Thursday night's Southern Exposure concert at USC was a ton of fun. I think the Bartok went pretty well, Lynn and I had a great time and we are grateful to our colleagues Scott Herring and Greg Apple for their percussionistic contribution to the whole. Marina Lomazov and Joe Rackers gave a hair-raising version of Rite of Spring for two pianos...all of us now are plotting a performance of "Les Noces" sometime down the road.
Lots on the music blogosphere these days about the problems facing classical music and proposed solutions for same...but anybody reading this from New York should know that "mini-music-scenes" are alive and kicking in many places overlooked by the "MSMM"...the "Mainstream Music Media."
John Fitz Rogers has done an extraordinary job with the SE series here in Columbia...it is now routine for the hall to be packed to its very capacity, with quite a number of people having to be turned away at the door. If Columbia had an acceptable 400-500-seat hall, I'm sure that the series could come close to filling such a space. And that's for new music, too. (Granted, this last concert focused more on 20th-century classics, but performances of those are quite rare around here too. Moreover, John Adams and Mary Ellen Childs had works on the program, and I heard from person after person backstage that the Childs work--"Kilter" for two pianos, from 1992--was their favorite work on the program.)
Now I'm off tomorrow morning for Milwaukee, where Kevin Stalheim and his group Present Music have been drawing audiences of 300-700, almost every time out, for years now. Next season is their 25th. And I do hear "good news" stories coming from many unlikely places. It's all about grass-roots, people. Building from the ground floor up. On his blog this weekend, Alex Ross quotes Esa-Pekka Salonen as saying, "The most important function of a conductor is that of developing local musical life." I couldn't agree more...how few really do that, though? Moreover, I'd also add university music faculty member to that list. Too often musicians, having attained a secure position in academia, allow their world (and their students') to be circumscribed by the walls of their particular School of Music building, not seeking to be a musical citizen of their community, not seeking to connect their art to the community, not seeking to do the badly needed work to build audiences in the community at large. There are exceptions, and Rogers in our city is a shining example. Well, this is a topic I could "pontificate" (my wife's word for what I'm prone to do) on ad nauseum, but we'll leave it here for now. Happy Easter and more from Milwaukee later this week.