The main thing a listener wanted from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s visit to Carnegie Hall this weekend was a sense of how this great ensemble was faring under the baton of Riccardo Muti, whose tenure as its music director began in September. You had to have a strong set of mental blinders not to think, in the moments before Mr. Muti walked onstage, about the alarming illnesses that have kept him off the podium much of the season, and that naturally brought to mind the health problems that led James Levine to give up his directorship of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Those concerns were amplified by the news, announced just hours before the Saturday evening concert, that the Philadelphia Orchestra — Mr. Muti’s previous American podium — had declared bankruptcy.
JTアートホール：堀米ゆず子；Beethoven室内楽の極み [音楽時評]
4月20日，ＪＴアートホールに，堀米ゆず子を中心とした「ベートーヴェンの極みⅢ」とタイトルされた室内楽を聴きに行ってきました．
プログラムと出演者は，オール・ベートーヴェンで， ピアノ三重奏曲第7番 変ロ長調 Op.97「大公」：野平一郎，堀米ゆず子，山崎伸子 ※※※※※※※※
弦楽四重奏曲第12番 変ホ長調 Op.127:堀米ゆず子，山口裕之，川崎和憲，山崎伸子
でした．
2曲ともたいへん有名な曲ですが，作品番号から見て，その最後が135ですから，後半生に作曲されたもので，特に127は晩年といえるのでしょうか．
常設のトリオやクァルテットではありませんが，いずれも日本を代表する演奏者が揃っていましたから，ミス・タッチがなかった訳ではありませんが，一級の名演奏でこのそれぞれ4楽章構成の名曲2曲を，ＪＴアートホールのこぢんまりとした響きの良い会場で聴くことが出来，大いに堪能したコンサートでした．
Anne Midgette:Orchestra の将来 [音楽時評]
Anne Midgette が Philadelphia Symphony の破産申請を取り上げています．
まず，ホールの新築コスト問題を挙げています． Montreal is eagerly hoping for its new concert hall. In Hamburg, costs for the shining new Elbphilharmonie are far outstripping projections. And -- the Philadelphia Orchestra, one of the leading orchestras in the country, which moved into a new concert hall a mere years ago, has filed for bankrupcy.
日本の乱造されたホール，松本やびわ湖，横須賀の4面舞台ホールなど，これからずしりと負担が重くなるでしょうが．．．
it didn’t sound as if classical music were in very much trouble after all, with so many new performing venues, now did it? there’s no denying this is a big wakeup call in a long string of wakeup calls (see Syracuse, Honolulu, Louisville, Florida). And that other orchestras -- Baltimore, Detroit -- have been visibly struggling with existential crises, more or less or entirely (in Baltimore’s case) financial in nature.
The Denver Symphony, which folded in 1989, is an example of an orchestra whose players were able to regroup; the Colorado Symphony almost immediately sprang up to carry the torch, and is doing well. The Honolulu Symphony may be following suit.
for many people, speaking of orchestras’ problems seems to be construed as attack on classical music — rather than a way to help it. と，orchestra で問題が起こると，人々はクラシック音楽を責めていると嘆いています．
New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s，a tight-knit and well-organized freelance ensemble, has just opened its own new home this spring;．．． With this home, rather than erecting a beautiful new performance venue, the orchestra actually addressed a dire need for freelance musicians and ensembles all over the New York area. It offers rehearsal spaces, practice studios, a place where out-of-town musicians can warm up, change between gigs, give lessons, make recordings, even give free concerts
Expensive new concert halls are a wonderful thing. But they don’t always help the musicians who play in them. The DiMenna Center seems like a much more productive edifice than even the Elbphilharmonie, or the Kimmel Center, for classical music’s future.
概略，以上が，Anne Midgette がPhiladelphia の破産申請に寄せた評論です．
Orchestral futures: is Philly’s tragedy a harbinger or merely a warning?
Montreal is eagerly hoping for its new concert hall. In Hamburg, costs for the shining new Elbphilharmonie are far outstripping projections. And -- the Philadelphia Orchestra, one of the leading orchestras in the country, which moved into a new concert hall a mere years ago, has filed for bankrupcy.
People often misconstrue my concerns about classical music’s future as a kind of ill will toward the field. Someone wrote me gleefully, after my article outlining the large number of new regional performing arts centers in the Washington region, to say that it didn’t sound as if classical music were in very much trouble after all, with so many new performing venues, now did it? Others point out that people have always worried about the future of classical music and predicted its demise: they did it in 1795, and they did it in 1969, and therefore we shouldn’t worry too much that some people are doing it now.
Let me be clear: I don’t think classical music is going to die. And I, personally, would love it if every orchestra in the United States, and in the rest of the world, were able to continue playing forever, in beautiful new concert halls with fantastic acoustics. I am deeply saddened by the news from Philadelphia, and I hope the orchestra, which has been struggling for years, is able to turn things around.
But there’s no denying this is a big wakeup call in a long string of wakeup calls (see Syracuse, Honolulu, Louisville, Florida). And that other orchestras -- Baltimore, Detroit -- have been visibly struggling with existential crises, more or less or entirely (in Baltimore’s case) financial in nature.
The Denver Symphony, which folded in 1989, is an example of an orchestra whose players were able to regroup; the Colorado Symphony almost immediately sprang up to carry the torch, and is doing well. The Honolulu Symphony may be following suit. The moral: it isn’t necessarily that a community doesn’t want an orchestra, or can’t carry one. It’s that the organization wasn’t able to continue.
Orchestras are institutions, like businesses. Like businesses, not all of them are equally healthy. There’s a life cycle to businesses: they start, they flourish or fold they continue for generations or close up shop. So it’s unrealistic to expect all orchestral institutions to live on indefinitely.
In the business world, you wouldn’t condemn the whole field because a few businesses folded. But you would laugh at a field that clung to traditional business models even when they were proving not to work very well in a changing economic climate. You would also laugh at anyone who confused an institution with its product (just because Kodak is doing badly doesn’t mean that the future of photography is at risk). Yet for many people, speaking of orchestras’ problems seems to be construed as attack on classical music — rather than a way to help it.
My husband, Greg Sandow, has been writing lately about the need for orchestras to find a new business model. One that springs to mind and that I’ve certainly mentioned before here is New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s. That orchestra, a tight-knit and well-organized freelance ensemble, has just opened its own new home this spring; I have been delinquent in not yet visiting the DiMenna Center. With this home, rather than erecting a beautiful new performance venue, the orchestra actually addressed a dire need for freelance musicians and ensembles all over the New York area. It offers rehearsal spaces, practice studios, a place where out-of-town musicians can warm up, change between gigs, give lessons, make recordings, even give free concerts (the orchestra has a new series called OLS@DMC).
Expensive new concert halls are a wonderful thing. But they don’t always help the musicians who play in them. The DiMenna Center seems like a much more productive edifice than even the Elbphilharmonie, or the Kimmel Center, for classical music’s future.
By | 10:25 AM ET, 04/19/2011
Muti, Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall [音楽時評]
Chicago Symphony のMusic Director に昨年秋に就任しながら，シーズン開幕時には過労ということで休演してしまい，今年に入って，リハーサルまで行いながら，その途中に指揮台から失神状態で前に倒れて，顎と頬の骨折を負ってしまい，その治療と，そもそも失神の原因として心臓のペースの乱れが発見され，ペースメーカーを埋め込んでから，すっかり回復して，まずイタリアでオペラで完全復帰してから，ようやくChicago Symphony の指揮台に立ったRiccardo Muti が，かねて予定されていたCarnegie Hall 公演に登場して，Muti フアンを大いに安心させたようです．
時恰も，Muti がかつてMusic Director を勤めたPhiladelphia Symphony の破産宣告が報じられて，いっそうMuti-Chicago Symphony の関係に関心が高まっていたこともあったのです．
The main thing a listener wanted from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s visit to Carnegie Hall this weekend was a sense of how this great ensemble was faring under the baton of Riccardo Muti, whose tenure as its music director began in September. You had to have a strong set of mental blinders not to think, in the moments before Mr. Muti walked onstage, about the alarming illnesses that have kept him off the podium much of the season, and that naturally brought to mind the health problems that led James Levine to give up his directorship of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Those concerns were amplified by the news, announced just hours before the Saturday evening concert, that the Philadelphia Orchestra — Mr. Muti’s previous American podium — had declared bankruptcy.
演奏曲目は，日曜日が Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” at the start Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, at the end 土曜日は All Berlioz で， “Symphonie Fantastique,” “Lélio, ou le Retour à la Vie” (“Lélio, or the Return to Life”) だったようです．
Mr. Muti, lithe and energetic, drew such a glorious sound from his players, and interpreted the music with such insight and clarity, that a listener had to be fully in the moment. とすっかり聴衆を満足させる素晴しい演奏だったそうです．
the Shostakovich brought the best out of the orchestra. The strings were lush, the woodwind playing was beautifully chiseled, and the brasses had the kind of spectacular power and precision that made the section legendary during the Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti eras. と，細かな点は別として，絶賛しています．
Music Review
Berlioz, Shostakovich and Gérard Depardieu
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, led by Riccardo Muti at Carnegie Hall on Sunday. On Saturday, the orchestra performed an all-Berlioz program.
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: April 18, 2011
Mr. Muti, lithe and energetic (the Shostakovich included a balletic leap or two, both feet off the podium), drew such a glorious sound from his players, and interpreted the music with such insight and clarity, that a listener had to be fully in the moment.
The Saturday evening concert was a repeat of the all-Berlioz program that Mr. Muti offered as his season opener in Chicago, a pairing of the “Symphonie Fantastique” and its rarely heard sequel, “Lélio, ou le Retour à la Vie” (“Lélio, or the Return to Life”).
From the start, “Symphonie Fantastique” benefited from the keen sense of drama Mr. Muti has developed as an opera conductor: moments of dreamy introspection were calm, leisurely and unusually serene in Mr. Muti’s reading, and the more passionate sections that propel the work (including the hallucinatory execution and the Witches’ Sabbath) were played with all the tension, drive and volume you could want. Beyond those broad contours, Mr. Muti dealt in nuance, focusing on voicings and details that are often lost in Berlioz’s narrative sweep.
“Lélio” is more diffuse; in fact, it is actually a handful of pieces — songs with piano accompaniment, larger orchestral and choral fantasies — strung together with a narration that includes reflections on Shakespeare, semiautobiographical musing (in the character of the artist-hero of “Symphonie Fantastique”) and even comments on the music at hand. In 19th-century terms, it is completely loopy. But nowadays orchestras and new-music groups that present similar quasi-theatrical, mixed-genre programs are praised as groundbreaking.
As in Chicago, Gérard Depardieu gave an alternately manic and depressed reading of the narration, in French. Mario Zeffiri sang the tenor arias with a sweet fluidity, and the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen gave a strong account of the “Song of the Brigands.” In the larger pieces, particularly the fantasy on Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” the orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Chorus were solid and supple.
The Sunday afternoon concert was originally to have included Varèse’s “Arcana” and a new work by Anna Clyne, as well as the Shostakovich. Mr. Muti’s recent illness kept him from rehearsing the Varèse and Clyne works, so he substituted Cherubini’s Overture in G, an alternately graceful and splashy curtain-raiser that Mr. Muti made into a smart, trim glimpse of early Romanticism, and a dazzling, cohesive performance of Liszt’s symphonic poem “Les Préludes.”
There was room to quibble about Mr. Muti’s reading of the Shostakovich. Whenever a tempo was slower than Allegro, Mr. Muti lingered over it, replacing its tartness with an unwarranted beauty. Those touches created a striking contrast with the fast, loud and intensely bitter sections that invariably followed, but Shostakovich’s slow music should not be defanged.
That said, the Shostakovich brought the best out of the orchestra. The strings were lush, the woodwind playing was beautifully chiseled, and the brasses had the kind of spectacular power and precision that made the section legendary during the Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti eras. All that made it easy to forgive a touch of interpretive oddness. But the way I see it, Mr. Muti still owes us an “Arcana.”
