Sofia Gubaidulina, part 16

The last post on this topic was way back in August, so time to follow up, I think! In the early 1980s Gubaidulina encountered the thought of music theoretician Pyotr Meshchaninov, who lectured at the Moscow Conservatory on the evolutionary history of music. Meshchaninov proposed that the foundational source of musical pitch was the overtone series and that the Fibonacci series served a similar function with regard to rhythm. Meshchaninov was influenced in his thinking by his study and performance of the music of Bach, particularly the Art of Fugue. The Fibonnaci series is a sequence of numbers, each one of which is the sum of the two previous. Bartók also used the series to structure some of his pieces. Here is an illustration:

Gubaidulina approaches music from a different perspective. For her artistic form is a distillation of spirit, an organic, living process both fluid and moving. In a discussion with musicologist Olga Bugrova, Gubaidulina explained how she views the three realms of melody, harmony and rhythm, or, more organically, the root, trunk and leaves of a tree:

Mulling over which of the three fundamental elements of musical fabric within the sonorous complex might be seen as the "roots" of the tree I realized that it was rhythm. All of the harmonic, the mass of the resonance, forms the "trunk," while the contrapuntal lines exemplify the "leaves." Under the conditions of sonoristics, the melody can no longer be conceived, as in the past, as the means for developing, elaborating the material. Instead, it must manifest itself as a transformation of the material itself, and the consequence of growth from the "roots" through the "trunk." ... But with all that, one must not suppress intuition nor lose imaginative spontaneity. But, why rhythm? Because it alone presupposes the agency of laws that do not conflict with a system that embraces all possible sonic and timbral conceptions. [this quote comes from Kurtz' biography, p. 175]

I'm not sure what she means by the last sentence, but the rest is implying that rhythm is like a deep movement in the earth's crust that generates the harmonic waves of a tsunami while melody is the waves crashing on the land. Choose your own metaphor! Valeryia Tsenova has written an essay on the numerical aspect of Gubaidulina's music and I will take up that paper in a later post.

Gubaidulina, due to her non-compromising attitude, had been prevented for many years from traveling outside the Soviet Union to attend performances of her music. Finally in 1984 she was able to attend a special edition of the Helsinki Festival devoted to Soviet and Russian culture. The authorities were still unwilling to allow her to travel, but gave in when Veijo Vapio, the artistic director, stated that if Gubaidulina was not allowed to attend, the whole festival would be canceled! The first evening concert of the festival featured two pieces, Offertorium by Gubaidulina, followed by the Symphony No. 8 by Shostakovich. We have talked about the Offertorium before, a violin concerto written for Gidon Kremer, but let's listen to it again, re-creating this concert by hearing clips of the Offertorium followed by the Shostakovich symphony.

Now that's a concert! This event really was the beginning of a widespread recognition of Gubaidulina's importance. The Finnish composer Kalevi Aho wrote about the great impression she made on him when he visited Moscow in early April 1984:

I thought to myself that composers like Gubaidulina can only come from Russia. Perhaps it was fortuitous for her development as a composer that she had been confronted by many ... difficulties in the course of her career. Without these struggles she might not have developed her mind as much as she did; if everything had gone smoothly she might not have pushed herself to understand the reasons for being a composer or to thing about the higher purpose of her compositions. [op. cit. p. 180]

The first fruits of Gubaidulina's new understanding of the rhythm of musical form was a commission for percussion ensemble, In the Beginning There Was Rhythm:

One Year in the Studio, part 2

In my last post in this series I talked about moving from northern British Columbia to Vancouver Island which happened when I was fourteen. Were it not for this move the available options in my life would have been far narrower. I first started getting interested in music a year or so after the move and it was rock and pop music, the most ubiquitous, that caught my attention. I took up the electric bass guitar and joined a band. Actually, I wanted to take up the drums, God knows why, but they cost $12 a month to rent while a bass guitar was only $9. Yes, we were on a tight budget! Six months after my first lesson on bass guitar (I think I only had a couple) my band played its first "gig" in a little hall in a tiny town whose name I forget. There were less than ten people in attendance and I think that we made six dollars each. Now that's professionalism! After a while I took up the acoustic six string and became interested in both the Beatles and Bob Dylan. In a brief folk music interlude I recall performing, in a state of high anxiety, Dylan's "Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands," an eleven-minute dirge (though a nice one) at a local talent festival. This demonstrates two things, I think, my wide-ranging aesthetic curiosity and taste and my inability to either notice or care what the tastes of the audience might be!

From time to time I would notice the existence of classical music. As I recall my mother had an LP of Ferrante and Teicher, an American piano duo specializing in light classics and I quite enjoyed their arrangement of Malagueña. But the real revelation came when a friend played me a recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and I realized that there was a whole musical universe of intricate harmonies and orchestrations and extreme virtuosity that I knew little of. At first I started borrowing classical LPs from another friend's father. I recall listening to the "New World Symphony" by Antonín Dvořák, the "Unfinished Symphony" by Franz Schubert, the Symphony No. 5 by Beethoven and "La Mer" by Claude Debussy. A transcendental wow. All these gems were listened to on an old monophonic cabinet stereo and the discs themselves were a mass of tics and surface noise through which the music appeared as a spectral ghost. I still almost expect the sound to skip a groove at a certain place in the Unfinished Symphony from listening to that old record so many times.

One summer I worked for a stuccoer (very demanding physical labor) and before going to work in the morning I would listen to an LP of violin music by Pinchas Zukerman that had Romantic showpieces by Henryk Wieniawski, Camille Saint-Saëns and others. Here is the Violin Concerto No. 2 by Wieniawski:

Noble and lovely music. After a hard days work I would often drop by the local record store and pick up a new LP. I recall that re-issues of older recordings were often available for $2.99 from the well-known companies (or $1.99 from the lesser-known). Mind you, I was only getting paid something like two or three dollars an hour!

At some point around then (1970) I discovered J. S. Bach. I used to have a photo, taken by a friend, of me leaning out a window holding an Archiv box set of the Bach Mass in B minor, looking very much like the tablets of Moses. This same recording is still available:

At the time this was a new 1969 recording. The whole performance is on YouTube with a short introduction in German:

Music does not get much better than this. Not too long after I discovered two things: that there was such a thing as a classical guitar and that one could play actual music by Bach on this instrument. That pretty much set the course of my life for the next few decades. The great Chaconne by Bach, the last movement of the Partita No. 2 for solo violin, transcribed for guitar by Andrés Segovia, was my inspiration for years:

Ironically, this was the only goal that I did not ultimately achieve. I never did play that piece in public.

Friday Miscellanea

First up a whimsical performance where two comic violinists take on Hilary Hahn in a hula-hoop Paganini contest:

That's the Caprice No. 24, by the way.

* * *

Yo-Yo Ma on cello in the Montreal Metro with some chopped-off Bach and Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

Many years ago I played a few times in the Metro and believe me, you have to pick your location.

* * *

Back in Montreal I used to occasionally read Le Monde diplomatique for its interesting and intellectual perspective on things. Here is an article on The music of migration.

There has been a tectonic shift in global urban culture, with shrinking spaces for free musical expression in Britain. The old community pub culture is being replaced by an imperialist coffee shop culture where people are isolated with online social media, listening to pre-recorded music on headphones. You cannot sing in a Starbucks. In London, street music is controlled through licensing, often limited to solo performers; unlicensed buskers can be fined £1,000 and their instruments confiscated. Privatisation and enclosure also silence voices; a people’s choir in the rich university city of Cambridge can’t find a space to rehearse. And while religion in British cities used to be Christian and choral, churches are in decline and all community singing is gone; Islam thrives in those cities, but regards music, song and dance as haram.

This is partly a long-coming unintended consequence of the development of the technology to record and play back music. I find most public spaces these days very unpleasant solely because of the music--whether blasting or unobtrusive.

* * *

Speaking of public spaces I had a glimpse of the future recently. Waiting lounges at Toronto's Pearson airport are outfitted with hoards of iPads at nearly every seat. I tried one out and found it to be non-functional in interesting ways. There were a lot of the icons you find on your iPhone screen, but with significant omissions. No web browser, for example. This is presumably so unsavory characters can't view pornography. Is this what they do in libraries these days? There was a News icon, but no way of choosing what news. I got some outdated articles on George H. W. Bush's funeral from a paper in Texas. There was a CNN channel and some games, but the map icon was also non-functional. What is  creepy about this is that I can easily see authoritarian governments of the future tightly controlling all public access to information for their own purposes. No criticism allowed, of course. This is already the case in some nations. The public information and discussion space in Canada is already quite limited; all those little magazines that used to exist with a variety of different viewpoints seem to have vanished. There is a tiny bit of ideological variance between the Globe and Mail, along with the CBC the voice of the central Canadian establishment, and the National Post, the radical conservative upstart just celebrating its 20th anniversary. The Globe and Mail believes that caution and compassion is the solution to French President Emmanuel Macron's problem with weeks of riots over his fuel tax. Over at the National Post they see the solution to resistance to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's carbon tax in adroit handling of the rebates to affected parties. If you squint you can see that the National Post is slightly on the right and the Globe and Mail slightly on the left, but both are handmaidens to the oligarchy of Canadian big business. And that is what passes for public discussion in Canada.

* * *

For a diametrically different perspective on Yo-Yo Ma, we have a new piece by Alex Ross in The New Yorker: Yo-Yo Ma’s Days of Action.

The cyclone of exuberance that is Yo-Yo Ma tore through the Washington, D.C., area at the end of November. The cellist is in the middle of a sprawling tour called the Bach Project, which involves performances of Bach’s six solo-cello suites in thirty-six places, on six continents. Classical music has taken to attaching the word “project” to undertakings large and small. If two or more Brahms symphonies are played, it becomes a Brahms Project. The Bach Project, though, is deserving of the name. Most of Ma’s concerts are slated for large spaces capable of accommodating thousands. Each is accompanied by a Day of Action, in which Ma meets with local artists, community leaders, students, and activists, exploring how culture can contribute to social progress. In Washington, the venue was the National Cathedral. The Day of Action took place in Anacostia, the historic African-American neighborhood in southeast D.C.

I have to admit that I have never quite fallen under Yo-Yo Ma's spell. He seems an entirely serious musician and compassionate spirit who only wants to do good in the world and more power to him. Ironically, the one jarring bit in Ross' article is about the power of culture to do good:

The premise underlying the project—that “culture helps us to imagine a better future,” as Ma wrote in a program note—is open to question. It is far from clear that culture makes the world better. Put to wrong ends, it can make the world worse; Hitler and Stalin proved as much. In our own time, Valery Gergiev lends lustre to Vladimir Putin and Kanye West hypes Donald Trump.

Ah, that's the Manhattan intelligentsia ideology we were waiting for. Yes, Hitler, Stalin, Putin and Trump are all a much of a muchness. At least Yo-Yo Ma avoids such crude equivalences.

 * * *

The Spectator takes up the horrifying injustice of there being too many male instrumentalists in jazz:

The legislation of gender parity is also injurious to the music. I’ve exchanged a flurry of emails with Birmingham’s head of jazz, Jeremy Price. He observes: ‘The band leader’s choice of personnel is as important as the composing and the band leader’s playing. You choose personnel to fit your music and that’s the way it should remain. That a festival dictates or seeks to overly influence your personnel choices is way too anti-art for me.’ Yet if Price warns festival organizers against ‘searching for inexperienced female jazz artists to make up the numbers’, he’s ‘hung out to dry as a misogynist’. He describes the usual response as, ‘So you’re saying that women aren’t as good as men at jazz!’

* * * 

Let's listen to some Yo-Yo Ma for our envoi today. Here he is with the Cello Suite No. 1 by Bach at the 2015 Proms:

Laptop Review

I don't usually don't do reviews of anything, but I have had an excellent experience with my new laptop, so here are some comments. I wanted a lighter laptop with a larger screen than my older Macbook Pro so I bought a Chromebook. They take some getting used to, but I have used them before and they are quite manageable for most purposes. I bought the newest Acer 15.6 inch model:

As I said in the previous post, I just got the laptop and charged it up the day before getting on the plane to Toronto. As I forgot the charger, it had to last the whole six days I was there, which it did, but after checking my email the last morning, it only had five minutes left! Pretty impressive, especially compared to my older MacBook Pro that only has a couple of hours of charge. I love Chromebooks because they boot up in just a few seconds and shut down instantly. Mac and Windows machines, especially the latter, seem to take geological time to boot up.

So what is the hitch? Chromebooks run the Chrome operating system from Google which will not run any ordinary applications. So I can't compose on the road as it won't run Finale. It also won't run Word or Powerpoint or any other ordinary program. What it will run is Google docs so for normal purposes just open your Word file with Google docs and edit therein, saving it as a Word file to send to others. Mind you, I haven't done this much, but I think it would work. For web browsing there are no issues. I am writing this review on my Chromebook.

Why did I get a Chromebook instead of a MacBook Air like everyone else? A new MacBook Air with a 13' screen costs north of a thousand dollars. My 15.6' Chromebook cost $212 (plus $58 shipping and import fees to Mexico).

How does the screen definition and speakers compare to my older MacBook Pro? Quite well. Viewing this YouTube clip on the Chromebook compares well with the Mac:

The picture seems very comparable (mind you, my old MacBook does not have a retina display) and the sound also seems just as good--a bit better in fact as it delivers more volume at max. The MacBook is a bit quiet even when you crank it up. The Chromebook has some fair-sized speakers on either side of the keyboard. The keyboard is nothing special, not as nice as on a Mac, but perfectly useable.

So there you have it. Why are Macs so much more expensive? They are gorgeous examples of industrial design, and Apple has found that their customers are loyal enough to accept higher prices. Windows machines are more expensive largely because of the hefty fee Microsoft charges for the operating system. So, you might consider buying a Chromebook at a fraction of the cost.

UPDATE: How hard was it to connect my Chromebook to my HP printer? It took 30 seconds.

Back From Toronto

I got back from Toronto last night so I can give a bit of an update on the project. First some background: over the last few years I had developed a good working relationship with a recording engineer down here in Mexico. Ken Basman was originally from Toronto and was an outstanding jazz guitarist. He was also a very talented recording engineer with his own studio and an impressive collection of microphones. Sadly, he passed away a couple of years ago so I have been looking for an alternative. I just completed a piece for violin and guitar, Dark Dream, and there was another piece for violin and piano that also needed recording so I approached violinist Valerie Li, first violin with the Afiara Quartet whom I had met when they gave a number of concerts here in Mexico. She was interesting in recording the pieces with me and knew a very good recording engineer in Toronto. As Toronto is also home to some fine pianists, that made the project feasible. I just had to fly up to Toronto in December when the daytime high is often around zero! Never mind, just dress warmly.

The project was a real success. We recorded in the Glenn Gould Studio, a small concert hall in the CBC broadcast centre that is outfitted as probably the finest studio for recording classical music in Canada. We recorded two pieces, Dark Dream, which I just completed a couple of months ago, and Chase, composed three years ago. I flew into Toronto last Wednesday, getting in at 1:30 in the morning. At noon the next day I had a rehearsal with Val which was our first run-through of the piece. As she is a highly accomplished chamber music musician it went very smoothly and we largely worked out the ensemble problems. The next day I attended the rehearsal of Val with pianist Todd Yaniw for the much shorter piece, Chase. That went quite well, though I was not impressed with the beat up piano at the Conservatory. Saturday Val and I had another rehearsal of Dark Dream and Sunday we recorded both pieces at the CBC. Total rehearsal time Dark Dream: 3 1/2 hours and Chase, 1 1/2 hours. Total recording time: Dark Dream, 2 hours and Chase 1 1/2 hours. Dark Dream turned out to be about 14 minutes long and Chase about 4 minutes. I expected Dark Dream to come in at ten minutes as that is how it was originally planned. However, I rewrote the piece three or four times so it just grew!

Here is a look at the Glenn Gould Studio, named after perhaps Canada's most famous classical musician, pianist Glenn Gould who was pretty much resident in the CBC building for much of his career:

Click to enlarge

Inside the control room:

Our recording crew, Paul, technical assistant from the CBC, Pouya Hamidi, our recording engineer, and pianist Todd Yaniw. I believe that Pouya is performing a traditional invocation of the gods of recording for a successful session.

Myself, Pouya and violinist Valerie Li, getting ready to do a take:

I will have more about the actual recording in future posts.

While the recording itself went very well, there were a few unexpected challenges. As I said in a previous post, I completely forgot my charging cables for my iPhone, my Chromebook and my Kindle. They were all charged up when I left so it was not a complete disaster. In fact, the Kindle lasted the whole trip. Val had a spare iPhone charger, so that helped. But the Chromebook only lasted the whole time due to stringent rationing! I was going to do a lot more blog posting and maybe watch a few shows on Netflix, but had to keep the usage to an hour or two a day. It turned out that the Chromebook, advertised as having up to 12 hours of battery time, actually delivered about that much. However, taking an Uber to the Royal Conservatory for a rehearsal, my iPhone slipped out of my jacket pocket in the back of the cab. It took several days of phone calls and a significant tip to get the phone back. Luckily, I did! But my recommendation is to NEVER leave anything in an Uber.

On the plus side, I discovered a really good sushi restaurant near my hotel.

Sunny Toronto

Sure, it starts to get dark around 4:30 in the afternoon, but Toronto can be sunny in the winter as it was yesterday. Mind you, it was also 8 degrees below zero, so there's that. We had a rehearsal at the Royal Conservatory of Music, one of Canada's leading musical institutions. Here is a photo of the original building that has since been added on to with new construction on one side and at the back:

I also paid a little visit to the LCBO another uniquely Canadian institution. Canada, traditionally, was a bit conflicted about sinful things like alcohol, so in most provinces, sales of alcoholic beverages are tightly controlled by the government. LCBO stands for the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. The Quebec equivalent is the SAQ, the Societe des Alcools de Quebec (sorry, no accents on this keyboard), and in British Columbia it is the BCLDB, the BC Liquor Distribution Branch. These shameful products are usually sold out of dull, generic government buildings. On the other hand, provinces like Ontario and BC are more and more producing fine wines and are justifiably proud of them.

I ran into another wine aficionado just before coming to Toronto which reminded me of my interest in ice wines. Ice wine (Eiswien in German) was invented in Germany, by wineries in the Moselle valley. Sometimes, if you let your grapes fully ripen in late fall, which gives you those luscious late-harvest wines, you get caught by an early frost which ruins the grapes by the time they thaw out. But sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century vintners started to crush the grapes when they were still frozen which gives a highly concentrated juice as the water is taken out in the form of ice crystals. The result is a sweet, completely natural wine, balanced by good acidity. Other sweet wines, like Sauternes, are created by a fungus, referred to as "noble rot" that causes the skin of the grapes to degrade and some of the water to evaporate, again resulting in a more concentrated juice.

The two main nations that produce ice wine are Germany and recently, Canada. So I dropped by the LCBO and picked up a couple of bottles of ice wine to take back to Mexico with me. Very little of this wine is exported and, as far as I know, none to Mexico! I also picked up what I hope will be a good Barolo to go with the Christmas turkey:

Ice wine is traditionally made with the Riesling grape, but in Canada is often made with the little-known Vidal blanc grape:

Vidal blanc (or simply Vidal) is a white hybrid grape variety produced from the Vitis vinifera variety Ugni blanc (also known as Trebbiano Toscano) and another hybrid variety, Rayon d'Or (Seibel 4986). It is a very winter-hardy variety that manages to produce high sugar levels in cold climates with moderate to high acidity.

Ice wine is not cheap as the whole crop has to be picked all at once, often in the pre-dawn so the grapes are still frozen when they are crushed. Save it for a special occasion!

Friday Miscellanea

This will be a combined miscellanea today with some bits about my trip to Toronto as I am rationing time on my laptop due to my forgetting my charging cable at home. I had my first rehearsal with violinist Valerie Li yesterday and it went very well. Val is a terrific violinist, first violin with the Afiara Quartet, a really outstanding ensemble. Val is originally from Vancouver and attended the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, one of the finest music schools in the US. She and the other members of the quartet came together at the San Francisco Conservatory and later on at Julliard in New York. They just got back from a three week tour of Denmark. I met the quartet in Mexico when they performed a few times in our local festivals. They stood out for me for their superb musicianship, especially in the Beethoven quartets. So when I was looking for a violinist to record some new pieces, she was at the top of the list.

We rehearsed for a couple of hours yesterday and I was very pleased with how it went. Val is a meticulous musician and working on my piece "Dark Dream" for violin and guitar, I had some new insights into what is going on in the piece! How this piece came to be, something I will go into in more detail in another post, was first of all at the conceptual level, then later on I rewrote much of it intuitively. With new music, the details of interpretation will develop as you rehearse the piece. Val was very insightful in shaping phrases and the dynamic layout. Today I will meet her and pianist Todd Yaniw at the Royal Conservatory of Music where I will hear them rehearsing my older piece, "Chase" for violin and piano. I have only written two pieces for piano in my life, this one and a song for voice and piano from a couple of years ago. "Chase" is a pretty straightforward piece designed to be a bit of a romp for both instruments and easily enjoyable for the audience.

* * *

The New York Times has a piece on creativity and asceticism. They recount how artists have often, in the past, been associated with hedonistic excess:

In classical Greece, in fourth- and fifth-century Athens, the major artistic prize of the era, for drama, was given under the auspices of Dionysus, a god of wine and ecstasy. Dionysus is a curious proto-patron saint of the arts, given the story of his birth. Zeus — king of gods, thunder god — wooed the mortal Semele. Hera, Zeus’ wife and the goddess of heaven, tired of her husband’s philandering, learned of Zeus’ latest conquest and convinced Semele to demand that Zeus reveal his true form — lightning — a sight Hera knew would kill her: No mortal can bear a god in full. Zeus assented, Semele died, but Zeus saved Semele’s fetal son, tucking him into his thigh, carrying him to term, earning the child the epithet “twice born”: to a mortal, to a god.

That there is something divine in the mortal act of making things is another part of the lore around creativity. The process of giving artistic birth is said to court a kind of violence that the maker must reckon with. Recent books have wondered about the tension between varieties of addiction and creativity, often by writers who themselves had been alcoholics, booze being a way to blunt or redirect the violence of making.

But the writer, Wyatt Mason, goes on to note that:

if it is fact that a kind of excess often accompanies the making of art, then there’s another kind of excess — less cinematic, for sure — that seems closer to the point: Artists, even the hedonistic ones, are fundamentally, one might say excessively, ascetic.

For the artist, though, asceticism isn’t a fad or a fashion or a mindful cleanse — a thumb of turmeric and a pinch of cayenne — prudently chosen. It is a regimen that evolves out of the need to do something unreasonable that an artist can’t be reasoned out of doing: work, demanded by no one but the self that makes it, because making is what the artist needs and knows.

* * *

I have long been a fan of Esa-Pekka Salonen both for his conducting and as a composer so I am delighted to read that he will be the next musical director of the San Francisco Symphony. This orchestra, unlike many others in North America, does not change conductors on a whim. The current director, Michael Tilson Thomas, has been at the helm for a quarter-century. Joshua Kosman writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The 60-year-old Finnish musician’s arrival in 2020 to succeed Michael Tilson Thomas promises to be an exciting development on every conceivable front. It’s going to mean a high level of musical execution from an orchestra that already plays like one of the best in the world. It’s going to mean a healthy infusion of contemporary music and a broadening of the repertoire, and it’s going to mean a range of new approaches to the very structure of orchestral music-making.

It’s really something of a coup.

If that assessment sounds a little breathless, consider that it could not have been made about any other conductor the Symphony might have chosen. There are fine conductors out there, but there’s simply no one on the orchestral scene today who can boast the range of musical and leadership skills that Salonen is poised to bring with him.

* * *

 They don't link to the story and I can't find it, but Arts Journal mentions a piece by critic Jennifer Gersten that sounds interesting:

Classical radio stations promote their programming as “calming and refreshing,” an “oasis,” or “an island of sanity.” Playlists on YouTube and audio streaming services have titles like “8 Hours Classical Music for Sleeping”; inexpensive compilation CDs offer “The Most Relaxing Classical Music in the Universe.” Jennifer Gersten, winner of the 2018 Rubin Prize in Music Criticism — identifies at least one reason why the industry keeps falling into this rut, and argues that the habit sells both the music itself and potential listeners very short.

Well, sure. The thing is that while I, and some of you as well, look to music for an enlivening, occasionally transcendental experience, a lot of listeners just hope for a respite from the hectic stress of everyday life.

 * * *

This item struck close to home: Canadian orchestra is forced out of its hall.

After decades of performances at its home base at the Royal Theatre, the Victoria Symphony has announced that it is being forced out of the Theatre due to exorbitant rental increases and curtailed access to booking dates.

Recent changes to rental fees and newly created priority scheduling policies and procedures developed by the Board of the Royal Theatre have created an untenable situation for the Victoria Symphony. ‘With the new policy our rent will increase by 100%, and combined with significantly reduced access to available dates in the Theatre we can no longer continue to offer our series of concerts,’ says says Chairman Alan Hollingworth.

The Symphony will pull out half of its season offerings from the Royal and take them to the Farquhar Auditorium at the University of Victoria.

I played the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo with that orchestra on that very stage. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds because the Royal Theatre is an older facility with frankly, minimal backstage amenities. The newer auditorium at the university is a better performing space.

* * *

Ending with a bit of whimsy, Yuja Wang's agent, Mark Newbanks, has, according to Slipped Disc, dropped her because she is too "high maintenance."

The boutique artists’ manager Mark Newbanks has dropped the pianist from his elite list, apparently for being too high maintenance.

Mark erased Yuja from his website this month and she has reciprocated in kind.

This is an uncomfortable situation for an international artist, but she won’t be alone for long. The vultures are circling quite low in the sky.

* * *

Which brings us to our envoi. One of my favorite orchestral clips, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting an orchestra of young students at the Verbier Festival. This is the last movement of the Symphony No. 5 by Sibelius: