形 令人困窘的 Classical Music's Dirty Little Secret

On Jan. 14, the violinist Hilary Hahn scored a rare gig for a classical music performer: She appeared on "The Tonight Show." And not just any "Tonight Show," but the "Tonight Show" during the final days of Conan O'Brien's brief tenure as host. Everybody was watching. So it came as no surprise that Hahn's new album, "Bach: Violin and Voice," debuted that week at No. 1 on the Billboard classical charts.

No. 1 on the charts: It doesn't get any better than that. Or does it?

形 令人困窘的 The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales of 200 or 300 units are enough to land an album in the top 10. Hahn's No. 1 recording, after the sales spike resulting from her appearance on Conan, bolstered by blogs and press, sold 1,000 copies.

It's not exactly news that album sales in all genres have been declining for years. Nor is it news that classical recordings are not top sellers. "The classical charts have always been looked at as in the 3-percenter club," says Alex Miller, general manager of Sony Masterworks. "Three percent of total music sales are in classical music.

The idea that the classical recording industry is on the rocks, a suggestion raised from time to time in part because of strikingly low sales figures, is generally countered by the assertion that there are more classical recordings available than ever before. And that might be the reason so few of them are selling well.

SoundScan, the company that provides sales data to Billboard, says it cannot officially release exact sales figures to journalists. Instead, all numbers are rounded to the nearest 1,000, so sales of 501 copies are reported as 1,000, and anything less than 500 is "under 1,000." On last week's traditional classical chart, only the top two recordings managed to sell "1,000" copies. Every other recording (including, in its second week, Hahn's) sold "under 1,000." The official total sales of the top 25 titles amounted to 5,000 copies, an average of 200 units a recording (sorry, "under 1,000"). And yes, that includes downloads.

A leaked copy of the SoundScan figures for a single week from the fall tells an equally sad tale. In early October, pianist Murray Perahia's much-praised album of Bach partitas was in its sixth week on the list, holding strong at No. 10. It sold 189 copies. No. 25, the debut of the young violinist Caroline Goulding, in its third week, sold 75 copies.

Is there any point to charting such low numbers? Billboard has wondered the same thing. The magazine has two charts, Classical Traditional and Classical Crossover, and combines them on http://Billboard.com. "We have actually considered decreasing the length of the two separate charts," says Silvio Pietroluongo, charts director of Billboard. Some charts, such as World Music, list only the top 15 sellers. Having 25 positions, he says, "may be a bit much."

Weekly charts are not the best way to measure classical performance, industry insiders say

"We don't necessarily follow the bump of a new album," says John Q. Walker of Zenph Studios, speaking about the "Re-Performance" release of Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations, re-created with computer technology and released by Sony in 2007. "People hear it and tell their friends, and it keeps riding this wave."

For the Gould album, Walker and Sony were thinking not week by week, but year by year. The sales projections were 40,000 copies over a 20-year lifetime. The album sold 40,000 copies in its first year. "The next 19 years are gravy," Walker says. He is, therefore, not worried that Zenph's latest re-creation, "Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff," released by Sony in the fall, only sold 385 copies in its first two weeks, debuting at No. 7 on the traditional classical charts

"We do view our projects initially on a three-year basis," says Sony Masterwork's Miller, adding that the Billboard charts show only U.S. sales. "Murray Perahia," he says, "is an artist that we take a worldwide perspective on. A few hundred units in any given week of Murray Perahia in the U.S. is part of the thousands and thousands that we may sell in Germany or France."

Exact sales figures for those other countries were not available, but they appear to be higher. The soprano Anna Netrebko broke into the top 10 on the non-classical charts in Europe with a recent release. And Cecilia Bartoli's "Sacrificium" is said to have sold 300,000 copies worldwide since its October release -- and 12,000 in the States.

There's evidence that people in the industry look carefully at the weekly charts, nonetheless. The hip string trio Time for Three just released its first major-label recording, "3 Fervent Travelers," this week -- more than a year after hitting the charts with a self-produced CD. Hoping to get noticed for the Grammys, the group registered that recording with SoundScan. It happened to be a week when the trio was appearing with the Indianapolis Symphony and selling CDs in the lobby.

"We sold more CDs than most groups sell in that bracket of time," Nick Kendall, one of the trio's violinists, said in an interview in the fall. "We started charting after the first week of SoundScan." The label E1 (formerly Koch) promptly picked the group up. The numbers that allowed this stellar rise to fame? "We sold over 200 CDs," Kendall says.

The classical music field is caught in a perpetual bind when it comes to mass-culture benchmarks. On one hand, it wants to aim higher, presenting great art for perpetuity. "Our goal is to build artists," Sony's Miller says. On the other hand, it searches for signs that it matters in the larger culture, in which it is increasingly marginalized -- signs such as winning Grammys, which will be doled out Sunday and which, like the Billboard charts, are of questionable significance for classical music.


If classical music can't make money, it can't stay alive. And it's notable that recordings appear to do worse than concert ticket sales. If everyone who attended the National Symphony Orchestra on a given night bought a copy of the same album, that album would leap to the top of the classical charts every week.

Are the low sales figures a sign of the field's decline or that the charts are outdated? Miller says the charts are not for consumers, but for those within the field.

"You need it for historical context," he says: to measure how an artist is doing relative to his or her past chart performance. (Joshua Bell's "At Home With Friends" "sold more in its first week than any other Bell record.")

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012904193.html

暗晦.素淡. Sad News: One of the world's great master pianists Earl Wild has died.

"As reported by his long-time companion of 38 years Michael Rolland Davis, he passed comfortably in his home in Palm Springs California after a long illness. Cause of death was congestive heart disease. He was 94.

He had a wonderfully full life and was still coaching pianists up until the last week of his life. He will be greatly missed. His memoirs are scheduled to be published in a few months by Carnegie Mellon Press."

Wild gave a concert of transcriptions at Carnegie Hall on the same day in 1982 that Vladimir Horowitz was giving a "comeback" concert. Horowitz who was rarely known to be concerned about competition reportedly told his manager that he was worried about getting a good audience because "Wild is a very good pianist you know".

Although we never saw him perform it was a great pleasure to grow up listening to records of his amazing musicmaking and his fascination with the widest, riskiest repertoire. Our condolences to his longtime partner, Michael Rolland Davis.

Alex Prior, Britain’s Teen Conducting Phenom, Goes to Seattle: 'I'm young, so what?'

Britain’s teenage conducting phenomenon Alex Prior talks about his new job at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra .

As a composer, Alexander has written more than 40 works including symphonies, operas and a requiem The news last week that classical music’s teenage phenomenon Alex Prior has been appointed to the conducting staff of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra may have amazed many onlookers, but it’s an outcome that Prior had been working towards for some time.

“I’ve been aiming towards it since the summer,” reveals the super-confident 17-year-old. Tall, dark-haired and pale-complexioned, wearing a fur-lined parka against the London chill, Prior looks the part of the exotically gifted princeling he undoubtedly sees himself as.

“I set myself on a mission to secure the post, and I did, and it’s a fantastic orchestra with a real can-do attitude,” he says. “They’re not formal, and everything’s really friendly, like a big family. I think that’s characteristic of American orchestras.”

During his six-month fellowship in the city that brought the world Starbucks, Frasier and grunge band Nirvana, Prior’s responsibilities will involve understudying the orchestra’s guest conductors (who include Kurt Masur, Roberto Abbado, Vassily Sinaisky and Itzhak Perlman), as well as helping to progamme the orchestra’s concerts and getting involved in its youth outreach projects.

“There’s none of this age-discrimination, um, bull---- in Seattle,” he says. “I think I’ll help them to attract more of a young audience, but they already get a full house often enough. They’re not struggling with empty halls, like orchestras do in Europe.”

Does he fear curmudgeonly critics complaining that a teenager can’t possibly be qualified for such a prestigious post? “Well, that’s their problem, isn’t it?” he snaps. “There is always going to be jealousy, and you just have to forgive these people. You have to be big about it.

“But I think that’s a British attitude. America’s much more open to youth, and what does it matter if I’m younger? No one would dare say, 'He’s black, he got the job’ or 'He’s Jewish, he got the job.’ It’s like saying a conductor should look white because that’s the tradition. It’s totally politically incorrect, and discrimination is discrimination on any basis, isn’t it?”

I think they mean that a 17-year-old hasn’t had time to soak up enough of life’s loves, disasters and all that stuff.

“Don’t you reckon someone might have fallen in love by 17?” he demands. “Some people live 50 years and haven’t done anything. In my five years of being a conductor, I’ve experienced every emotion and gone through lots of ups and downs. I did it my way!” he adds, with a chuckle.

Sadly, his way didn’t involve signing up with a British orchestra. “I haven’t been invited,” he shrugs. “I had a patriotic feel of duty to try to find an English job, but another side of me was saying America’s going to be more fun. The Philharmonia Orchestra and the Northern Sinfonia have been very good to me, so it’s certainly not one-sided, but generally reaction in the USA has been more open-handed. At least I can go to America with a clean conscience – I tried, I did my best.”

Is the British classical music world more reactionary and less imaginative? “Yes is the answer to that question. There’s conservatism, in a bad way. I’m quite conservative in my music, but I think you have to take chances and be experimental.”

Despite such little local difficulties, it seems nothing can stop Prior’s high-flying trajectory. He emerged into the blaze of media visibility when he starred in Channel 4’s The World’s Greatest Musical Prodigies last year, in which he scoured the planet for four budding musical geniuses and then wrote his own Velesslavitsa concerto for them to play. He’ll be conducting it with the same soloists at the Barbican in April.

Prior has always displayed astounding precocity. After being taken to Swan Lake at the age of four by his Russian mother, Elena, he returned home and began singing chunks of the score, having memorised it instantly. When he was eight, he composed his first full-scale piano piece, Fantasy in E Major. At 11, he wrote a requiem for the victims of the Beslan school massacre.

Inevitably, he found it difficult to fit in with mere mortals at school. His father, Peter, who runs a renewable-energy company in Berkshire, tried to encourage him to play his own favourite sports, cricket and rugby, but it was as if Alex was floating in his own private dimension.

Weekend classes at the Royal College of Music proved insufficient to satisfy his ravenous musical appetite, and the family reached the conclusion that he should attend the St Petersburg Conservatory in his mother’s native Russia. This involved painful sacrifices, with Elena moving to Russia to chaperone her son, and Peter selling the family flat in St John’s Wood to fund the enterprise.

There has been an assumption that Prior is the product of pushy-parent syndrome, but it may have been more a case of “pushy child”. It became obvious that Alex’s gifts demanded the finest elite musical education.

“I was never pushed, which is very good,” he says. “You see that a lot in Asia and China, and it’s very bad because the children don’t develop emotionally. I think it was difficult for my parents, but they let me try everything — tennis, painting, ballet and music. It was clear to them at an early point that it was music, so we got rid of everything else.

“They had to put up with a lot of lectures from me as a little child going on and on about Wagner. But they let me pursue my path, and I’m always very grateful for that.”

He insists that stories of him being bullied at school in Britain were blown out of proportion. “It’s typical of the media: they exaggerated what I said. I wasn’t bullied, though there was one chap who held me at knifepoint. But he threatened everyone; he was a general sort of terrorist. So I wasn’t bullied, but I wasn’t challenged and I wasn’t particularly happy at school. But maybe that was good, because I left school and did a year of home tuition, did my exams, and went straight to the Conservatory. If I’d been happy at school I might have been at a much lesser stage now.”

Whether the Seattle-ites understand what they’ve let themselves in for remains to be seen, because a conversation with Prior is a bit like listening to someone speed-reading Wikipedia aloud. He roves with satellite vision over Russian and Native American folklore, the interrelationships of Germanic and Slavic languages, the history of minimalism in music, the future of contemporary classical music.

Is there anything he doesn’t know, for heaven’s sake? “Um, probably. I’m quite sure there is. I try to learn something new every day. I’ve learned to be more forgiving of ignorance, which I wasn’t when I was 11.

“Now I understand, of course, that people are ignorant, but I like talking and teaching people about things.” Cheers, mate.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/7037695/Alex-Prior-Im-young-so-what.html

名不幸者....Google's China Music Partner Faces Unsure Fate

According to the Wall Street Journal, hanging in the balance of Google Inc.'s possible withdrawal from China is the fate of the search giant's pioneering partnership with a Chinese company to distribute music free online.

The music venture, which relies on advertising, is the first major service to let users to download and stream licensed songs without charging them. Done in partnership with Top100.cn, a site owned by Chinese company Orca Digital Inc., the service has been closely watched since its launch last March as a possible solution to rampant piracy, which has crippled the music industry.

Gary Chen, CEO of Orca Digital, in which Google owns a stake, said he was surprised when Google issued its statement last week saying it would stop censoring its Chinese search results and might have to close its Chinese operations.

Chen said Google had yet to contact him about the announcement as of early this week, although he said advertisers have been calling him daily to inquire about the fate of the enterprise. People familiar with the matter said Google is currently reviewing the collaboration. Chen, who has studied and worked in both China and the U.S., is remaining studiously neutral in the Google-Beijing conflict. He said he sees Top100 as a bridge and "as a bridge, you cannot take sides."

He hopes Google and Chinese authorities compromise on a way to allow Google to keep operating in China. "I love Google, and I love China," he said.

The Google-Top100 music venture has about six million songs downloaded or streamed each day. Top100 licenses the music from record labels and serves them as downloads and streams to users.

Collaborators include the world's four biggest record companies—Warner Music Group Corp., Vivendi SA's Universal Music, EMI Group Ltd., and Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment—who have contributed much of their catalogues.

The service offers songs by famous Chinese-language pop stars like Jacky Cheung and Faye Wong, as well as western stars like Lady Gaga and rapper Lil Wayne and even more obscure older acts like 1960s and 70s experimental rocker Captain Beefheart. In all, Top100 has licensed some five million tracks, although it has so far loaded only about a third that number on its site.

Google drives most of Top100's traffic through its Google.cn/music page. When users click on a link for a song they like in the search results, a Top100 window pops up carrying a music player or a download button along with an ad. Users with Internet connections outside China are blocked from downloading music through the service.
Play On

A snapshot of the free music service offered in China by Google and Top100.cn

* Number of songs licensed: 5 million
* Number of songs currently available for download: 1.5 million
* Sample artists included in catalog: Jacky Cheung, Lady Gaga, Lil Wayne, Captain Beefheart
* Sample advertisers: Nokia, Apple, Sony Ericsson, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz
* Advertising revenue: $732,000
* Number of downloads or streams per day: 6 million
* Number of unique users (estimated): 2 million to 3 million
* Record labels: Warner Music, Universal Music, EMI Group, Sony Music

Source: Top100.cn and WSJ reporting

Music labels have been especially hopeful about the Google-Top100 venture because rampant piracy had effectively ruined their business in China. Record companies had long complained about Google's chief competitor in China, Baidu Inc., offering direct links to unlicensed music downloads, and saw the ad-supported model, in which they receive a share of revenue, as a possible way forward not just for China, but potentially in other markets.

Sandy Monteiro, a Universal Music executive in Asia, said it would be "unfortunate" if Google's standoff with Beijing affects its Chinese music venture, adding that the outcome is "uncertain."…

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004575011683006036028.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Settled Strike at Cleveland Orchestra Reveals Classical Music Troubles

副 非常;很;甚;颇;不怎样! Even though it’s over, one of the first high-profile labor tussles of 2010 points to troubled times for the nation’s elite classical musical ensembles amid the Great Recession.

Orchestra members struck on Monday, the first such work stoppage here in 30 years. It was a day off for them anyway, so there was little immediate effect, but the strike forced the cancellation of a two-day teaching and concert trip to Indiana University and threatened a lucrative residency in Miami, both scheduled for this week. The two sides spent much of the day together in talks with a mediator.

In troubles elsewhere, the New York Philharmonic has just reported a record deficit for last year of $4.6 million, with nearly that much of a shortfall expected this season. The Seattle Symphony musicians have authorized a strike if need be.

Many of the nation’s top orchestras have reduced staff positions and administrative salaries in the last year. Orchestras have downsized seasons, canceled tours, programmed smaller works and left jobs open.

Current economic hardships, of course, are partly to blame. But industry experts point out that in the flush years of the 1990s, orchestras went on spending sprees without building up their endowments for a rainy decade. Now the crunch is on. At the same time, the old system of making the majority of ticket money from season-long subscriptions is breaking down. Big recording contracts are long gone.

In Cleveland, the fight revolves around several thousand dollars a year in salary for each player. But implicit is a debate over the worth of exquisitely trained musical artists in our society and how much we are now willing to pay for them.

The problem is especially acute here. Cleveland presents one of classical music’s great anomalies: a top international orchestra in a shrinking city, an ensemble in a Rust Belt town that plays with the greatest of ease among the Viennese.

The Cleveland Orchestra, founded in 1918, was born out of the city’s industrial might. While a couple of fiery plumes in the night sky are reminders of that legacy, much of the industry has died or moved away. The population has declined by nearly half in the last 50 years, and 10 percent over the last decade. Corporate headquarters have shut their doors. No new industries are minting millionaires. Old-money families are dispersing. Ticket sales have declined, although loyalty remains fierce.

“The orchestra is living off of historic wealth,” said Edward W. Hill, a professor of economic development at Cleveland State University.

According to numbers provided by management, the orchestra has been operating at large deficits for nearly a decade, averaging around $4 million for the last seven seasons with a budget now at $42.3 million. It has plugged the holes by using most of the money it had set aside to pay off $28 million in bonds when they come due in 2028 and by raising $18 million in emergency funds — which run out this season.

Orchestra officials say finances were hurt by dipping excessively every year into the endowment, which has plunged to $97 million from about $146 million in 2006-7.

Yet the orchestra remains undiminished artistically. Last Thursday’s concert gave ample evidence. The music director, Franz Welser-Möst, conducted impeccable accounts of works by Strauss, Adès and Brahms. The orchestra’s famed sound, transparent yet golden, glowed as usual. Entrances and cutoffs were typically precise. Melodies were caressed as much as played. The concert was well attended but not full.

But before the first notes of Strauss’s “Don Juan,” the players engaged in the equivalent of hurling Molotov cocktails in the genteel confines of Severance Hall, the orchestra’s splendidly renovated home: they left the stage and passed out leaflets among the patrons.

Clevelanders, whether they go to Severance Hall or not, know that the orchestra is one of the things about their city that register best around the world. (The Cleveland Clinic, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Lebron James are up there, too.)

In town, players say they are often treated as celebrities. Lines of yellow school buses on East Boulevard near Severance Hall attest to a widely experienced rite of passage for Cleveland youngsters: a trip to hear the Cleveland Orchestra.

“The orchestra has become almost like a church in Cleveland,” said Ross W. Duffin, a music professor at Case Western Reserve University here.

But it has become increasingly clear that this church must find a flock outside Cleveland. It has embarked on a kind of “globalization strategy,” establishing residences in Miami; Vienna; Lucerne, Switzerland; and in the future, New York, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. It is going, basically, where the money is.

The orchestra says it has raised $9 million from Miami donors in the last four seasons. They dominate the category of gifts over $100,000 in the last annual report.

The strike was strategically timed. The orchestra was scheduled to leave Thursday for its 10-day Miami residency.

The players and management are deadlocked over salaries. The musicians have proposed freezing their pay through the season, then re-examining the situation in the summer. The orchestra’s leadership has asked the players to take a 5 percent pay cut this year, go back to par next year and accept a 2.5 percent raise the following year. It is also seeking cuts in benefits.

Management argues that administrators and staff members have taken pay cuts, and that the players should share in the sacrifice. Mr. Welser-Möst, whose last reported income was $1.3 million, took a 20 percent pay cut. Gary Hanson, the executive director, whose last reported salary was $404,000, took a 15 percent cut and said he now earns what he started at in 2004.

The players say they have made numerous concessions in recent years. But more critically, they argue, any further slippage in pay will threaten the orchestra’s greatness by putting it far behind the pay scales of its peers, which consist mainly of the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony — America’s so-called Big Five. (The San Francisco Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic resent the phrase.)

The Cleveland players’ minimum salary now stands at $115,000, seventh in the nation, but most earn more through additional payments; principal players can earn two or three times that amount.

As the musicians see it, losing further ground will make it tougher to attract the absolute best players, and to keep them, threatening the orchestra’s greatness. “Continuity and stability have been the backbone of this orchestra,” said Michael Sachs, the principal trumpeter.

Mr. Hanson, the executive director, dismissed these arguments. “The proposal that we’re making is fair and reasonable and will not cause any artistic impact such as they’re predicting,” he said…….

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/arts/music/19orchestra.html?ref=music


Just in case you think this is an isolated problem, 形 独特的, a one-off, check out this memo with a detailed study of what American Orchestras are facing. Better fasten your seatbelt - it's gonna be a very bumpy ride!
http://www.americanorchestras.org/images/stories/knowledge_pdf/NEA_memo.pdf

Careers: When a brilliant musician makes a dumb mistake….

表示惊讶!Andrew Patner writes; when Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal flute Mathieu Dufour takes the stage Thursday night as a soloist for the first of a month of CSO concerts saluting the upcoming 85th birthday of conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, there should be even more than the usual cheers for the popular musician.

Just before a CSO rehearsal Tuesday morning, the internationally acclaimed Dufour, 37, who has been on leave playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic the last several months, told his CSO colleagues and Boulez that he would be remaining in Chicago.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal flute Mathieu Dufour has been on leave playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the past several months.

“I missed Chicago — the players and the audience and the city itself — really a lot,” he told the Sun-Times on Tuesday. “I’m glad that I tried something else. But by doing so I realized even more what we have here.

“There are fine musicians in Los Angeles, but we have achieved a very strong common purpose and set of aims in Chicago that they do not have or do not yet have there. They have no tradition there — no tradition of sound and no tradition of working together as a dedicated ensemble. Maybe they will have that someday in the future.”

In an e-mail Tuesday to CSO trustees, CSO Association President Deborah F. Rutter wrote, “When this news was shared with the orchestra this morning, there was a sustained warm and enthusiastic response (yes, cheering, stomping of feet, etc!). This is great news for all of us at the CSO!”

With the exception of some attention-hungry opera divas, the world of classical music is usually fairly civil, collegial and lacking in surprises. A contract is a contract. There’s little news until formal announcements are made. Players and singers from rival groups are courted, but never poached.

But in September, the L.A. Phil issued an unprecedented press release announcing that Dufour was leaving Chicago after 10 years to take up the first flute chair at Walt Disney Concert Hall under the Philharmonic’s new music director, the charismatic young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel. The Philharmonic even posted a biography of Dufour on its Web site, claiming he had been appointed as principal back in 2008 by the orchestra’s former music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen.

There were a few problems with the Philharmonic’s statements, though. In the first place, they weren’t true.

“Everyone in the music business knows that these things are trial periods at first,” Dufour told the Sun-Times in September while in Lucerne, Switzerland, where the CSO was on a five-city, nine-concert European tour with its principal conductor Bernard Haitink.

CSO officials were barely given a courtesy heads-up from their Los Angeles colleagues before the press release went out, and they learned of it only as the CSO was taking the stage in Berlin for its first concert of the fall European tour.

“We can’t speak for another orchestra,” said CSO vice president for public relations Raechel Alexander in September. “But we don’t announce new appointments until a player’s existing ones elsewhere have been resolved. And Mathieu is the principal flute of the CSO and of no other orchestra, as far as we are aware.”

Without bothering to speak to Dufour himself, other news organizations in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago reported that he was moving out West.

Dufour played last season with the Philharmonic and Salonen on a lengthy Asian tour and at its Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall. He took an unpaid leave for a part of this season to try things out with Dudamel.

But he also played the CSO’s full Europe tour and Chicago dates with Haitink, is playing three weeks of programs with Boulez (including a tour this month to New York’s Carnegie Hall) and is still committed to the CSO’s all-Beethoven Festival, also with Haitink, in June. All of this is a much heavier schedule than usual for a departing musician.

The L.A. musicians, Dufour said, “will have some exciting concerts there for sure as they go along. But in every rehearsal I missed what makes up the Chicago sound: the sense that every member of the CSO knows that you cannot ever go halfway and that every subtle detail is important.”

As it is, Dufour will not be returning to Los Angeles at all this season, using the time from February through May for shoulder surgery and recuperation.

http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/music/classical/1975430,mathieu-dufour-chicago-symphony-orchestra-010509.article

A Piano Virtuoso's Bizarre Revenge

Critics: as a performer you can't live with them, but you can't live without them. And what do they really know? If you can read between the lines of this story, not much. In fact it took a digital guru to get to the bottom of this. But don't take our word for it...read on.

形 不体面的! Joyce Hatto became a star when she released 104 brilliant recordings of classical works and then they were proven to be fakes. It was a remarkable story, one that instantly attracted the attention of Hollywood producers. How, virtually overnight, did a frail old lady become 'the greatest instrumentalist almost nobody had heard of?'

Nearly 30 years after she retired from the concert halls with ovarian cancer, classical pianist Joyce Hatto and her producer husband William Coupe released 104 of the world's most famous and challenging solo performances and piano concertos on their tiny record label Concert Artists.

While Joyce, until then barely known among the classical community, performed the music on her Steinway piano, her husband recorded the interpretations, producing an astonishing catalogue of work which he hoped would become her legacy. By the time she died last June, aged 77, at their home in Royston, Hertfordshire, the couple had created a cult phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic.

Joyce was described by critics as a 'national treasure', and 'one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced'.

However, last year, in an extraordinary twist, leading classical music magazine Gramophone said it could prove Hatto's purported works were fake. By electronically comparing the pitch, volume and tempo of the music with other artists, they found the soundwaves were identical - at least five of the records were performed by other artists and conductors. Many more fakes were uncovered.

Classical pianist David Owen Norris was informed that his 1988 rare solo piano recording of Elgar's Symphony No 1 in A flat major, opus 55, has been passed off as Hatto's work. 'I'm just very sad,' he said. 'I think it's pathetic really that somebody should be reduced to this.'

Suspicions grew that Hatto, who struggled throughout her career to earn real respect and acclaim, deliberately took part in a massive fraud to create a reputation she never deserved and to take revenge on the classical music industry.

According to Gramophone, Coupe not only lifted works of international pianists but also recordings made by orchestras and conductors. The sleeve-notes credit orchestras such as the National Philharmonic-Symphony and the Warsaw Philharmonia - neither of which exist - and the conductor Rene Kohler, whom Coupe said studied at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow. However, nobody has ever seen a photograph of Kohler and the university denied anyone of that name had studied there.

News of the apparent deception sent shockwaves through the classical music world and left many asking questions about Hatto and her husband. Little is known about them - Hatto gave only a handful of interviews before her death…...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-438296/Revenge-fraudster-pianist.html

Culling CDs

近义词! My lease is up. Time to move to another apartment. But the problem is it’s going to have less room for all of my CDS, so lie it or not it’s time to bite the bullet and get rid of some of my CDs.

My kitchen will be bigger, but other areas are going to be smaller, including the area I store my CDs. Over the years from the first one I purchased (Simon Preston conducting The Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford and the Academy of Ancient Music in JS Bach’s Magnificat in E/Vivaldi’s Gloria in D in 1988) to the CDs that arrived by the carload (from companies eager to hve them reviewed sent them to critics) to my modest present purchases, they’ve just piled up. So many that if I listened to them one by one, starting with it would take months, without taking time to hit the bathroom, meals or sneaking a cigarette here and there. Never mind weekends. And to be honest the thought of sitting for months to go through the whole bunch – from Albeniz and Albinoni (with the great De Larrocha and Heinz Holliger respectively) to Weill’s opera Rise and Fall of Mahagonny isn’t very appealing. Then there are the hundred or so rock, blues and jazz classics I’ve accumulated along the way.

It’s time to downsize, deacqusition, to cast out. Probably you’ll have little empathy for the pain this will cause. But trust me getting rid of CDs is a nasty job. In the past even with a good doctor friend who will value them, I’ve made the attempt with little to show for my trouble. You go to your CDs with a hard heart. You are going to be absolutely ruthless, and then you browse, listen to a couple of likely candidates, and when you’re through, a small pile of discs to be removed, sits on a table, the ones I’m convinced I never listen to – a late Schubert string quartet you have two other performances of, Mozart late quartets you already have better versions of, anything with a no name conductor. There’s little or no feeling that anything much has been accomplished.

I tell myself that this time it will be different. Instead of steeling myself; and trying to be hard-hearted, I’ll try and use some logic. Once again you approach the piles of gleaming jewel boxes with an eye to what you really have listened to more than few times. I think about the balance of the collection and how it is supposed to reflect my musical tastes.

Maybe the way to go is to get rid of duplicates, leaving just the best single performance by the best performer. How many versions of Strauss’ Four Last Songs does a person need? Of course the early classic Elizabeth Schwarzkopf stays. I pull out the Gundula Janowitz and the Jesse Norman, but put them back. Janowitz with her clear, voice soaring up and over the orchestra like a bird, was one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century. How can I be parted with one of the few recordings of her I own? And there’s a tremendous Karajan “Death and Transfiguration”, and a gut-wrenching “Thus Spake Zarathustra” paired with it. Maybe the Jessye Norman should go– but since she performed it with her large, rich voice, reminiscent of Kirsten Flagstad, the first person to perform it after Strauss’ death, maybe not. With assurance I reach for the Della Casa version and put it aside only to remember her scenes of “Arabella” are some of the finest on record. Back it goes. I pull out the Kiri Te Kanawa version and it stays on the pile. She sounds too cool and distant, perhaps the way Strauss wanted them sung, but a little too unemotional for my taste.

This isn’t working. At this rate, I’ll have been moved and still be trying to cull CDs. Perhaps randomly picking one CD and then tossing out its neighbors will work. But no – looking hopefully at the “Bs” I can’t see what Bach to discard, nor what Beethoven, or Bartok. Funny how the great composers group around certain letters of the alphabet.

When I started collecting I had two goals – music that I loved and a little bit of everything. Thanks to the amazing productivity of the music industry I could cling to both goals, plus expand into the lesser known pieces at the same time. But since then the music industry has changed – most of the CD stores have closed – which makes my CD more valuable and at the same time there are other options. Downloads are cheaper and growing in their quality and range. The internet has cut the need to buy something just because your eye accidentally hits on it while you’re in the process of finding something else.

It’s a better world for music, even completists. Now it’s easier to approach my collection like a an editor approaches a manuscript. Getting rid of CDs is about shaping and clarity. Paring them down forces me to relearn and recognize my own musical tastes. It helps that CDs are going through their death throes. But back in the day that's what they said about vinyl long-playing records - and now tey sell half a million old-fashioned turntables a year, and classical vinyl is worth its weight in gold. Which leaves me exactly.....where?