It's smiles aplenty with opera plots akimbo as Twitter contest enters its final day

I decided to check in with The Omniscient Mussel's #Operaplot 2010 contest (summarize opera in Twitterese -- 140 words or less -- get judged by operatic posterMensch Jonas Kaufman, win a prize).

This year's contest closes at midnight, and it's already groaning with a bumper crop of succulent puns, quips and winks. If you have too much time between coffee breaks, there's a long list of "orphan" opera plots, where you can try to guess the title of the opera (or wonder which substance the contestant was abusing that day).

My biggest smile came from seeing how a plot can get Twitterized so many different ways.

Here's the entry for Leos Janacek's Katya Kabanova, followed by a beautifully Twitter-like promotional video English National Opera released for its March production:

Katya Kabanova
Madison Opera – My mother-in-law is cruel / my husband’s a tool. But Boris is dreamy / maybe he’ll save me. Or not. Boom, crash, splash.

2010 edition of Twitter-an-opera-plot contest is underway with celebrity judge, tenor Jonas Kaufman

Marcia Adair, a.k.a. The Omniscient Mussel in the blogosphere, has launched the latest edition of her #Operaplot 2010 contest. She has rounded up some operatastic prizes -- as well as hunky German tenor Jonas Kaufman as judge.

Let the fun and games begin.

Lesson learned from one year of daily blogging music and musicians are an inexhaustible source of insight and inspiration

Yesterday marked the first anniversary of my first post here. I set myself a goal of posting at least once every day, which became part of a new early-morning routine. I worried that the well of inspiration might run dry, but, even with time out for summer vacation, I managed more than 400 posts.

I realised that the well would never run dry. There's to much music and too many fascinating people creating and interpreting it to every worry about that.

In fact, there is far more going on than any individual can possibly serve. The classical music and opera scene in Toronto is larger and more diverse than ever, reaching a huge combined audience.

Walking home from the Star after writing my review for last night's Mariinsky Orchestra concert, I started a mental tally (I haven't checked these numbers with the presenters, by the way):

-Toronto Symphony: More than 100 regular concerts drawing an audience in excess of 200,000 people, plus its ambitious school concert programmmes.

-Canadian Opera Company: Seven seasonal productions that bring in an audience of about 140,000, plus school programmes, plus the free twice-weekly free concert series that draws a standing-room-only crowd to the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.

-Tafelmusik: 48 regular concerts good for at least 50,000 tickets, plus its school concerts. Then there is the orchestra's ambitious annual touring schedule, making them prime Toronto ambassadors.

-Koerner Hall, which will complete its first music season later this spring, the Corporation of Massey hall and Roy Thomson Hall, which also now runs the concert series at the Glenn Gould Studio, and Music Toronto at the Jane Mallett Theatre all have prestigious seasons.

-Then there are Opera Atelier, the University of Toronto's chamber music, faculty and student concerts, York University, the Women's Musical Club of Toronto, Esprit Orchestra, Soundstreams, the Music Gallery, I Furiosi, the Toronto Mednelssohn Choir, the Hannaford Street Silver Band, Sinfonia Toronto, Toronto Philharmonia, the Aldeburgh Connection, Mooredale Concerts, Off Centre Music Salon, and this is only the top of the list.

I'm positive that all of the professional activity alone must represent about $100 million in ticket sales and donations independent of government grants every year. 

The better the music, the better the quality of international talents that are drawn to Toronto, the more international students come to study here, and the more local kids are inspired to develop a love of music.

I keep reading about shrinking audiences for classical music and opera but, in Toronto, right now, the audience is growing. It's something to celebrate and build even further.

At the same time, the merciless economics of the traditional media world mean that, in a metropolitan area of more than 5 million people which has three English-language daily broadsheets, one paid daily tabloid and a couple of free daily commuter papers, there is one full-time, staff critic whose primary beat is classical music and opera.

The Globe and Mail officially has a music critic on staff, Robert Everett-Green, but his writing appears in the paper only once in a while. There are freelancers who occasionally fill in, too. The National Post gave up on classical music coverage a while ago. The Sun's John Colbourn covers opera as the paper's theatre critic, but they don't have a critic for classical music.

Anyone looking at the Globe and Mail, National Post and Toronto Sun over the course of any given month would conclude that classical music is not a significant enough part of Toronto culture to deserve regular mention.

Imagine what my superiors must conclude when they survey this media landscape and try to find obvious ways of cutting costs at the Star -- something that has become an imperative, not just an option.

Meanwhile, thousands of Toronto musicians practice, teach, perform and travel every day. Every day, at the very least several hundred, but more likely several thousand people go to an opera or a concert in this amazing city.

New opera houses and concert halls -- for which individuals have donated tens of millions of dollars -- do not open in cities where classical music is a dying or less-than-fully-relevant art form.

So why do most of our city's newspaper's treat it the way they do?

Composer Michael Colgrass's adventures offer rare and valuable display of practical wisdom

Theorists are common, but people with practical wisdom are rare and valuable.

Composer Michael Colgrass is one of those special people. 

His memoir, Michael Colgrass: Adventures of an American Composer, published today by Meredith Music (click on the book image to go to the company's website, then click on "what's new"), is filled with life lessons big and small. 

You can get a quick overview of my thoughts on the book in today's Star.

I wanted to highlight one particular lesson here. It appeals to me as a keyboard player and as a critic -- especially given last Friday's Angela Hewitt recital, where she played Bach and Brahms. This lesson also beautifully illustrates the elegant incisiveness of Colgrass's mind.

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Here is the chapter, "Casting a Spell on Bach," from Colgrass's book:

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When the University of Louisville asked me to give a talk on Tradition and Memory, I asked for a pianist who felt at home in different styles -- baroque, classical, Romantic and modern. They gave me a graduate student named Jeff Myers.

At the talk, I asked Jeff to sit in a chair facing the audience and play a Bach prelude on an imaginary piano. I wanted him to do everything he normally did when performing Bach except produce sound. His back straightened, his breathing evened out and he began to play on the imaginary keyboard. His hads moved so evenly that they could have balanced stacks of quarters.

When he finished, his body relaxed and his breath deepened. It was as if he had temporarily become someone else. I called this state his "Bach trance."

Next was imaginary Brahms. The audience watched him lean forward with a rounded back, breathe deeply and press his hands on the invisible keys. Those hypothetical coins would have fallen off this time. I called this his "Brahms trance."

When I asked what was going on inside him in each state, he said, "In the Bach state I was counting, but not consciously. in the Brahms I was feeling more and my body felt heavier."

Next I suggested he become Ravel. Again his breathing changed, and his fingers seemed to float over the keys as his body swayed slightly.

Finally I asked him to play the music of one composer while in the state of another -- on the real piano. He laughed and said he'd try. He took time to prepare himself, looking at the keyboard and leaning forward with a rounded back. He played the Bach prelude, but I knew from his body that he was in the Brahms trance. Nothing could have prepared me for the shock this stylistic crossover produced. I was momentarily convinced that this Bach prelude was, in fact, written by Brahms.

The audience was just as surprised by the mix of music and style. We concluded that Bach and Brahms weren't so different after all -- and that it was the performer who held the ultimate power over a piece of music.

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For much more from Colgrass, check out his blog.

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Here's a snippet of Colgrass talking to high school students participating in workshops called BandQuest, organised by the American Composers Forum. He explains how he creates music starting with a particular performer, not a musical idea, in mind:

What would your set-in-Toronto opera be? Mine would include 'La Clemenza di TTC'

Further to my post about the made-for-TV operas in Switzerland.

I thought, if City-TV were to broadcast some made-for-Toronto operas, where would they be set? I came up with three ideas while doing my yoga stretches.

If you have any suggestions, send them to me (jterauds@thestar.ca) and I'll post them.

Here are my three cents, with total disregard for politeness or political correctness:

- Der Freischütz im Jane-Finch

- Siegfried aus Queen's Park, preferably at 5 p.m., so the traffic going north on Queen's Park Circle doesn't appear to be moving faster than the opera.

- La Clemenza di Tito at Davisville, where the fine men who run our city's transit system show such kind leniency toward their employees. We could change the title to La Clemenza di TTC.

Classical music today is 'a city that chants beneath the waves,' wrote New York critic

New York City music critic and commentator Alex Ross, my favourite current writer on the subject in English, announced on his New Yorker blog (Unquiet Thoughts) that he has sent off the manuscript of his next book, Listen to This, to Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He says it's due for publication in September.

Unlike The Rest is Noise, the new book sounds like a collection of different subjects, many culled from Ross's New Yorker essays on the appreciation of all kinds of music. Ross alludes to a piece he wrote six years ago. I gave it a read, and found an eloquent description of the state of serious music that works as a standalone meditation and inspiration:

The music is always dying, ever-ending. It is an ageless diva on a non-stop farewell tour, coming around for one absolutely final appearance. It is hard to name because it never really existed to begin with—not in the sense that it stemmed from a single time or place. It has no genealogy, no ethnicity: leading composers of today hail from China, Estonia, Argentina, Queens. The music is simply whatever composers create—a long string of written-down works to which various performing traditions have become attached. It encompasses the high, the low, empire, underground, dance, prayer, silence, noise. Composers are genius parasites; they feed voraciously on the song matter of their time in order to engender something new. They have gone through a rough stretch in the past hundred years, facing external obstacles (Hitler and Stalin were amateur music critics) as well as problems of their own invention (“Why doesn’t anyone like our beautiful twelve-tone music?”). But they may be on the verge of an improbable renaissance, and the music may take a form that no one today would recognize. For now, it is like the “sunken cathedral” that Debussy depicts in one of his Preludes—a city that chants beneath the waves.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/02/16/040216fa_fact4#ixzz0eQSh1UO0

In keeping with the spirit of Ross's words -- as well as the allusion -- here is the magic of Claude Debussy's Prélude No. 10, La Cathédrale engloutie, as rearranged for percussion by Keiichiro Haiyashi, followed by the original, as recorded by the legendary Alfred Cortot (1877-1962) in 1947:

Some orchestral pieces are heard over and over and over again, blogger discovers in check of Toronto Symphony programmes

Young horn player-about-town Jason Austin has sat down with Toronto Symphony Orchestra programmes dating back to 2000 to see which pieces are played most often.

He published the initial findings on his blog yesterday, and they make for interesting reading for anyone who has a sneaking suspicion that certain works are played a bit too much. Austin doesn't make any judgements, though. He merely lays out the titles, so we can draw our own conclusions.

For example, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto is lovely, but there are many others we could listen to, instead. But the pull of the familiar -- in every part of our lives -- usually overrides our spirit of adventure.

Before you turn to Horn Logic, Austin's blog, make a mental list of which symphonies and concertos you think you've heard too often. 

Robert Schumann's barely known violin concerto

I can understand soloists and music directors neglecting new music and pieces by forgotten composers, because the marketing people will have a hard time selling tickets. But I can't understand musicians not taking a chance on something by a respected name.

Robert Schumann's Violin Concerto is a case in point. Have you heard it? Have you ever heard of it?

This piece has a fascinating history that's better than any piece of fiction. In short, if what I've read is true, Schumann wrote the piece for Joseph Joachim, who put it away, thinking that the music was a product of the composer's late-life madness, leaving instructions that, if found, it not be played until 100 years after Schumann's death. At a séance in the 1930s, two grand-nieces of Joachim's were visited by Schumann's spirit, which told them about the concerto. This led to its eventual Berlin premiere in 1937 (I guess the spirit's instructions overrode Joachim's wish that people wait until 1956.)

Here is Romanian violinist Liviu Prunaru (currently concertmaster at the Royal Concergebouw Orchestra) performing Schumann's concerto at the Athenaeum in Bucharest in 2006. I love the second movement (video 2a) the best.

Viral video: This little Traviata takes operatic hijinx to market in the most delightful way

Thanks to Patti Loach for passing this along (she got it from soprano Mary Lou Fallis). Opera singers, disguised as market vendors, captivate/ambush shoppers at a market in Valencia. It's brilliant!

I'd love seeing something like this at St. Lawrence Market or the Eaton Centre. The possibilities are endless.

Toronto should be the world's laboratory for bridging cultural differences in selling tickets to classical concerts

Prolific and provocative American music blogger, thinker and educator Greg Sandow has reproduced a recent blog post by Ray Ricker, director of the Institute for Music Leadership at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, which muses on the implications of seeing a largely white audience inside the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, while the streets outside teem in cultural diversity.

Ricker, who has seen a similar pattern in American cities, worries that the European tradition of classical music may die off unless it can reach out to people from other cultures who make up the demographic in just about every major city nowadays.

It made me think about the classical music and opera audiences I see in Toronto. Yes, they are largely of European extraction -- much more so than the mix of people in the Greater Toronto Area. But I also see signs of a brighter future than the one Ricker imagines.

People are interested in classical music. They're just more selective in what they choose to buy tickets for.

A couple of seasons ago, when Roy Thomson Hall invited soprano Sumi Jo for a solo recital, the audience was overwhelmingly of Korean background. When Lang Lang comes to play, the lobby at the hall resounds with Cantonese and Mandarin exchanges.

Part of the reason for this -- and the explanations here are likely very complex socially, economically, geographically and culturally -- is that people probably love to see a reflection of themselves on stage. 

There are more diverse faces among the members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra than ever before. Anyone sitting in the atrium at the Royal Conservatory of Music will quickly notice an ethnic mix among the students that is almost as broad as the city itself. Same thing across Philosophers Walk at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music.

I'm thinking that, as these young musicians graduate into professional careers, that audience diversity will grow with them -- assuming that the music presenters are doing their homework as well. It doesn't matter who your audience is, or what sort of art you're offering, you cannot take it for granted that people will buy tickets simply because you say you're presenting masterworks. People need to be reminded every week, month and year why it's worth their while to switch off The Biggest Loser and turn on to Das Lied von der Erde instead.

Ricker closes by quoting Wayne Gretzky on not skating to where the puck is, but to where it's going to be. I know from many conversations that the big music presenters in Toronto -- the Symphony and the Canadian Opera Company -- are already marketing strategically to specific communities, both for subscriptions and fundraising.

I thought this would be a matter of course for music presenters in other cities. If it isn't, perhaps they should take a look at what's happening in Toronto.

This video is a digression, but an interesting one, I hope. It's American choral conductor John Nelson rehearsing the Shanghai Opera Chorus and some members of the New York Choral Society for a 2005 performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah:

Star Wars' C3PO actor gives me a slap in the face, and I'm thankful

Gosh... even more. And again.And again.

I am still thrilled to be part of Star Wars -In Concert, as we share the spectacle across America. I'm learning more about the depths of the Star Wars saga and the depths of John Williams' compositions as well. I may become a fan!

These are the words I saw on the home page of British actor Anthony Daniels' website. I was doing some background reading. I wanted to have an intelligent conversation with the man who played C3PO in George Lucas's Star Wars film series during the 15 minutes of phone time that had been allotted to me yesterday.

Daniels is the narrator for Star Wars in Concert, a two-hour giant-screen-and-symphony-orchestra spectacular that is currently touring North America. The show arrives at the Air Canada Centre on Nov. 26. This was a writing assignment I wasn't particularly looking forward to, given that I haven't seen all the Star Wars movies. 

So, preparing for the interview was all the more important. But I was distracted by Daniels' words (written Oct. 25), that said he might even become a fan of composer John Williams's scores.

Aha! I thought. Daniels doesn't think much of the music and he may even secretly resent the fact that so much of his acting career has been taken up with the Star Wars franchise.

So I started my 15 minutes with a flip comment about his homepage and Williams's music. This immediately sent Daniels into high dudgeon (an old-fashioned expression for outrage that seems appropriate here). He was especially cutting about snobby and closed-minded critics who don't understand the power or value of film music.

Fortunately for the journalist, Daniels was eloquent in his anger, so it gave me something I can put into an article next week.

But however busy my right hand was in scribbling down Daniels' words, I could feel my face burning. I had committed my profession's cardinal sin: of taking on a subject with prejudice. As much as possible, I try to approach any interview or any performance with as open a mind as I possibly can. Yet here I was doing exactly what I would shake my head at if I saw, heard or read someone else doing it. In the process, I had belittled Daniels' livelihood and, in the case of a prolonged, intense tour, very hard work. Shame on me.

Why this public confession? I feel I need to have witnesses to my resolve to not do this again. I also hope that someone will verbally slap me in the face again, should I forget.

Here is a fan interview with Daniels from last year, when he was promoting a Star Wars science exhibition: