franz Josef Selig as Sarastro; William Lacy conducts. Elixir newcomers are Anna Netrebko as Adina, Roberto Sacca as Nemorino, Nmon Ford as Belcore, Bojan Knezevic as Dulcamara; Lacey and Maurizio Barbacini share conducting duties.
Rosenberg 'debut'
Pamela Rosenberg, who takes over officially on August 1 from Lotfi Mansouri as the San Francisco Opera's general manager, has scheduled her first meeting with the press Tuesday morning, January 9.
(Janos Gereben is arts editor of the Oakland, CA, Post Newspaper Group and technology editor for www.the451.com
©2000 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.
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