Under Analysis: The Psychology of Tudor's Ballets

By Alastair Macaulay

When the choreographer Antony Tudor, whose centenary is being celebrated this year, moved to America in 1939, the moment could not have been more right. He was known as the psychological choreographer, and he arrived when psychology entered American popular culture. In 1938 Fred Astaire played Ginger Rogers's psychoanalyst in "Carefree"; in 1942 Claude Rains steered Bette Davis back from a nervous breakdown in "Now, Voyager." Later Martha Graham would become yet more famous for the Greek myths she turned into modern-dance psychodramas, but that phase – like Hitchcock's (notably in "Spellbound," 1945) – had not yet arrived.

Back in 1936, however, in none-too-psychology-friendly London, Tudor created "Jardin aux Lilas" (sometimes called "Lilac Garden"), often labeled the first psychological ballet. Nobody played a psychiatrist in it, but its steps, gestures and phrases showed flickering aspects of repression, denial, private longing, heartbreak, personal conflict and hypocrisy, all against a setting both romantic (a garden with lilacs in full bloom at twilight) and conformist (with characters in Edwardian dress, middle-class and formal).

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/dance/11maca.html

Staatsoper Taps Woman Concertmaster

By Susan Elliott

Thursday, May 8, 2008 may go down in history as a major milestone in classical music. The Wiener Staatsoper, most of whose orchestra members comprise the Vienna Philharmonic, appointed a woman as its concertmaster. Albena Danailova, of Sofia, takes first chair in September. According to custom, if all goes well for two years, she will then move into the position permanently.

Her appointment is significant for two reasons: One, she is the first woman to have the post at the Staatsoper, and two, in her new job she will oversee a core of instrumentalists – the Vienna Philharmonic – that has long deemed women musicians to be inferior to men.

Read more about this at the MusicalAmerica.com website:

   http://www.musicalamerica.com/news/newsstory.cfm?archived=0&storyid=18154

Symphony will shut down for summer with future in doubt

Picnic with the Pops series canceled

By Jeffrey Sheban

After 57 years of music making, including a triumphant concert in New York's Carnegie Hall, the Columbus Symphony says it will shut down June 1.

Out of money and having failed to reach a new labor agreement with the musicians, the orchestra's board of trustees said today that it is canceling the summer Picnic With the Pops and Popcorn Pops series and most likely its 2008-09 season, scheduled to begin in October.

Columbus would become one of the nation's largest cities without a full-time professional orchestra.

Read more about this at The Columbus Dispatch website:

   http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/05/08/picnic.html

Cabdriver Thanked for Returning a Stradivarius

By Richard G. Jones

Newark, New Jersey – The violinist stood on a makeshift stage between two lampposts crowned with a patina of bird droppings, under a weathered vinyl canopy hastily erected outside Newark Liberty International Airport in the taxicab holding area. The audience watched him in awe, about 50 drivers in three rows, their yellow cabs a few feet behind, some lined up neatly, others askew.

As Philippe Quint spent half an hour playing five selections, the cabbies clapped and whistled. They danced in the aisles, hips gyrating like tipsy belly dancers. "Magic fingers, magic fingers," one called out. Another grabbed the hand of Mr. Quint's publicist and did what looked like a merengue across the front of the "stage."

Afterward, the virtuoso was mobbed by drivers seeking his autograph on dollar bills, napkins and cab receipts.

"It was so pleasing to see people dancing – that never happens," said Mr. Quint, 34, a Grammy-nominated classical violinist. "These people, they work so hard, I doubt they get a chance to get out to Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center."

So Mr. Quint took Carnegie Hall to them, in a miniconcert that was his way of expressing a simple sentiment: Thank you.

Read more about this at the New York Times website:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/nyregion/07violin.html

Vivaldi's long-lost opera returns to Prague after 278 years

After hunting the missing manuscript down in a German archive, Czech conductor revives "Argippo"

By David Randall

A long-lost opera by Antonio Vivaldi was to have its first performance in centuries last night. Argippo, discovered by a Czech musician as he rummaged through an old archive of anonymous scores, was being staged at a castle in Prague, the city where it had its premiere in 1730. Fittingly, it will be conducted by Ondrej Macek, the man who found the manuscript, and played by his Baroque Music Ensemble Hofmusici.

Vivaldi, called by contemporaries "the Red Priest" for the colour of his hair, is known these days, to all but serious lovers of Baroque music, for a single work: The Four Seasons. However, he was a prolific composer who produced more than 500 concertos, 73 sonatas, numerous pieces of sacred music and 46 operas. One of them, Argippo, opened in the Palace of Count Spork in the centre of Prague 278 years ago. The Czech capital was then a city of arts with some of the best music of the time, often performed by the continent's most prominent singers and musicians.

Read more about this at The Independent website:

   http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/820860.html

Saudis mix genders at 1^st public classical concert

By Donna Abu-Nasr (AP)

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – It's probably as revolutionary and groundbreaking as Mozart gets these days. A German-based quartet staged Saudi Arabia's first-ever performance of European classical music in a public venue before a mixed-gender audience.

The concert, held at a government-run cultural center Friday night, broke many taboos in a country where public music is banned and the sexes are segregated even in lines at fast-food outlets.

Friday's concert of works by works by Mozart, Brahms and Paul Juon was the first classical performance held in public in Saudi Arabia, said German press attaché Georg Klussmann.

Read more about this at the Seattle Times website:

   http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2004391176_mozart04.html

Muti to be Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director

By F.N. d'Alessio (AP)

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association named maestro Riccardo Muti on Monday as the next music director of the CSO, the 10^th conductor to hold the prestigious post.

CSO Association President Deborah Card announced that Muti, 66, had signed a five-year contract to serve as music director beginning in September of the 2010-2011 season. The post has been vacant since Daniel Barenboim retired in 2006.

Under the terms of the contract, Muti will conduct a minimum of 10 weeks of CSO subscription concerts each season, plus lead the orchestra in domestic and international tours.

Read more about this at the San Jose Mercury News website:

   http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_9157903

Is ballet's future in America?

San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival has been warmly received by an eager public. It makes English ballet look secretive and cautious

By Judith Mackrell

I was in San Francisco last week for the launch of San Francisco Ballet Company's New Works Festival. The levels of adrenaline and enthusiasm that were buzzing around put British ballet culture to shame.

It wasn't just that SFB were premiering an astonishing 10 new ballets over three successive days (compared to the two being offered by the Royal Ballet during their entire next season). It was that the city as a whole appeared to embrace ballet so energetically. This ambitious and expansive festival included choreography by Mark Morris, Paul Taylor and Christopher Wheeldon and a newly commissioned score from John Adams – yet most of the funding had been raised from local sponsors.

Read more about this at the Guardian website:

   http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/theatre/2008/05/ballets_future_is_in_america.html

More power to the performer

By Matthew Westwood

Classical music, as it grew progressively more complex through the romantic period onwards, evolved into a mind game where the composer always had the psychological lead.

Musical scores came to be written as if dogma, down to the last pedantic detail; performers, even brilliant ones, became mere instruments to the composer's vision.

That may be a bleak view of the concert hall. But Kristjan Jarvi, the energetic Estonian-born conductor, is disdainful of the pseudo-intellectualism of some contemporary music and the "academic blackmail" to which it subjects performers.

The pianist and conductor is doing his bit to address the perceived imbalance between composer and musician. It's not so much a contest of wills as a spectator sport in which music as well as audiences should benefit.

"It is really important to make the performers feel that they have freedom, that they can express music rather than just play the notes," Jarvi says on the phone from Hanover, Germany.

Read more about this at The Australian website:

   http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23624489-16947,00.html

Gramophone to put 85 years of classical music articles online

By Mark Brown

Gramophone magazine has always had an impressive list of contributors, from Rachmaninov to Barbirolli to Rattle – but the problem has been reading them all. Yesterday the 85-year-old magazine announced it is putting its entire archive online as well as entering the commercial download market. The magazine has never missed a month's publication since Compton Mackenzie founded it in 1923, even during the war years.

After 18 months' planning, editors said yesterday that, by early September, every word ever printed in the magazine will be available free in its searchable online archive. It also believes the classical music recording industry has been slow when it comes to digital downloads, so by January 2009 the archive will be linked to a download and mail order service.

Read more about this at the Guardian website:

   http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2277562,00.html