This weekend brings another edition of USC Cello Choir, an event organized each year by the university's distinguished professor of cello, Robert Jesselson. Each year he brings in a guest cellist to conduct master classes and perform as soloist with the massed ensemble of cellos. This year's guest is the wonderful cellist Anthony Elliott, who was a colleague of mine for several years at the University of Michigan and with whom I've worked in many different scenarios, from the old MayMusic festival in Charlotte that I was directing in the 90's, to concerts in Japan. Tony is a great teacher and if you want to watch his teaching in action, come to the master classes at the USC Recital Hall on Friday. There'll be a session for high school cellists and then one for college-level cellists.

Tony and I recorded a CD several years ago with 3 of the major French works for cello and piano: the Franck, Debussy, and Poulenc sonatas. It's available via CD Baby. For more information on the USC Cello Choir events click this link.

The final concert of the cello choir is at 5 PM Saturday in the Koger Center; if you get out by 6:30 you can go right next door to the School of Music and you might, I repeat might have a chance of getting a seat for the first Southern Exposure concert of the season. They've been granting a reserved seat for the whole series to those who contribute $75, and I understand many of the seats are getting snapped up. The first concert features the Amernet String Quartet playing Bartok's 3rd Quartet and, jumping the gun a bit on his 100th birthday coming up next year, Elliott Carter's 5th, plus works by Joel Hoffman and a work by Russell Platt for bassoon and quartet, featuring USC bassoon whiz Peter Kolkay.

Jeffrey Day and Gregory Barnes are keeping a blog over at Columbia's newspaper of record, The State, about the ongoing search this season for the new Music Director of the South Carolina Philharmonic. I joined Jeffrey for last night's opening concert with guest conductor Steven Lipsitt, one of the seven candidates for the post, and he graciously offered me the chance to "guest blog" on their site. So today's entry can be found over there.

Each year Drew McManus's blog on orchestral management issues, Adaptistration, posts a ranking of 84 major American orchestras' websites, from best to worst, and he's just come out with this year's edition. The rankings are based on a whole host of criteria, which you can read about in his posts, but they include being fully informative about the concert season, ease of purchasing tickets and making donations online, depth of information about the musicians themselves, and many other factors.

The SC Philharmonic is not among those listed, probably because its budget is too small. However, the Charlotte, Charleston, and Atlanta symphonies are. Atlanta's website ranks 20th out of 84; Charleston's ranks 50th, but that's a jump of 11 spots from their McManus rating of last year. Most dismal is the Charlotte Symphony's website: rated 58th, a drop of nineteen spots from last year. A detailed look at the scores reveals that Charlotte's website falls especially short in giving detailed information on upcoming events and performances; a score of 5 points out of a possible 20. Their rating for providing lots of information about the orchestral musicians themselves is also mediocre.

McManus describes his rating criteria for this category thusly: " Learning about an orchestra and having easy access to contact information and educational program information is crucial to an orchestra's ability to establish meaningful connections with its community...Given the fact that orchestras are suffering from wholesale underexposure, providing ample access to PR materials that can be accessed by media representatives 24 hours is crucial to maximizing exposure."

Amen, brother. For years I have been telling some of the major players (corporate and artistic) in the Charlotte arts scene that one reason the symphony has not received the support one might expect from such a booming financial capital is that for the most part the Symphony is perceived as a faceless mass. The Charlotte Symphony now possesses, on average, the finest roster of musicians it has ever had in its history (one could probably say the same for many mid-sized American orchestras, as wave after wave of superbly trained musicians are churned out annually by major American music schools and conservatories). These (often young) men and women should have their individual faces plastered on the sides of city buses...on concert ads splayed full-page in the local paper...they should be considered every bit a part of a "team" for the city of Charlotte in the same way average folks know the name of most players on the Bobcats' or Panthers' roster.

Whoever gets the SC Philharmonic Music Director position (and don't forget, tomorrow night brings the first candidate, Steven Lipsitt, in works by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky) should keep that in mind and encourage the Board to heighten the visibility to this community of the Philharmonic players.

Steven Lipsitt, the first of seven candidates for the Music Director position of the South Carolina Philharmonic, will lead the orchestra this coming Saturday night, Sept. 22. Regarding this year's search process, this report from The State newspaper today:  "In recent interviews board members said they don’t think the person they hire will be around for 10 or 15 years — the tenure of the last two conductors. They’ve found that many mid-sized orchestras are hiring new music directors every five years or so.'We want to let them come in, lift up the symphony while it lifts them, and then go on to bigger and better positions,' [Jim] Lehman [immediate past president of the Philharmonic Board] said."

And from "Mostly Music in the Midlands", Oct. 10, 2005: "He or she might only stay a few years, using the job as a stepping stone. That's OK. SC Phil is not a job for somebody to grow old in, but that person could bring talent and energy and new ideas with them for those few years. Somebody using this job to 'make their mark' is exactly what this orchestra could use."

My "inbox" brought two pieces of news yesterday that are very exciting to me personally. The first came via Kyle Gann's blog "PostClassic": the nonagenarian composer Henry Brant had some years ago done an orchestration of Charles Ives' "Concord" Sonata, and a recording of this version has recently been released on Innova. Well, I didn't even know Brant had done such a thing, so that came as pretty exciting news to me right there. Gann raves about Brant's version, so I can't wait to check it out. Of course so much of the sonata (especially the "Emerson" movement) is about the enormous effort required of the solitary, lonely performer to execute the musical equivalent of Emerson as "America's deepest explorer of the spiritual immensities...describing the inevitable struggle in the soul's uprise...hack[ing] his way up and down, as near as he can to the Absolute, the oneness of all nature, both human and spiritual, and to God's benevolence...reaching out through and beyond mankind, trying to see what he can of the infinite and its immensities, throwing back to us whatever he can . . . always beating down through the crust towards the first fire of life, of death, and of eternity" (from Ives' "Essays Before a Sonata"). So that sense would be missing from this version, I imagine; but I'm intrigued by what coloristic possibilities Brant has realized from his intrepretation of the score. I'll get back to you after I give it a hearing.

The other exciting news item yesterday was that my former teacher Leon Fleisher is one of the recipients this year of the Kennedy Center Honors (along with Martin Scorsese...right on...Diana Ross...yeah I can see that...Brian Wilson...maybe...and Steve Martin...not so sure about that one). The awards are bestowed at a White House ceremony and the gala to honor the awardees is televised on CBS in December. I'm not a big fan of any kind of awards show, but the Kennedy Center Honors gala is one of the very few occasions left when network television actually acknowledges the existence of classical music. I'm hopeful, then, that in this case, a few more Americans who are not necessarily fans of the genre will get to know about this man who has taught and inspired so many, whose ideas---and ideals---are now woven so deeply into the fabric of American concert-music life.