Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Richard Tang Yuk Leaves Princeton Festival

Richard Tang Yuk is leaving The Princeton Festival.

Tang Yuk is stepping down as executive and artistic director from the festival he founded in 2004.

The festival has made Princeton a June destination for music-lovers seeking quality opera, musical theater, chamber works, Baroque performance, jazz, dance, and multi-media.

Under Tang Yuk’s leadership, the festival has grown in scale from two events and four performances in 2004, to encompass eight events and 22 performances – in addition to 20 free lectures and workshops – in 2019. This year, the festival met the challenges of coronavirus with an ambitious menu of online offerings, mixing new and archival material.

Tang Yuk’s opera performances have earned acclaim in such publications as Opera News and The New York Times. Repertoire at the Princeton Festival has always been an engaging balance of the familiar and the unusual. Tang Yuk and his crackerjack team of technicians have presented uniformly excellent productions of “The Flying Dutchman,” “Peter Grimes,” “Porgy and Bess,” “The Rake’s Progress,” “Nixon in China,” Handel’s “Ariodante,” and a double-bill of “Gianni Schicchi” and Rachmaninoff’s “Francesca da Rimini,” among others.

Gregory Jon Geehern, the festival’s associate conductor and assistant to the artistic director, will step up as acting artistic director.

On September 23 at 6 pm EDT, the Princeton Festival will hold the finals of its annual piano competition, this year to be presented online. The competition will feature participants from around the world. For tickets and information, visit princetonfestival.org.

Sincere best wishes to Richard Tang Yuk. Thank you, Richard, for all that you’ve done!

September 18, 2020
Bard Music Festival: Rediscoveries Online

I know I have a tendency to talk a lot about Bard College. But it deserves to be talked about! Always a lot of interesting things happening there, on its bucolic campus within sight of the Catskills.

Yesterday, in conjunction with Nadia Boulanger’s birthday, I mentioned its summer music festival, which is a mecca, or should be, for anyone interested in live performance of rarely-heard, largely forgotten, and totally worthwhile music, presented over an immersive fortnight of concerts, lectures, and panels. Ordinarily, there’s a lot else going on, on Bard campus, all summer long.

“Nadia Boulanger and Her World” was to have been the focus of this year’s festival. Because of COVID, that has been postponed until next summer. But as you know, Nature abhors a vacuum (even as she may adore a pandemic), so in the meantime Bard has stepped up with some very enticing virtual programs, which it is presenting under the title “Out of the Silence: Bard Music Festival Rediscoveries.”

This series of live-streamed concerts includes works by classic, though underexposed, Black composers, alongside musical staples for string orchestra by Dvořák, Mendelssohn, Bartók, and Tchaikovsky. These are performed by the college’s resident ensemble, The Orchestra Now (TŌN), under the direction of Leon Botstein and his associates. Botstein is music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and president of Bard College.

The programs are presented on Saturdays at 5:30 pm EDT, with preconcert panels offered an hour before. Since it is not always the best hour for me to be listening, I am delighted to find that past concerts in the series are being archived online.

Here’s Program Two, with an introductory composers’ round table, featuring Adolphus Hailstork, Jessie Montgomery, Alvin Singleton, and Joan Tower. The music-making – which includes Montgomery’s “Strum,” Singleton’s “After Choice,” Hailstork’s “Sonata da Chiesa” (highly recommended), and Dvořák’s “Serenade for Strings” – begins around the 58-minute mark.

As you can see, they’ve figured out a way to present these concerts safely, outdoors, with strings appropriately distanced, and no potential for airborne contagion by way of plumes from wind or brass instruments.

Again, the next program in the series will be presented this Saturday. Here’s a link for free reservations for the remaining concerts:

https://tickets.fishercenter.bard.edu/2392/2396

Since the coronavirus shutdown, Bard has been extraordinarily generous with its archival material, sharing video of orchestral and opera performances from past festivals. In many of these, Botstein conducts the ASO. You’ll find much to choose from here:

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/upstreaming/

Times are tough for artists, as they are for everybody else. If you enjoy these offerings, or any of the virtual streams posted by other musicians and organizations, please consider supporting them with your contribution. Even a little bit means something, if everybody chips in.

Masked and distanced: The Bard musicians in rehearsal

Fisher Center at Bard

September 17, 2020
COVID Shift Rimsky to Mussorgsky

Six months into COVID: I was shooting for Rimsky-Korsakov, but wound up at Mussorgsky.

September 16, 2020
Nadia Boulanger: Influential Music Teacher
Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) has been described as the most influential teacher since Socrates.

Her students included everyone from Dinu Lipatti to Igor Markevitch, from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter, from Astor Piazzolla to Philip Glass, from Michel Legrand to Quincy Jones, from Leonard Bernstein to “What Makes It Great?” radio host Rob Kapilow.

Her influence on American music, in particular, has been incalculable. Hopefuls flocked to her American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, where she accepted applicants from all backgrounds, provided they were determined to learn. It was Virgil Thomson who quipped, “She was a one-woman graduate school, so powerful and permeating that legend credits every United States town with two things: a five and dime and a Boulanger pupil.” The five and dimes may have faded, but not so the legacy of the “Boulangerie.”

This summer, Boulanger was to have been the focus of “Nadia Boulanger and Her World,” a two-week celebration of her music and influence, at the Bard Music Festival, held on the campus of Bard College in upstate New York, since sensibly postponed to next year, because of COVID concerns. The concerts, talks, and panels will examine not only Boulanger’s own contributions, but also those of her sister, the tragically short-lived composer Lili Boulanger, and representative works by her innumerable students and contemporaries.*

In the meantime, I stumbled across this fascinating documentary a few months back. It’s full of great stuff – first-hand accounts, historical footage, and terrific insights. Bernstein is interviewed in French, beginning around the 7-minute mark:

Beneath those grey hairs and pince-nez lurked an iron will that brooked no nonsense, yet Boulanger was surprisingly accepting, astonishingly objective, and generally dead-on in her assessments. When asked if a hierarchy could be established among composers – Beethoven being more important than Max Bruch, for instance – she suggests the pointlessness of such comparisons, stating it is like comparing the Himalayas to Montmartre.

She accepts the philosophical breadth of her pupils as a matter of course: “It’s very different to confront a work you don’t know yet, or a work in which you have to recognize some worth, while secretly saying to yourself, ‘that’s a trend I would never follow.’ That’s a matter of personal taste. Cannot culture allow us to go beyond personal taste and see the beauty of an object? I may not want to buy it, but I can see that it’s beautiful.”

Clearly, she was an extraordinary person. Happy birthday, Nadia Boulanger!
- There’s always something interesting going on at Bard. Check out the Bard Music Festival “Rediscoveries” series, featuring underplayed works by classic Black composers on the same programs with beloved masterpieces for string orchestra by Tchaikovsky and Bartók, now streaming on Saturdays:
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/

Fisher Center at Bard
September 16, 2020
Richard Arnell Rediscovered Neglected Composer

Certainly, you all know by now how enthusiastic I am about unusual, neglected, and worthwhile repertoire. Here’s a composer who is so neglected, he didn’t even turn up in my birthday references for today – or at any rate, those I checked – Richard Arnell (1917-2009), known to his friends as Tony.

A few years ago, when WPRB 103.3 FM still had five hours a day devoted to classical music, I hosted a marathon tribute to Arnell on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth. To this end, I had the support of two of the composer’s younger friends – Patrick Jonathan, who now makes his home in Malaysia, and Warren Cohen, who is music director of the MusicaNova Orchestra, based in Phoenix, Arizona. Both of them were very generous with their time, sharing anecdotes, recordings, and, in the case of Patrick, historic documents. As luck would have it, Cohen actually makes his home in New Jersey, just about hour away. So he was able to drive down and join me for an in-studio interview.

If you missed it, here’s a link to our conversation. MusicaNova is a fascinating organization whose mission it is to present “the greatest music you’ve never heard – yet.” In fact, Cohen has conducted first American performances of a number of Arnell’s major works. The sound file includes a MusicaNova performance of Arnell’s Symphony No. 5 – subtitled “The Gorilla” (!) – and Cohen’s gorgeous arrangement for string orchestra, sanctioned by the composer, of the “Elegy” from Arnell’s String Quartet No. 3.

Learn more about this neglected English master, who was championed by Beecham, Stokowski, and Bernard Herrmann, by listening here:

Happy birthday, Tony Arnell!

September 15, 2020

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