This Week in Classical Music-May 16, 2010

by: Randy Kinkel

May 16, 2010

John Williams is the Reigning Pops King!

( Phoenix, AZ )
•Williams Celebrates Big Anniversary
•Schermerhorn Symphony Center Severely Damaged by Flooding

This Week in Classical Music 5/16/10

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

Composer John Williams is celebrating his 30th anniversary with the Boston Pops orchestra this year. It’s also his 14th year of serving as music director for the venerable orchestra, which is itself celebrating its 125th birthday this year; about leading America’s best-known orchestra, the Multiple Grammy-and-Oscar-winning Williams noted, “The important thing to me in the end wasn’t the music or the composer or the audience or the orchestra. The important thing was the connecting link… whatever spiritual thing happens when people are moved by music that someone has written and someone is playing. The audience completes that triad, and that communication, that elusive interaction, is what we live for, and that feeling has grown through the years.’’ And though proud of it’s past, Williams always has an eye to the future, and what the Pops and other orchestras may become in the 21st century; in an interview with the Boston Globe recently, he said, ““Maybe we’ll have to move out of the horseshoe-shaped box of Symphony Hall and into an area where we can have atmospherics and lights…,’’ he says. “Look what’s happened with 3-D films and ‘Avatar’ …. You can have some very ordinary ideas presented in such an enhanced and brilliant way, it’s almost like a new medium.’’

Parts of Nashville, Tennessee are still underwater, and the Country music capital’s icon the Grand Ol’ Opry isn’t the only musical casualty of the flood waters-- One of the city's recently acquired glories — the $2.5 million Schoenstein pipe organ installed in the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in 2007 — has been damaged—sources say the pipe organ's operating mechanism and console, Both of which were housed in the Schermerhorn's basement level, is currently under anywhere from 12 to 14 feet of flood water. Schermerhorn Senior director of communications Alan Bostick said "Everything that drives the pipes and manipulates the sound was submerged…The full extent of damage to the organ, won't be known until the waters recede. Bostick says no one will be able to tell whether the damaged components can be repaired or replaced until they can be inspected. But every piece of the organ was meticulously tailored to the Schermerhorn's dimensions — making the damage of any one piece a potential disaster. Bostick said the building will be unusable for at least a month.

For more on these and other items and events, go to the website, kbaq.org; find us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. 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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