This Week in Classical Music-November 30, 2008

by: Randy Kinkel

November 30, 2008

Richard Hickox

( Phoenix, AZ )
•Hickox dead at 60
•Rozhdestvensky quits BSO over billing
•Classical Improv on the rise

This Week in Classical Music, 11/30/08

It’s This Week in Classical Music, an update on what’s happening in the classical music world, I’m Randy Kinkel.

British conductor Richard Hickox has died of a suspected heart attack. He was 60. Hickox regularly directed many British orchestras and was music director of Opera Australia. He conducted more than 300 recordings and received his fifth Gramophone award in 2006; he won a Grammy award for his recording of Peter Grimes. He had been working on a recording with the National Orchestra of Wales when he was suddenly taken ill on Sunday.”Hickox’s agent, Stephen Lumsden, put it this way: “The shock of Richard Hickox’s death will resonate right around the globe and has robbed the world of one of its most popular and respected musicians…
In a not-so-generous mood was conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who recently pulled out of a four-concert gig with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a disagreement over the advertising and marketing of the series; the 77 year-old maestro apparently was miffed that a promotional poster outside the venue gave Cellist Lynn Harrell top billing and a brochure which again, gave him second billing to the Cellist. I felt insulted by the actions of the administration," he explained, "I feel not only slighted but I suffered what is called in Russian a moral insult, and I'm free to take any actions to defend myself in public." BSO managing director Mark Volpe responded yesterday in a statement: "All of us at the Boston Symphony Orchestra greatly admire Gennady Rozhdestvensky's artistry. We genuinely regret that Maestro Rozhdestvensky decided to cancel his concerts this week."
Long thought to be the purview of Jazz and other forms of music, Improvisation is making inroads in the classical music world. Artists like Robert Levin, Gabriela Montero (who was heard last year at ASU), Cellist Matt Haimovitz, and violinist/Composer Mark O’Connor have been incorporating improvisation into their performances. It’s nothing new, actually—in the 18th and 19th Centuries, composer like Beethoven, Liszt, and Bach dazzled audiences with pieces made up on the spot; it was just in the latter part of the 19th century that the practice fell out of favor. Mark O'Connor, who improvised a two-minute solo passage while performing one of his own compositions at Carnegie Hall last month, says performers have to relearn how to be creative, in part because their training places so much emphasis on the flawless execution of another person's creation. He said, “At some point in our education system, the creative composers were separated from the virtuosic performers. Some of that is starting to be broken down now,” O’Connor, learned to improvise by studying jazz and folk music and now coaches young musicians in improvisation at UCLA, Harvard and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Others aren’t buying into the trend; Pianist Charles Rosen, for example, says, “"The idea that when you improvise a cadenza you are doing what they did in the 18th century is a delusion…There's no reason to think that if you improvise one, it's going to be better than the one Mozart wrote."
For more information on these an other items and events, go to the website, kbaq.org, be listening each week at this time for another update, and join me every weekday at noon for the Mozart Buffet, an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries… for this week in classical music, I’m Randy Kinkel, on 89.5 KBAQ, Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.

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