Orchestra life

Facebook brought me the news this morning that George Cleve died yesterday. I knew he’d had health issues for a long time, but this hit me like a brick anyway. I first worked for George in 1974 upon my return from studying at a rather strange school in Switzerland known as the Institute for Advanced […]

The New Yorker continues to be the best magazine in the English-speaking work for coverage of arts issues (as opposed to arts news), as demonstrated by an article-length review of Sara Solovitch’s book Playing Scared: A History and Memoir of Stage Fright: Stagefright has been aptly described as “self-poisoning by adrenaline.” In response to stress, […]

The Hartford Symphony has been in the news recently, and not in the way that orchestras want to be: Behind the two-year dispute between the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and the musicians union over a new labor agreement is the symphony’s effort to remake itself to appeal to changing audiences and tastes. The orchestra says it’s […]

My orchestra had auditions for assistant conductor today. We saw six candidates for about 30 minutes each. It was an interesting experience, although not very enjoyable. A few I liked; a few I didn’t. But what struck me most was what always strikes me when dealing with young conductors; their failure to follow my two […]

As I write this introduction to my Editor’s Choice for this month, at top of mind for me is the former Director of the Eastman School of Music, Robert Freeman. In 1972 he was named director of Eastman, a position he held for 24 years. He returned to Eastman this week to be formally honored […]

One of the oddities of an orchestral career is the lack of control that we have over what we play. A consequencesof that odd fact is that, towards the end of a career, it’s possible to state with some certainty that one will have played a work for the last time. I’ve been musing on […]

One of the things that mystified me about the Dallas situation was the involvement of the NLRB; generally disputes between the union and management over contract administration are handled through the grievance arbitration process. Not this one, apparently: The union intervened after a January incident in which DSO management suspended without pay an associate principal […]

Those handful of us in the orchestra blogging community can always count on some conductor, somewhere, doing or saying something really dumb to rescue us from having nothing to write about. Our latest benefactor is Jaap van Zweden, music director of the Dallas Symphony: Conductor Jaap van Zweden has won international praise for elevating the […]

Long-time readers of this blog might remember an article I wrote in 2009 on the subject of discrimination in orchestras. I thought at the time that my survey of the rosters of ICSCOM orchestras demonstrated a marked differential between the number of men and women, especially in principal positions. Someone else has done much the […]

Most readers of this blog will remember the furor over Mozart in the Jungle, oboist and journalist Blair Tindall’s memoir of her days as a New York freelancer. I quite enjoyed it, but some didn’t (especially those who believed that they were featured in the story in an uncomplimentary way) I went onto the Amazon […]