If you are thinking about being an orchestra musician, read this

Or rather, peruse this: Polyphonic.org This robust website includes information for professional orchestra musicians and those who are contemplating that path. Based at the Eastman School of Music, it has too much good stuff to mention here. It features anything from basic info to breaking news in the orchestral front, with experts in nearly every area of the business giving advice and info.

Give it a look before you tune up next. 

Great Kat and the Great One

Do you know this woman?

Granted, she is a bit over the top, but I have a soft spot for the Great Kat, a former Juilliard-trained violinist who now dons dominatrix outfits and performs thrash-metal versions of classical music's masterpieces. (Will you ever think of me the same way now that I have admitted this?)

But really, it's all a bit of an act, and I think she doesn't mean to be taking 100 percent seriously. She has technique galore -- various guitar trade mags give her cred for playing incredibly fast (shredding), but she is bit of a goof with all the theatrics. But I suspect, as is the case with many metal bands, her tongue is planted firmly in cheek in all of this.

Everything except the music, that is. This I believe she takes very seriously, which is the way it should be even if she is taking it into a different realm. Bottom line, to me, her speed-demon take on classical music is fun to listen to -- and I continue to preach that not everything needs to be so serious in the art-music world. The Great Kat certainly isn't harming anything with this approach. It is not as if she is denying the traditional way to play Beethoven, Bach and Wagner. She is just serving it up in a crazy way, and, sure enough, the masterworks can sustain it. In fact, the driving rhythms at these speeds and amplification can be spectacular, even if the head banging is a bit much..

Her Web site has info on the history of music and composers -- she might actually turn some young rockers onto this music, so I say play on!

Oh, the reason I am inspired to blog about her is that she just announced a new DVD release of her shredding Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and more. You can order through her Web site.

PSO musicians helping out in Columbus

I know of at least two PSO musicians -- first violinists Sarah Clendenning and Susanne Park -- who are driving to Ohio this weekend to play in a benefit concert (info here) for the musicians of the ailing Columbus Symphony, which yesterday announced it had canceled the beginning of its fall concert season. Rather than fumble through a description myself and upset both sides, here are the first two paragraphs of yesterday's Columbus Dispatch article detailing it:

WQED: Becoming a Chautauqua Institution itself

Can't get up to picturesque the Chautauqua Institution this summer? WQED-FM 89.3 is broadcasting from the festival in in western New York State Friday (July 25) through Sunday (July 27). Apparently it's the twelfth time the Pittsburgh classical music station has done so. It is sending intrepid hosts Stephen Baum and Jim Cunningham for shows, including a live broadcast of the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Stefan Sanderling. Tune in.

Shhhh -- I am listening to the library!

There's an "e" in front of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh these day. The eCLP section of its Web site holds a wealth of streaming audio, video and music. This week I stopped by the music department at the main Carnegie Library branch in Oakland to donate some CDs and department head Kathy Logan reminded me of just how many resources the library has via remote access for anyone to access for free. It's worth checking out.

First you go to the Library's home page, (get an account and card if you don't already have one -- it's free) then click on eCLP and you see this:

eCLP: eBooks, eAudio and eVideo

25 years of helping GLBT choruses

 The "pride" keeps on growing.

This weekend GALA Choruses celebrates 25 years of assisting and enabling the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) choral movement in America in a festival in Miami July 12-19. It's the eighth such festival for the service organization based in Pittsburgh.

On the organizational level, the GLBT choral movement began with the Anna Crusis Women's Choir (founded 1975) and the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus (1978). "SFGMC's national tour in the spring of 1981 served as the catalyst for the formation of many of the gay and lesbian choruses that exist today," says GALA Chorus' historical account of the movement. GALA itself incorporated in 1983. 

The week-long festival will bring in 120 choruses and ensembles and more than 5,000 delegates from around the U.S. including Pittsburgh's Renaissance City Choirs. Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon - the member of the Freedom Singers and founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock - and Toshi Reagon -the singer featured on the Righteous Babe Records label are emceeing and performing. And in addition to workshops the choruses attending will perform during the afternoons and evenings. Call (412)-322-4260 for more information or visit Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, formerly known as the Carnival Center, where the convention is taking place.

Service organizations are all important to their constituents, but I am not sure any have been as crucial to the health of a field than GALA Choruses. In most cases, people in cities and towns looking to start a GLBT choir face far more difficulty than than funding issues. GALA has been able to help them navigate through that for a quarter of a century now, which is pretty remarkable. Let's hope there are many more years in the future. 

Up, up and away: Imani Winds

 I remember when!

It was 2001 when I first interviewed Monica Ellis, the Pittsburgh-born, CAPA-trained bassoonist and member of the New York-based Imani Winds. Back then, the group was cutting its teeth on a tough circuit playing in small venues and schools around the state. It was hard work, but it showed the group that its more informal and entertaining approach to concerts and its broadening of the repertoire for wind quintet -- flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn -- could make a mark on audiences. Its members also were emboldened by their success to continue their goal of performing and promoting classical repertoire from the black cultural context.

In that first article on Imani (which means "faith" in Swahili) I felt the ensemble  had the substance of a group that could make waves and the look of one that understood the necessary marketing to do so: "With four attractive women no older than 30 years and a penchant for urban chic, this group could be the next Ahn Trio."

I am not typically the predicting type. In fact when I wrote that I kind of regretted it later -- more than anything because I hate to set up a group for failure. Not as if they read my writing on them, but in any case the musicians were not jinxed. A recent look at its myspace page shows upcoming concerts in France, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands and Turkey! It's obvious the group has really exploded. Combine this with the Grammy nod for the album "The Classical Underground" and its Legacy Commissioning Project (which aims to expand the wind quintet repertoire with new works over the next five years) and you have yourself one amazing success story. I mean, who really thought that the group could really re-invent a genre and make a living doing it? I certainly can't honestly claim that.

Pittsburghers will get yet another chance to hear the group February 16 when the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society presents them at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland performing works by Husa, Ligeti and Piazzolla.

Chant: not this again!

I am not a fastidious tracker of the Billboard charts, but this one caught my attention.

This week, the Cistercian Monks Of Stift Heiligenkreuz (near Vienna), ascended the classical charts with "Chant: Music For The Soul" ( Decca/Universal Classics Group).

Please don't let this be the start of another chant fetish!

Look, I love chant (note: not "Gregorian chant") and studied it in undergraduate and graduate school -- even sung it. But music labels' commercialization of sacred chant in the 1990s made me queasy and I don't want to see a return of it. The way that Universal is marketing this and publicizing this disc makes me nervous: "Chant is the ultimate in relaxation and stress relief; the perfect antidote to our fast-moving modern world." an e-mail blast exclaims.

Approaching chant this way -- as relaxing sound and not as expression of religious belief or function -- is so out of context from the original function that it almost seems voyeuristic to me, especially when used by people in the background at home or in the car or whatever. To me, chant is different than other sacred music that reaches the concert hall because chant was/is so tied into a religious service -- it is the mass service, really -- opposed to other music that is inserted in.

Oh well. At least the disc brings some recognition to Stift Heiligenkreuz, the second-oldest Cistercian monastery. And, from what I hear from audio clips, its monks do sing with warmth and exceptional ensemble.   

And the winner is Rossini...and the patrons

 A little follow-up to a blog post I wrote in March about Chicago Opera Theater's innovative fund-raising/audience building initiative, "The People’s Opera," in which it asked audience to vote (at a dollar a vote) to decide one of the operas performed in its 2010 season. According to a presser, the company raised over $47,000 and that voters chose Rossini’s "Mose in Egitto" (apparently last seen in Chicago in 1863). Voters were given 3 choices, the others being Britten’s "Paul Bunyan" and Mozart’s "La finta giardiniera."

27% of the donors were new, which is impressive, even if at small amounts. The only snag occurred when some participants felt their voting donations would be in lieu of their regular annual giving. The company obviously hoped the voting $ would be in addition to that. But learning from experience is what experimenting is all about, and I am sure that can be successfully articulated next time.

I applaud Opera Theater and its general director Brian Dickie for this initiative. Anything within reason that empowers audiences is usually a good thing. It will be interesting to see if another opera company or orchestra takes it up.

Filming music the hard way

Lately, I have been on a "films about music" kick. I just watched Ingrid Bergman and Leslie Howard in "Intermezzo." It's an odd film, about a philandering violinist, though the best part is probably simply seeing the sparkling Bergman prior to the dominating screen presence she would later become. But in this film, as in most with a music performance, there's awkward moments when music is actually played, since Bergman (a pianist in the film) can't perform most what her character plays. Usually in these films, the camera takes an angle that avoids viewing the hands as the music is heard, performed by someone else.

Now consider a newly released Medici Arts DVD (3078048, distributed by Naxos) that concerns a professional pianist. It is a video of pianist Alexis Weissenberg playing Stravinsky's "Petrushka" in an arrangement along with Chopin, Prokofiev, Brahms and more, all from European TV broadcasts in the 1960s. But the neat thing is not the Bulgarian-born pianist's playing, which is spirited, but the filming by Ake Falck: Falck filmed Weissenberg "pretending" to play the piano!

Here is how it worked, according to the press materials:

"The shooting took 10 days and required a special 'silent' piano be built; Weissenberg performed in sync with a playback of his actual performance, while he listened through loudspeakers set at a distance from him."

Essentially, this is similar to the pervasive practice in movie musicals of recording singers in the studio and then having them lip-sync to that audio during the filming. The idea was that you would get better audio and more appealing images. But with a pianist, it just seems odd. And, while it is fascinating to watch as an oddity, it still didn't solve the problem. The audio isn't great and Weissenberg never gets completely in sync with the music -- how could he, with the speed of some of it!

I am sure that CGI has changed things, but the DVD offers one older, yet intriguing solution to the problem of filming music.