In conjunction with the upcoming performance of Wagner’s ‘Ring,” the Seattle Opera is releasing a series of videos depicting aspects of the production — rehearsals, props, costumes, etc. Here is the first video in the series.
Month: August 2009
Adam Neiman talks about his time at the SCMS Festival, romantic composers, and Toby Saks’s legacy
Adam Neiman is one of the musicians with the longest history at the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s summer festival. Neiman came to the festival in 1997 as a 19 year old just beginning his career as a pianist. He sat down with me moments before the final Lakeside School began to talk about his time at the festival, the need to preserve and play the music of lost romantic composers, and shared his insights on what makes a composer inspired. Neiman also shared his memories of working with Toby Saks — the festival’s co-artistic director — and the move to Benaroya Hall next year.
There is an amusing out take from this interview I plan on sharing on The Gathering Note. As Adam and I were talking, Ran Dank, a new pianist with the festival, walked through the rear door, introduced himself, and seemed perplexed about how to describe Bach’s French Suite — a piece he learned when he was 7. Dank played the piece as part of the free Friday recital.
Farewell, Lakeside
On Friday evening Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer festival held its final performance in the serene surroundings of Lakeside School. No more leisurely picnics beside the playing field, no intermissions under the evening sky in the little courtyard outside St. Nicholas Hall.
But hold on. This coming week and the one after you can still have all that ambience if you drive to The Overlake School in Redmond, which has an equally lovely campus including a picnic area and a small jewel of a concert hall, to hear another five recital/concert performances.
SCMS has known for sometime that it would have to leave Lakeside, and has been looking everywhere for a similar venue. There hasn’t been one, or not one which was available at the right times in the right place and which had a concert hall a tad bigger than the one at Lakeside (SCMS has been bursting out of that for several years).
The role of the critic: part II
My thoughts on the role of critics and arts journalism have struck a chord with AC Douglas the proprietor of the blog Sounds & Fury. Douglas takes issues with my belief that critics should do more than tap out a few hundred words in a concert review and that the way forward for maintaining a critical dialogue about art and specifically classical music is to engage the audience. Douglas makes a number of startling pronouncements.
Douglas says:
“For arts organizations to look to and take in earnest the opinions of the arts world equivalent of pop culture’s Joe Sixpack to assess how well they’re doing artistically is a perfect prescription for artistic suicide. Joe Sixpack may be entitled to an opinion, but it’s entirely worthless to anyone but himself and his kind. To say the thing less generously, Joe Sixpack is not entitled to an opinion beyond expressing that he liked or disliked whatever it is he heard and/or saw, and, given the source, we all know just how worthless that sort of judgment is except to the one declaring it.”
Gathering Note 