This Week in Classical Music-August 16, 2009

by: Randy Kinkel

August 16, 2009

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa

This Week in Classical Music-August 16, 2009

( Phoenix, AZ )
•Te Kanawa retires from Opera
•New Composer retreat in NY

This Week in Classical Music 8/16/09

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

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa says she is quitting the opera stage, saying she finds the discipline to be too tiring for her. The 65-year-old New Zealander’s last opera performance will be in April at the Cologne Opera in Germany in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. She said, “It will be my last. It’s not as if I want to do it on a regular basis now, because it’s exhausting. “I think certainly our voices change; opera is mainly for young people.” She has not sung opera since 2004 when she played in Samuel Barber’s 1958 work Vanessa at the Los Angeles Opera. At the time most thought it would be her operatic swansong, but this week she insisted she had never retired. “The press retired me,” she said. “I have not been singing opera very much but I still sing a lot of concerts.” The Diva said she would not give up singing and would maintain her touring concert schedule. Over the coming months she will perform in Sydney, Beijing, Spain and America at the Met.

A rural New York State farm that once was occupied by Cows, chickens and horses will soon be home to another breed of animal—Composers. The farm buildings, along with the mansion, its carriage house and the rest of the 130-acre estate, were the property of the Sloane family for nearly a century until they were bequeathed to Westchester County in 2001. In September, the site will come under control of Copland House; a music center housed 25 minutes away in the home of the late Aaron Copland. Plans are to turn Merestead into a unique artists' colony dedicated to nurturing new American music. The 28-room Georgian mansion at Merestead will provide the living quarters, while the farm buildings are given over to artists’ studios. Under a multimillion-dollar public-private partnership, Copland House will offer composers' residencies, workshops, and public concert series. The mansion will provide the living quarters, while the farm buildings are given over to artists' studios. Another performance venue will be the all-wooden cow barn with its cathedral ceiling and, according to Copland House's executive director, Michael Boriskin, "extraordinary natural acoustics." Boriskin also said, “I've been wanting to break out of the four walls of the concert hall for some time because I have felt that the concert experience has gotten weighted down by a culture of encrusted traditions,".

For more on these and other items and events, go to the website, kbaq.org: be listening each week at this time for another update; and join me each weekday at noon for “The Mozart Buffet” an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries; I’m Randy Kinkel for “This Week in Classical Music” on 89.5 KBAQ Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.

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