Monday Morning Violin Gossip, Op. 2, No. 10

By Darcy Lewis

Be sure to read the Akron Beacon Journal’s 2/26/06 account of the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Concertmaster Academy, led by William Preucil, concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra. “The Concertmaster Academy is intended to groom a person for the specific leadership demands of the job. Unlike performance programs, which one might argue are glutting the marketplace with players, this program has an intentionally tiny enrollment: one per year. There's no other such training program in the country. It's a concentrated, one-year, tuition-free program that requires no classes and offers one-on-one mentoring. The student observes rehearsals and concerts, watching to see how Preucil communicates with his section and the rest of the orchestra. At meetings with Preucil, he has a chance to ask questions about what he saw and heard."

The paper notes that "an early marker of the program's success is that [2004-05 Academy participant] Juliana Athayde last fall became concertmaster of the Rochester (N.Y.) Philharmonic." This year's participant is Jun Iwasaki, "who studied previously with Preucil at CIM before signing on for the concertmaster academy."

Violinist David Cerone, the president of the Cleveland Institute of Music, states: "It's our hope this will become a program which conductors of orchestras will see as a rich resource from which they can draw talent in their orchestra."

Read the entire article here here

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Another leading music story to come out this week was the news that the Juilliard School has been given a treasure trove of original scores, notes, and manuscripts created by some of the greatest composers who ever lived.

The gift "consists of 139 items: autograph scores, sketches, composer-emended proofs and first editions of major works by Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Stravinsky, Bach, Liszt, Ravel, Copland, Mozart and other masters of the classical music canon. Many of the manuscripts have been unavailable for generations and could be a significant source of new insight for scholars and performers," reports the New York Times. "The works - some in fragile condition - will be consolidated in a climate-controlled storage area and made available by special request to scholars." Juilliard is building a special room for the manuscripts, part of a larger renovation to be completed in 2009.

The donor is financier/billionaire Bruce Kovner, who also serves as Juilliard’s chairman and vice chairman of Lincoln Center.

Many of the items would be of great interest to string players, including:

Beethoven, Grosse Fugue – Autographed manuscript
Beethoven, String Quartet, Op. 127 – Score for the scherzo movement with numerous corrections
Brahms, Double Concerto – Manuscript with extensive revisions by Brahms
Schubert, Violin Sonata in C, D46 – Autographed, working manuscript
Schubert, String Quintet, D8 – Autographed score

For a more detailed list of the gift’s contents, read here

Musician News

The young violinists from the IU Jacobs School of Music String Academy, directed by Mimi Zweig, are the subjects of a new documentary, "Circling Around: The Violin Virtuosi." The documentary, produced by RIAX in association with WTIU, will premiere on more than 200 public television stations throughout the United States beginning this month.

Charles Haupt, concertmaster of the Buffalo Philharmonic, will retire at the end of this season. He has been concertmaster of the BPO since 1969.

Michael Ludwig has been named concertmaster of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, effective next season. He is currently associate concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He also is on the faculty at Rowan University (Glassboro, New Jersey) and the School of Orchestral Studies (Saratoga Springs, New York).

Violinist Tadashi Maeda and his wife, pianist Chinatsu Maeda, recently performed the world premiere of Chía (Lucia) Patiño’s Bucaramange, for strings, percussion, violin, and piano. The work was composed for them.

3/12/06 – Violinist Sergey Khachatryan will perform the Khachaturian Violin Concerto with Kurt Masur and the London Philharmonic in San Francisco. If the name looks similar to the composer's, it's because both are Armenian and closely related. The composer died in 1978, however, while the violinist has just turned 21, reports San Francisco Classical Voice.

3/6/06 – The Del Sol String Quartet will present a world-premiere presentation of the complete string quartets of Haitian-American violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain. To be held in San Francisco, the concert is called "A Civil Rights Reader." The works honor Malcolm X (Quartet No. 1), Martin Luther King, Jr. (No. 2), Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (No. 3), and Maya Angelou (No. 4), the last with Roumain on electric violin and DJ Scientific, turntablist. Roumain's music combines traditional counterpoint with pop and hip-hop.

3/2/06 – Violinist Jennifer Frautschi performed Stravinsky's Violin Concerto with the Louisville Orchestra, reports the Louisville Courier-Journal. Frautschi played "with superlative commitment, digging into and under every phrase, demonstrating why the concerto is so intrinsically dance music." The review notes that "throughout all the recent stress [of acrimonious contract negotiations], the orchestra's musicians have refused to buckle under. Instead, they are playing with what genuinely appears to be renewed purpose and commitment."

3/1/06 - Kristopher Tong joined the Borromeo String Quartet as the new second violinist. Tong, who graduated from IU in 2002, studied with Franco Gulli, Yuval Yaron, and Miriam Fried.

2/27/06 – The great violist Milton Katims died of heart failure at the age of 96. The New York Times’ obituary (3/2) focused on Katim’s viola career: "In addition to spending 11 years performing under Toscanini's baton in the NBC Symphony Orchestra, he often joined the Budapest String Quartet as a guest artist and made several recordings with that group. He gave the first performance of Morton Gould's Viola Concerto in 1952 and participated in Pablo Casals's elite Prades Festival, where he recorded a well-known, penetrating version of Schubert's C Major String Quintet with Casals, Isaac Stern, Alexander Schneider and Paul Tortelier." Predictably, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s obituary (2/28) focused more on Katims’ contributions to his city: “As music director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra from 1954 to 1976, [Katims] helped transform a part-time, modestly professional orchestra into a major regional ensemble that became a symbol of pride for the city.” He also “worked ceaselessly to increase the city's awareness of the symphony. He built the orchestra's repertory, adding more than 75 works during his tenure, made recordings, premiered new pieces and did several tours."

Orchestra News

3/12/06 – The Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra will wrap up its tour of the United States’ East Coast by performing at Carnegie Hall. The 20-city tour included stops from Florida to Massachusetts.

3/01/06 - ArtsJournal blogger Drew McManus (Adaptistration) says that there's absolutely no reason that the Louisville Orchestra can't find its way out of the fiscal hole it is in, but "ignorance, inexperience, and financial stress were conspiring to damn the negotiations [on a new musicians' contract] before they began." Neither the orchestra's board chair nor its executive director have ever participated in a collective bargaining process before, and the lack of experience apparently led them to lash out in anger the moment the musicians declined to immediately accept their terms, he says.

2/28/06 - Ralf Gothóni, the "highly regarded" artistic director of the Northwest Chamber Orchestra, and board president Dave Matison have announced their resignations, reports the Seattle Times. "Gothóni said the NWCO board is negotiating with him about retaining an emeritus position that calls for him to program and conduct one concert per season," quoting Gothóni: "Maybe the NWCO needs an American music director who is able to stay more in Seattle helping with fundraising [and] media performance and who is willing to compromise with programming." The paper adds that the Interlochen Arts Festival, "a major venue of the NWCO's upcoming May tour to Michigan ... canceled the orchestra's two concerts there."

2/18/06 - Iowa Public Television filmed the Southeast Iowa Symphony Orchestra's winter series. The concerts were filmed by for the "Orchestras in Iowa" series. The program featured Concertmaster Charlene Hansen in Vivaldi's Violin Concerto No. 1.

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