Musical America Worldwide Announces November Updates

Musical America Worldwide announced updates for November.

Musical America's 2012 Musicians of the Year are David Finckel and Wu Han.

In an unprecedented move, Musical America has selected not one but two Musicians of the Year for 2012: David Finckel and Wu Han. He is a cellist, she a pianist, and together they are the artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, among other organizations. Finckel and Han have managed to breathe new life into an artform all too often overlooked.

Musical America has named MacArthur "Genius" grant winner Meredith Composer of the Year. Of course she is much more than that -- singer, keyboardist, dancer, choreographer, director, film maker, and a performance artist -- long before the term was even invented.

When Jaap van Zweden first conducted the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in 2006 as a guest, Dallas Morning News critic Scott Cantrell wrote, "Sell the farm, mortgage the children, cancel the cruise. Do what you have to do to get to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's concerts this weekend." Now in the job for four years, Van Zweden has managed to turn the DSO into a world-class orchestra.

Violinist Gil Shaham is Musical America's Instrumentalist of the Year. Shaham is a brilliant and passionate player, bringing a special kind of humanism to his interpretations.

Finally, Jonas Kaufmann is Vocalist of the Year and the "it" tenor of the moment, having just wowed the crowd with a solo recital at the Metropolitan Opera, where he will soon sing the title role in Gounod's Faust.

New Artist of the Month is Ward Stare. 

Ward Stare exudes charm as he bounds on stage and bows to the audience from the podium. He's a good-looking guy, not tall, but with an athletic build, a full head of black hair and blue eyes. And once he picks up the baton, he's all about the music.

Music, he says, chose him. At the age of five, entranced with Beethoven's sonic world, he started piano lessons. At nine he began trombone lessons; a year later, he was hired to play trombone in a uniformed firefighters' marching band. At 16, he finished high school and entered Juilliard; two years later, he won the principal trombone's chair in the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra. Three years ago, he became resident conductor with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Now, at 29, Stare is an up-and-coming conductor with a burgeoning international career.

"I have some engagements already in 2015," he says, "believe it or not."

Believe it.

Bayreuth Festival Finds Its Ring Director.

The Bayreuth Festival has confirmed Frank Castorf as the director of the new Ring cycle to bow during Wagner's bicentenary in 2013. Co-intendant Katharina Wagner has been in talks with the Berlin Volksbühne Intendant and provocateur since plans to work with Wim Wenders fell through. The Wagner sisters had also reportedly approached Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke.

The "enfant terrible" of the German theater scene, Castorf is known for his wild antics and anarchic interpretations, which have included throwing paint at the audience and having actors scream through an entire production. A 2006 Meistersinger he staged at the Berlin Volksbühne featured a vomiting Trojan horse and had Walther von Stolzing carrying a machine gun. Wagner's big arias and choruses are guaranteed some of these effects. 

English National Opera's admirable quest for breaking new ground has its latest manifestation in the company's first Rameau opera. Castor and Pollux is in its second week at the London Coliseum, staged by Australian opera and theater director Barrie Kosky.

Kosky's approach to Castor and Pollux is outlined in the program book; rare productions of the work, he says, have often been "cold, unemotional experiences." He has sought to breathe passion and emotion into the work, he says.

For this listener, a least, he has failed. The production is the result of the typical (imagined) scenario, in which a director is invited to take on a work, listens to the CD and shouts "God, this is boring! What can I do to make it fun?"

Michal Schmidt, founder and president of Schmidt Artists International, Inc., died in a New York hospital on Oct. 22. She was 54. The cause was complications from breast cancer and rheumatoid arthritis, which prevented a full recovery from a fall she took a year ago, according to her friend and business partner Patricia Handy.

Ms. Schmidt started in the business in 1986 working for the late Thea Dispeker. Moving quickly up the ladder, she was soon overseeing the 30-member Instrumentalists and Conductors division, which she subsequently spun off to form Schmidt Artists International, Inc., in 1993.

Julie Taymor might have been fired from the Spider-Man musical on Broadway, but she could still earn a Tony Award next year for directing the show. The Tony Awards Administration Committee said Thursday that she will be considered eligible in the best direction of a musical category for Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.

Taymor is the original book co-writer and director. She was let go in March after delays, accidents, poor audience reaction and money woes turned the musical into a punch line. Philip William McKinley, who directed the Hugh Jackman musical The Boy from Oz, in 2003, was hired to replace her.

Edna wants YOUR questions! Write to askedna@musicalamerica.com. From "Ask Edna" by Edna Landau:

Dear Edna:

My career is evenly divided between an active performing career and commissions for original compositions. My guiding rule over the years has been to never turn down work, regardless of budget and timeframe, unless it was absolutely impossible to fit it in. This year, however, it became clear that I am more of a perfectionist than I used to be and projects take somewhat more time to come into shape. I need to find a way to space out my workload a little more evenly, which may mean turning down or postponing more projects. And so I wonder - is there a polite way to turn down or postpone work (concerts, commissions, smaller projects) when you're clearly over-committed during a period, but to do it in such a way so as not to jeopardize the relationship for the future? Are there good battle strategies for this? Thank you so much! --Caffeine Doolittle

From "Why I Left Muncie" by Sedgwick Clark:

Leonard Bernstein is one of the few artists whose recordings have continued to sell after his death, and last fall Sony Classical reissued a "limited edition" set of the conductor's 1950s-70s symphony recordings, most with the New York Philharmonic. But it sold out before I could rehear the CDs, and this write-up has been sitting in my computer awaiting a second run, which is now at hand again to beguile the Christmas gift crowd.

Many of these recordings are my favorites of the works, and those happy with a classy coffee-table presentation need look no further. It's a beautiful looking design, to be sure, but an utterly impractical fit in a CD collection. The box is LP size and two and a half inches thick. One must lay the box flat and remove the top to get to the CDs. A plastic divider holds four stacks of the 60 CDs, each encased in a cardboard sleeve. Without long fingernails, one must often resort to an implement to pry the bottom-most CD from the holder. For three months while I spot-checked the discs, the box shuttled from room to room in fruitless search for a home. I was tempted to discard the box and file the discs on my conventional CD shelf, but the spine copy is infinitesimal, with titles of the works too dark to be read without klieg lights and a magnifying glass. The 32-page b&w booklet with two adoring tri-lingual tributes to Bernstein and a mixture of familiar and rare photos has no notes on the symphonies; no texts and translations for choral works. Nor is recording info as specific as in earlier CD releases.

Latest Roster Changes:

Musical America is helping presenters keep up with its advertisers! Managers whose rosters appear in the 2011 edition of the Musical America Directory should write to listings@musicalamerica.com with the names of artists and attractions that have been either added or removed, and please be sure to indicate "added" or "removed."

For mor information visit http://www.musicalamerica.com/.