State Theatre Offers Student Discounts

The State Theatre, 15 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, Tuesday announced it is offering $8 tickets for students to many of its classical music events, including major orchestra performances and the film presentations of opera performances.


Called the Students Meet The Arts program, the discount is funded by the Frank and Lydia Bergen Foundation and is good for the whole season.

Upcoming events that are available for students at the $8 price including the Hamburg Symphony, conducted by Jeffrey Tate, in performances of Vaughn Williams, Brahms and Beethoven 8 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 18; the St. Petersburg State Orchestra led by Roman Leontiev with Alexandre Pirojenko as piano soloist in work by Ravel, Chopin and Prokofiev 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 12; and the Dresden Philharmonic led by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos with Gautier Capuçon, as cello soloist 8 p.m. Friday, March 9 in performances of Carl Maria von Weber, Dvorak and Beethoven.

The discount also applies to the performance of “Cinderella” by the Moscow Festival Ballet in April and the performances of ballet and opera on film, including tonight’s (Nov. 16) screening of Verdi’s “Aida” and the Dec. 8 showing, live from Teatro alla Scala in Milan, of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” with Daniel Barenboim conducting and Anna Netrebko and Bryn Terfel in the leads.

For tickets or more information, call the State Theatre ticket office at 732-246-7469, or visit www.StateTheatreNJ.org.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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Philadelphia Orchestra

Today, I am distracted by the recent news from the Philadelphia Orchestra. Friday night they were deciding whether to declare bankruptcy. This morning I'm reading the board has now voted to take that step.

It is interesting to note the orchestra will list assets in excess of three times its liabilities. Meaning that it doesn't have to declare bankruptcy at this moment. It has the means to continue to meet its obligations. Quotes from the board seem to indicate that the filing would be preemptive, an attempt to prevent the orchestra from having to shut down completely at some point in the future. Concerts will continue as normal for the remainder of the season at least.

All five musicians on the 75-member board voted against filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In fact, the musicians of the orchestra may yet succeed in blocking the filing. The underlying assumption here is that at least one of the goals of bankruptcy will be to reopen negotiations with the musicians, and ultimately to reimburse them less for their participation. The uncertain future is causing some to think of leaving the ensemble.

Meanwhile, the Honolulu Symphony declared bankruptcy and ceased operations in 2009. However recent talks have produced a new organization, the Symphony Exploratory Committee, with a much smaller budget. Musicians who had been employed by the orchestra will return, at roughly the same amount of money they were making two years ago (a paltry salary). Musicians will not be paid extra for some publicity appearances on radio, and probably there are other small concessions. But most of the cost savings comes from paring down administrative costs. Not from increased revenue projections.

These are troubling times for classical music and for orchestras in particular. As old funding mechanisms fail, new ones are not being put in place and the lessons of reinvention are learned over and over, by each group in turn, the hard way.

The question on many musicians' minds is, how could the communities these orchestras serve allow this to happen? How could Philadelphia, for instance, allow one of the world's leading orchestras, one of the greatest sources of pride for one of the world's greatest cities, to come to this juncture? The Philadelphia Orchestra posted this explanation on its website:

... a decline in ticket revenues, decreased donations, eroding endowment income, pension obligations, contractual agreements, and operational costs. Our beloved musicians made multiple generous concessions during the collective bargaining negotiations. Our Board donated more than $9.5 million above and beyond annual giving. And our professional staff was both reduced and agreed to pay cuts. These proactive and important steps were simply not enough to solve all of the issues we face.

The letter goes on to say that the board has a strategy for righting its finances, but does not outline specifics.

Some musicians (not associated with the orchestra) are pointing to the Philadelphia Orchestra's investment in its new home, The Kimmel Center, as a large mistake. The Academy of Music, which the group still owns, is a somewhat rickety, historic building with steep stairs. Not big, not showy, but still relatively comfortable, with warm, wonderful acoustics. However, given the fact that so many other orchestras are currently failing, and given the reasons the orchestra's board cites above, it would appear that there are deeper issues at work.

--C.
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Jazz in Orchestral Programming

Symphony orchestra music directors need to program work by some of the great African American jazz composers. I can't think of one instance recently where this has happened. And it is necessary. The classical tradition, over the last 100 years, has moved slowly from exploiting jazz while mocking it as a vulgar "folk" idiom--mining its appeal and techniques while keeping it at arm's length--to a grudging admission that jazz might actually be an essential element in the evolution of the classical tradition in the 20th Century. Jazz at Lincoln Center brings the styles of jazz permanently into the Mecca of U.S. classical music, the same center where the Metropolitan Opera and Juilliard School are housed.

But JALC, as important as it is, does not undo the century-long hostility that kept jazz (with rare exceptions) out of the classical concert halls. In an important way, JALC is just the last bastion of the "other music" mentality. In the same way that Black History Month distracts attention from the absence of black history that should be taught in our schools year round, Jazz at Lincoln Center presents the entire jazz tradition as a self-contained museum exhibit, allowing its importance to be acknowledged while still isolating it from the main body of performable concert music.
There are some things about jazz that are different. But not as many as leaders in the classical world like to believe. Jazz and classical are part of the same tradition, the dance hall and the club, the chamber music salon and the concert hall. The same audiences heard all of it, often entertained by the same musicians merely dressed differently. The repertoire moves easily from one to the other. We just haven't gotten to the point of seeing that yet.

Orchestra works by jazz composers represent an obvious opportunity to enrich the symphonic canon and begin to bridge the unnatural gap between these two vital repertoires. We could begin with James P. Johnson's "Victory Stride" or Duke Ellington's "Black, Brown and Beige". Then we could investigate the possibility that many other jazz composers have written for orchestra and we just don't know about their work. I suspect that we'll find that many homes and many library archives contain important scores that deserve to be heard. Probably we'll even find great composers whose names are unknown in both the jazz and the classical worlds.

The worst that could happen is we end up with only a handful of works that we can add to the list of classical pieces that get recycled each season. That would still be progress.

--C.
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RE: WQXR sale

So I've now read confirming reports that the 105.9 signal will definitely be weaker than QXR's current signal and I've updated my blog entry below to reflect that. That means, regardless of what happens, it will be New Jerseyans and other outlanders who suffer from this deal, as most of us will no longer be able to get WQXR. The new owners could choose to boost the signal strength (they've done that with WNYC). But without such a boost, it is unlikely we'll be able to pick it up down here at the Shore.

Even for those within broadcast range of 105.9, the future is in doubt. WQXR's website uses the carefully ambiguous wording "for the future, WQXR will continue to bring classical music to FM listeners in New York, and online listeners around the world, for a long, long time to come." That's clearly not a firm commitment to their current status as a clsassical-only station.

WQXR's website is saying that a timetable for the relocation to the new frequency "is not yet known." In a formal announcement, WQXR's president said only that it will occur "later this year."


--C.

WNYC Buys WQXR

Public radio station WNYC announced yesterday (Tuesday) it has acquired the last all-classical music station in the New York area, WQXR, for $11.5 million. WQXR was owned by The New York Times; WNYC is an independent nonprofit. The deal involved a third party, Spanish language media corporation Univision. The Times is making a solid profit as a result, reaping a total $45 million. It is uncertain at the moment exactly how the move will affect the already beaten-down classical music broadcasting for the Northeast area.

NYT first sold Univision the rights to WQXR's broadcasting frequency and accepted Univision's WCAA frequency, 105.9, in exchange, along with a 33.5 million. In marketing psychology, this swap automatically reduces the value of WQXR by pushing it to the edge of the FM radio dial. Then NYT sold the WQXR call letters and business to WNYC. WQXR is still broadcasting as of publishing time (7:54 a.m. Wednesday).

The deal will also reduce the strength of QXR's signal, but it is uncertain how exactly it will affect programming. Bloggers and online comments are immediately concerned that QXR's signal will be as weak as WCAA's current signal and that programming will shift to a variety format, a la WNYC, pushing classical music into the background.

Alternatively, WYNC could move its remaining music programs--the popular weekday "Evening Music" with Terrance McKnight for instance--to the newly re-located QXR. Any move like that could be bad news for us in Central New Jersey. I just tried 105.9 on my kitchen radio and I get nothing but static, while 96.3 comes in loud and clear.

Several large cultural institutions in New York, including the Metropolitan Opera and the Juilliard School, depend on QXR to broadcast their performances. While those relationships are now uncertain, it is doubtful the board at WNYC would want to abandon such high-profile content altogether.

Many comments on news sites and blogs have painted this a positive move likely to preserve classical music on the New York radio. It also effectively turns QXR from a loss-making arm of a for-profit company to a nonprofit, following the successful model of WNYC's 93.3 and that also bodes well for the future.

For those of us farther away from New York City, it just may not be our future.

--C.

Pink Floyd

In a Facebook conversation yesterday and today I am reminded of one of the formative musical experiences of my youth: attending Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" tour concert in, I think 1973, at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh. I was around 14 and should not have been going to concerts without an adult. Which makes it all the more memorable and wild. I'll talk about that specifically some other time, if anyone is interested.

Pink Floyd was a huge influence on my thinking at that age and I was the gleeful mark for their double album set "Ummagumma," a reissue of two earlier releases, some of which included the now-legendary Syd Barrett. It was trippy music, scornful of societal convention, ambiguous in its message, childlike in its playful interplay of groove and raw sound and wise to the ways of traditional musical drama. The words represented the tip of the iceberg, the story unfolded in the music and that's a lesson I've never forgotten. "Ummagumma" had such pensive titles as "Careful With that Ax, Eugene"--as I recall it was a long instrumental but for one line, the title, which crescendoes into a scream. Ha! Beautiful.

Classical music offers far more interesting examples of all these things and eventually I was won over by the longhairs, particularly those who similarly pushed the envelope of listener expectation: Ives, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Varese and most of all Messiaen--they became the heroes of my college days. While I've lost my taste for Pink Floyd's music now--to adult ears its posturing, self-conscious and pretty superficial, particularly when the lyrics make sense--I'm grateful to it for its part in luring me into a larger world.