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☆ Discord at the Symphony: Losing a Star, San Francisco Weighs Its Future
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-24 | by ( Robin Pogrebin | Javier C. Hernández | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For a night at the symphony, there was a lot of tension in the air. The evening’s program was just the sort of thing he had promised when he was hired with a mandate to rethink the concert experience: Ravel’s charming “Mother Goose” brought to life by dancers from Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, and then Schoenberg’s nightmarish “Erwartung” staged by the director Peter Sellars. His decision to leave once his contract is up next year has upset fans — “Who he is and what he brings can’t be replicated,” Mark Malaspina, an audience member, lamented as he entered the hall — and left some concerned about the future of the 113-year-old San Francisco Symphony. “An orchestra that was in very good shape is now in crisis,” said Peter Pastreich, a longtime arts administrator who managed the San Francisco Symphony from 1978 to 1999. “It is heartbreaking to watch.”

Persons: concertgoers, Pekka Salonen’s, Goose ”, Alonzo King’s, ”, Peter Sellars, —, ” Mark Malaspina, Peter Pastreich Organizations: Davies Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Ballet

☆ The Vienna Philharmonic Tours With a Favorite Conductor
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-04 | by ( Joshua Barone | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The Vienna Philharmonic hasn’t had a chief conductor since 1933. But it has had favorite conductors. The violinist Daniel Froschauer, the Philharmonic’s chairman, has said that today, the ensemble not so secretly has two maestros at the top of its roster: Riccardo Muti and Franz Welser-Möst. It takes a lot to win over the affection of the Philharmonic, one of Europe’s finest ensembles, just as it takes a lot to join its ranks. These players — known for their lush sound, their brighter, higher tuning frequency and their distinctly Viennese articulation — can be haughty and stubborn; I have seen them outright defy a conductor in rehearsal.

Persons: Vienna Philharmonic hasn’t, Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Herbert von Karajan, Karl Böhm, Daniel Froschauer, Riccardo Muti, Franz Welser, Bruckner, Mahler, Berg, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Strauss, Ravel Organizations: Vienna Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, Philharmonic Locations: Vienna, Austrian

He’s seeing this develop as co-CEO of Amwell, a Boston-based company that provides telemedicine software and technology for health systems and insurers. The company works with more than 55 health plans and health systems representing over 2,000 hospitals. Q: What is some care patients seek in-person now that you expect will become largely virtual in the future? The revolution that’s going on right now is where people are beginning to utilize these technologies to interact with their regular caretakers. If the patient is not doing well, (the technology) will have the smarts to escalate that patient right back in front of (a nurse or doctor).

Persons: Roy Schoenberg, He’s, Schoenberg, We’re, Ido, We’ve Organizations: Associated Press, Associated Press Health, Science Department, Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science, Educational Media Group, AP Locations: Boston, telemedicine

☆ David Del Tredici, Who Set ‘Alice’ to Music, Dies at 86
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-18 | by ( Allan Kozinn | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

David began his piano studies when he was 11 and was 16 when he gave his first public performance, in San Francisco in 1954. By the time he was 18, he had won a handful of scholarships and awards, including the $5,000 John E. Kimber Prize, in 1955, which covered his piano studies for several years. “He yelled at me and was very severe, and I didn’t realize, coming from California, that all he really was, was a New Yorker,” Mr. Del Tredici told American Public Media in 2002. Mr. Milhaud was encouraging, and when Mr. Del Tredici returned to Berkeley, he enrolled in a composition class taught by Seymour Shifrin. He later pointed out that he had never been composer of 12-tone music, the radical departure from traditional tonality pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg.

Persons: David, John E, Kimber, Leonard Shure, ” Mr, Del Tredici, “, ‘, ”, Darius Milhaud, Milhaud, Seymour Shifrin, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Earl Kim, Roger Sessions, Arnold Schoenberg Organizations: University of California, Aspen Music Festival, School, New Yorker, American Public Media, La, Princeton University, Times Locations: San Francisco, Berkeley, California, New, La Monte

☆ How Classical Composers Made Music After the Holocaust
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-02 | by ( Kira Thurman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Perhaps she’d learned them in the early days after the war, when she’d performed with Holocaust survivors at a hospital in 1945. Jansen does not appear in Jeremy Eichler’s new book, “Time’s Echo,” but the impulse to turn to music during and after the Holocaust is at the heart of it. Eichler, The Boston Globe’s chief classical music critic, suggests that music can help us remember what we’ve lost. “Time’s Echo” is an engrossing recovery project that reveals the depths of Europe’s ability — and inability — to mourn those losses. Not only do we remember music but, just as importantly, “music also remembers us,” Eichler argues.

Persons: Jeremy Eichler, Fasia Jansen, Brecht, she’d, Jansen, Jeremy Eichler’s, Eichler, we’ve, —, Richard Strauss’s “, ” Arnold Schoenberg’s “, ” Benjamin Britten’s “, ”, Dmitri Shostakovich’s “ Babi Yar, ” Eichler, “, ” Schoenberg Organizations: The Boston, Central Locations: German, Hamburg, Neuengamme, Warsaw, Europe

☆ Make It New and Difficult: The Music of Arnold Schoenberg
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-28 | by ( John Adams | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

SCHOENBERG: Why He Matters, by Harvey SachsIn 1955 Henry Pleasants, a critic of both popular and classical music, issued a cranky screed of a book, “The Agony of Modern Music,” which opened with the implacable verdict that “serious music is a dead art.” Pleasants’s thesis was that the traditional forms of classical music — opera, oratorio, orchestral and chamber music, all constructions of a bygone era — no longer related to the experience of our modern lives. Composers had lost touch with the currents of popular taste, and popular music, with its vitality and its connection to the spirit of the times, had dethroned the classics. One could still love classical music, but only with the awareness that it was a relic of the past and in no way representative of our contemporary experience. While Pleasants’s signaling the ascendance of popular music was right, much of the rest of “The Agony of Modern Music” was fallacious, not least its way of according value to a work of art based on the size of its audience. And for a large part of its public, no composer is more emblematic of that persistent feeling of alienation between composer and listener than Arnold Schoenberg.

Persons: SCHOENBERG, Harvey Sachs, Henry Pleasants, ”, Composers, Beethoven, Verdi, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Arnold Schoenberg, “ Schoenberg, ” Sachs, Toscanini, Sachs, Schoenberg, — Locations: obscurantism

☆ Chris Wheeldon’s ‘Dangerous and Exciting’ Adventure at City Ballet
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Roslyn Sulcas | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“There is an ambiguity about non-narrative work that feels both dangerous and exciting,” he said, “especially working the way I do — going into a room with the music and allowing whatever lies beneath to emerge. Nonetheless, Wheeldon said, he had been ambivalent about using the music. “I’ve been a bit frightened of it,” he said. “In parts it’s torturously beautiful and intensely romantic, with an underlying uneasiness to the romance. Even though it has five movements, there is no definition between them, so it feels like a long poem, and structurally that’s hard.”

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