ON THIS DATE one hundred years ago – American opera gained home-court advantage.

Born in Newton, Mass., in 1871, Frederick Shepherd Converse was a quick study on the piano who quickly captured that most Massachusetts of ambitions: a Harvard diploma. By the turn of the century, the protégé of New England School composers John Knowles Paine and George Chadwick distinguished himself through a European-styled mastery of orchestration and poetic temperament. His life’s work included a composition for full orchestra, “Endymion's Narrative, After Keats” (1901), a vocal solo from Keats, “La belle dame sans merci” (1902), and several symphonic poems based on Whitman, including his best-remembered work, “The Mystic Trumpeter” (1904).

Poetry merged with the fantastical and pseudo-Christian for Converse in 1906 when he completed his first opera, “The Pipe of Desire.” Telling the story of a peasant whose disbelief in the mystical powers of an elven king’s pipe results in a delirium that claims the life of his fiancée and provides a lesson on both forgiveness and environmental conservation, it opened at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on March 18, 1910, in an intrepid double-bill with “Pagliacci.” “For Mr. Converse’s opera is short,” reported The New York Times on March 19, “being in one act and playing but little over an hour.”

The performance marked the first time an American opera was presented at the Met, and the first time an opera in English was offered in the Met’s regular season. “The performance was, in fact, and excellent one,” said the Times, “carried through with real devotion by all who were concerned in it…Everything, in fact, had been done for the opera to set it forth in the most advantageous way.” But the debut was far from a rave success. The Times, ever quick to point out facts, noted that “the events that are set forth in ‘The Pipe of Desire’ are not clearly intelligible nor do they result in carrying the listener’s interest on from one point to the next. There is, in fact, a great dearth of action upon the stage of any dramatic sort.”

Running for three performances under the baton of Alfred Hertz, the Met production had little effect on Converse himself. He founded the short-lived Boston Opera Company and oversaw stagings of both his first opera and its more successful successor, “The Sacrifice” (1911); two other Converse operas remain unperformed. He served as a bandmaster in WWI and worked as instructor and dean of faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music, faithful to his native Massachusetts until his death at home in Westwood in 1940.

Maybe it’s the theme from “Rocky.” Maybe it’s Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Maybe, we hope not for your sake, it’s the Disney “Small World” tune. Regardless of any musical merit, we’ve all had the experience of a tune getting stuck in our heads—a phenomenon known as an “earworm.” Why does that happen and more importantly, HOW DO WE MAKE IT STOP?

Check out this New York Times piece on mental melodies for the answer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/science/16qna.html?ref=science

12:45 a.m. South African time (already Monday), 6:45 p.m. Raleigh time (still Sunday). I’m 30,000+ feet in the air flying from Johannesburg - where I’ve been conducting a production of Puccini’s La Bohème with Opera Africa - to Raleigh for this week as a guest conductor of the North Carolina Symphony (for the "A Journey Down the Rhine" concerts).

While I have been thoroughly studying all three works for this concert, the one I’ve been thinking about the most lately is the Schumann. An interesting twist is that I have the fortune to be on the not-so-long list of conductors who have conducted Schumann’s opera, Genoveva.

Around this period of his life Schumann had become interested in, if not fascinated by the work of Richard Wagner. So great was his interest that Schumann paid a visit to Wagner bearing a copy of the libretto for Genoveva, and was quite crushed when the great composer of music-dramas was clearly not enthused by its quality or subject matter. Also important to remember is that Schumann was also an avid and serious composer of song repertoire, including such beautiful cycles as Frauen-Liebe und Leben.

So as I think about the “Rhenish” symphony I can’t help but to apply the lens of Schumann as a writer of vocal music and an intense, Wagnerianesque musical-drama. It certainly makes the picture quite different and more complex than simply viewing this masterpiece as the culmination of four symphonies.

I believe the best music inspires a sense of discovery in the listener, so think about it this way: if one were to write text for the music of the first phrase of the “Rhenish,” what might the words be? What type of voice would sing it? Where in the 20-bar phrase would the singer breathe? What character makes their entrance during the fanfare music of the final movement? Which instruments express love? Which instruments express nobility? Which instruments express loss? I hope you’ll let your imagination run wild like I do.

This upcoming week with the North Carolina Symphony is exciting for me. It’s a pleasure to work with this group of talented musicians, a superb soloist like Kurt Nikkanen, and to spend the week digging deep into the best music in the world. See you there!

Staff Note: Timothy Myer's concerts with the NCS will perform in Chapel Hill at Memorial Hall on March 18 and in Raleigh's Meymandi Concert Hall on March 19 and 20.

Saturday's New York Times published a funny, sweet, moving tribute to a New Jersey music teacher that is just too good not to share with our readers. Whether you are a real musician, a dilettante or just an appreciator, we think you will be touched by this piece by Joann Lipman.
Please enjoy!

Read the story here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28lipman.html?em

As readers of this space probably know, Andrew Litton will conduct the North Carolina Symphony in concerts March 4-6. Perhaps the best known piece on his program is Gustav Holst’s The Planets. We thought you might enjoy these bits of random information:

1. The concept for the work is astrological, rather than astronomical. Holst’s friend Clifford Bax introduced him to astrology and he became quite committed to the subject, casting his friends’ horoscopes for fun. The idea for the piece came to him during a holiday with a group of artists in Majorca.

2. “Saturn” was Holst’s favorite movement, HOWEVER…

3. …he become perturbed at the popularity of The Planets, complaining that it overshadowed his other work.

4. He hated The Planets fame so much, in fact, that when fans of the work asked for his autograph, he handed out a sheet of paper that stated he didn’t give autographs.

5. After writing the piece, disillusioned by its celebrity, he swore off astrology. However, he still enjoyed casting horoscopes to the end of his life.

6. Pluto was discovered in 1930, four years before Holst’s death but he had no interest in writing a new movement for it (see 3, 4 and 5). As it turns out, he probably made the right decision since the International Astronomical Union downgraded Pluto to a dwarf planet in 2006. Did Holst forsee this in his study of astrology? Hmmm.

7. Charlotte Llewellyn’s middle name is Imogen, named after Holst’s daughter, “a wonderful woman,” according to Grant. Grant and Charlotte’s eldest daughter is also named Imogen.

Please join us for the performance of this popular work! In the end, we don’t think Holst will really mind.

On this date in 1709 – Vivaldi got the sack.

By the beginning of the 16th century, Venice’s status as Europe’s busiest mercantile port and an aristocratic bastion were firmly in its past. Just, no one told the aristocrats. Lavish sums were being spent to make the Republic’s operas, paintings and theatrical productions the most popular on the continent. By 1703, their influence had trickled into some of the city’s less reputable corners, allowing a sickly, red-haired priest, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (1678-1741), to be hired as violin master at a local girl’s orphanage, the Pio Ospedale della Pietà. Good timing: The Pietà became a forerunner of the modern music conservatory, and Vivaldi wrote for its pupils the majority of work from his staggering creative output—50+ operas, 500+ concertos (including the ever-popular Four Seasons), some 40 secular cantatas, several dozen sacred works, and sonatas enough to be lost and constantly rediscovered.

Despite his growing international reputation, Vivaldi’s job was never fully secure. Church fathers running the orphanage debated every year on whether to keep the virtuoso on board. Rarely unanimous, they voted him out of office in 1709. But being a genius has its rewards. Vivaldi was returned to his post in 1711 without a dissenting vote, and by 1716 he was appointed the institution’s music director. He continued to supply the school with compositions until 1729, by which time he commanded one of music’s most emulated voices.

Hopefully the State of North Carolina’s $8 million challenge to the North Carolina Symphony is one of the worst kept secrets in town. As we originally reported in this space on August 7, the State of North Carolina’s General Assembly as a part of last summer’s budget package allocated an additional $1.5 million of funding for the benefit of the Symphony, provided the Symphony generate $8 million in funds from the community-at-large. Since then, we’ve been working hard to communicate this challenge to our audience and donor base, in hopes of motivating everyone who believes in our orchestra, its music, and our statewide music education mission to make an investment in the organization. (Call to action: you can make a convenient online donation with just a few clicks, just mouse over to “Donate Now” just under the monthly calendar on the homepage, or click here.)

Along the way there have been some wonderful outpourings of support, including some that garnered a significant amount of media attention. Rather than face a postponement of the Poulenc Concerto for Two Pianos, Pascal Rogé together with his wife and concert pianist in her own right Ami offered to play for no performance fee. Walking out on to stage hand in hand, they enjoyed a heartwarming reception from our audience before they had even played a note! Violinist superstar Joshua Bell offered to arrive one night early in order to play a special mini-recital in the home of a donor who made a special $10,000 gift to the Symphony for the privilege. And donors of all sizes have made gifts to sustain their orchestra through challenging times.

Through all of it, the orchestra has continued its music education programs unabated and has performed some astonishing concerts along the way. We were delighted to see our new associate conductor Sarah Hicks make her classical season debut with a program that included Dvorak’s 8th Symphony and Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer with the outstanding baritone Randall Scarlata, and just a few weeks later resident conductor William Henry Curry led a program that brought the audience to its feet for Yuja Wang’s rendition of the Rachmaninoff 3rd Piano Concerto. This past weekend’s Brahms’s 4th Symphony was excellent, too. The orchestra continues to perform at an exceptional level, which is relevant to this challenge grant business because every single ticket purchase counts toward our goal as well. So whether it’s a charitable gift, or perhaps buying a couple of extra tickets so you can invite your neighbors to attend a concert with you, every dollar of community support counts toward this unprecedented State challenge.

As of this writing, the Symphony stands at $5.14 million toward its $8 million goal. And that number will surely increase as individual and corporate donors renew their annual support of the Symphony through the spring. Getting to the full $8 million will take the collective energy and commitment of supporters statewide, and I hope that if you have not yet made a commitment to the Symphony this season you’ll take an opportunity to do so! Thanks to the several thousand North Carolinians who have already voted with their feet and attended a performance this season. If you’re still just thinking about it, join us, you’ll be glad you did.

I continue to be impressed by the unique ways in which communities have chosen to show their support of this great orchestra. One of these special communities is a group of artists at the Hillsborough Gallery of Art in beautiful, downtown Hillsborough. I am very excited about our upcoming fundraiser partnership, and so I asked Mirinda Kossoff (gallery artist and wife of the Symphony’s assistant principal bassoonist) to share with us why the Symphony, why now.

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Thursday, February 25th from 6-9 p.m., there’s a party in Hillsborough. It’s a party with a purpose, but a party nevertheless, with a spread of fine food and wine, live classical music, and art to feast your eyes upon. Just come to the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, on Hillsborough’s Churton Street, to meet, eat, mingle and enjoy the art of established local artists who own and operate the gallery. You’ll find works in many different media: oil and acrylic painting, watercolor, collage, encaustic, photography, metal sculpture, terra cotta pottery, fiber arts, copper sculpture, enamels, jewelry and blown glass. The price for all this is only $10, which goes to the Symphony, and the gallery also will donate 10% of its proceeds that night to the Symphony.

How did our art gallery get connected to the North Carolina Symphony? Last fall, we artist-owners began talking about hosting a fundraiser at the gallery as a way of doing good while introducing ourselves to new people. It seemed like a worthwhile but challenging endeavor, and we wanted to think carefully about which organization to support.

At more than one of our monthly business meetings, we kicked around ideas. Various members put forth their favorite nonprofits, but when someone mentioned the Symphony, it was an “aha” moment – at least for me. Others were soon convinced that it was a great fit – artists supporting artists. And we had a personal connection. I’m married to that short, dark and handsome Italian bassoon player, Vic Benedict. I ran the idea by Vic, and he warmed to it right away. At our next business meeting, we put it to a vote and the group of 18 was on board. (Now, we have 20 members). After we made the commitment to host a benefit for the Symphony and met with the Symphony to work out details, the gallery made another commitment - to expand our footprint and get much-needed store-front space. In November of 2009, we officially opened our expanded and renovated space: airy, light-filled and with more exhibit area for both two- and three-dimensional art. The theme for our party is “Music to My Eyes,” which seemed to us like the perfect blend of the visual and performing arts. Those who come to our benefit night will get a preview of our monthly featured artist show, which always happens on the last Friday of each month. We are excited to be partnering with the North Carolina Symphony in this way and hope that you will come and enjoy the evening created for the benefit of great art on February 25!

Mirinda Kossoff
Gallery member, jeweler and collage artist
Wife of North Carolina Symphony musician, Vic Benedict

At the end of this season, our Principal Clarinet Jimmy Gilmore will retire from the orchestra; after 41 seasons, thousands of concerts and countless miles on North Carolina’s highways and byways. The process of finding a Principal Clarinet for next season and beyond takes place this weekend.

We have advertised the position for many months and have received hundreds of inquiries concerning the position. We provide information about the position to every player who contacts us. They also receive a list of clarinet orchestral excerpts (short sections from an orchestral work that features the clarinet at that moment) as well as printed copies of all this music. This audition list is what each player will have to prepare for the live auditions taking place this weekend.

122 players have reserved an audition time and will be in Raleigh for their audition this weekend. The first round of auditions, the preliminary round, will take place in Meymandi Concert Hall on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Every player will play the same set of excerpts (selected by the audition committee), and will have 5 minutes to convince the audition committee that they should be considered for the position and should advance to the second round of semi-final auditions.

In order to ensure that the audition committee considers only the playing of the auditionee, the player stands alone on the stage of Meymandi, with the audition committee (nine players from the orchestra) seated behind a large screen in the middle of the hall. We put a line of carpet from the stage door to the playing position on stage, in the area of the conductor’s podium, so that the committee cannot infer from footsteps anything about the candidate. The players are instructed not to speak to the committee. We make every effort to ensure the complete anonymity of the player so that the committee is judging only on the playing ability of each musician. As the player arrives on stage, I announce the audition number of the candidate to the committee; the players are identified only by this number through the final round of auditions.

Evaluating such a large number of players requires great concentration and stamina on the part of the audition committee. We also have concerts Friday and Saturday evenings, so we are especially grateful for the efforts of our musicians this weekend.

After listening to a group of 7 or 8 players, the committee takes a secret ballot vote to determine if any player advances to the semi-final round. We do not have a pre-determined number of semi-final players, but we will likely have only a dozen or so players who advance to the second round. Every hour or so it is my job, as Personnel Manager, to meet with the group of players who just completed their audition. In most cases, I thank them for coming to the audition and then send them to their cars or taxi to the airport to go home. The few players who advance are scheduled for a semi-final audition time on Monday morning. They head back to the hotel for more individual practice time.

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One of the interesting things about my job is that I get a lot of music in the mail – artist managers proposing soloists for consideration, composers hoping to get their music included in one of our programs, and publishers hawking works from their rental libraries. Recently I received a collection of excerpted works by Latin American composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos, José Pablo Moncayo and Pedro Halffter that a publisher sent out. I haven’t listened to the entire CD yet, but seeing it reminded me of a work which we considered for our “Fiesta Latina” Pops and Young People’s Concerts back in January.

Silvestre Revueltas is one of the great overlooked composers of the 20th century. Born in Mexico in 1899, the year after Gershwin and the year before Aaron Copland, and like Gershwin his life was all too brief; he died in 1940. To my knowledge, the North Carolina Symphony has played just one of his works, Sensemayá, back in 2002. We considered programming a work of his for chamber orchestra entitled Homenaje a Federico Garcia Lorca, but ultimately chose other music instead. I’d love to play it some other time – it has incredibly vibrant colors given its small instrumentation, and rhythmically it is both complex and yet constantly propulsive. Not to take anything away from Revueltas’s originality, but to me it sounds a bit like Stravinsky or Prokofiev paid a visit to that famous cantina in Mexico City and captured their impressions, as Copland did in El Salon Mexico. The recording I have is by Esa-Pekka Salonen and a group of players from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Check out the wicked tuba part in the first movement!

Switching gears completely, I’ve also been listening lately to Pink Martini’s fourth album Splendor in the Grass. (Renewing Pops series subscribers will know by now that we’ve invited the Portland, Oregon-based ensemble back for a return trip to Raleigh in March 2011.) In our marketing materials we bill the group as equal parts Parisian café orchestra, Brazilian samba band, and classical chamber music ensemble. The new disc also features their polyglot trademark style, incorporating all sorts of influences from virtually the whole musical world over. The title track includes the famous sweeping melody from Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and the effervescent song “Tuca Tuca” includes a bluesy solo played on sitar – try that one at home, why don’t ya? The only track I’m disappointed in is “New Amsterdam”; its lyrics fall flat for me.

Many of our concertgoers were blown away by 21-year-old pianist Yuja Wang earlier this month. Her fiery approach to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 was matched by her phenomenal technical gifts. On Saturday, February 6, she played three encores after the Rachmaninoff, each more impressive than the last. Listing them in reverse order, she closed with a whirlwind of an adaptation of Mozart’s “Turkish Rondo” movement from the Sonata in A Major, K.331, created by the Russian pianist Arcadi Volodos. Before that she did the single fastest rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee from the Tsar Sultan Suite that I’ve ever heard on any instrument; it was more like Flight of the Microbee. And before that she led off the encores with a wonderful sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, in G Major, No. 455 in the Kirkpatrick listings. We don’t hear much Scarlatti in the concert hall, sadly, mostly because he wrote almost exclusively for solo keyboard (over 550 sonatas alone) and opera, with a smattering of sacred music for chorus and orchestra. Scarlatti was born in Naples in 1685, the same year as Bach and Handel – a pretty good year for composers, apparently. I have a Naxos CD of 19 of the keyboard sonatas played by the American pianist Michael Lewin, and got it out after Yuja’s performance. Lewin, incidentally, is a good friend of our Resident Conductor William Henry Curry, and performed music by Gottschalk and Gershwin at Bill’s inaugural concert as music director of the Durham Symphony. Ironically, I first met Michael more than 20 years ago when he did a semester-long artist residency at tiny Whitman College in rural southeastern Washington state, where I got my undergraduate degree. He even accompanied me in a recital performance of Fauré’s Elegy…small world.

Finally, many of our concertgoers probably heard their first live performance of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony at the same concert that Yuja Wang took by storm. I was particularly glad to hear it, because now I’ve completed a personal Sibelius cycle of sorts – I’ve heard all seven symphonies live. If you’re hoping to hear it again, and can’t wait until this summer when our WUNC-FM radio broadcast of the concert is likely to be, I’d recommend the version by the Lahti Symphony conducted by Osmo Vänskä, which was recorded by our good friends at BIS Records. Vänskä turned a regionally respected orchestra in Finland into a major recording player in the industry before taking the artistic reins at the Minnesota Orchestra, where he also works with our Associate Conductor Sarah Hicks who is their Principal Conductor of Pops and Presentations. Vänskä’s Sibelius is pristine, taut and utterly convincing.