Copious Notes

Interview: David Finckel and Wu Han on the Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass

Wu Han (center) and David Finckel (right) at Shaker Village last year with their daughter Lilian. Photo courtesy of Finckel and Han.

Last year, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center participated in a pioneering effort: The first Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass.

Presented by the Norton Center for the Arts and its director, George Foreman, the fest was held at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, off the beaten path for most concert goers, in a renovated tobacco barn, an atypical venue for musicians more accustomed to cozy concert halls.

And it was a smashing success.

The concerts were sold out, and the chamber music society’s press representative says the musicians haven’t stopped talking about Kentucky.

So, with the second edition upon us, we got on the phone with cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han, co-directors of the Chamber Music Society, to talk about the second edition of the festival and their return to the Bluegrass.

Herald-Leader: Tell us about your trip here last year and what made it so great.

David Fickel: The most wonderful thing, besides being in Kentucky, and in such a beautiful place and having such beautiful weather and meeting all the new people and playing for a new audience was being present at the birth of a really exciting new project. These days, when classical music takes root in a new location and blossoms, it’s wonderful news for everybody involved. We also look at our involvement at the Shaker Village there as being something that the Chamber Society is good at, something that we should do, being the kind of organization we are, we should go around and help people start new things because we can present great art in great programs and get people excited.

In the end, we all had a marvelous time. We made a lot of new friends, and we’ve really been thinking about it ever since.

Wu Han: In a regular concert, we usually hit a city and play for an audience of 500 to 2,000 and then we probably split the next morning and hit the next town. That’s a performer’s life.

So, to have the opportunity to base in such a gorgeous environment – it’s inspiring to be in such a pure and spiritual place like the Shaker Village – and to have the opportunity to be involved in a festival is incredibly satisfying. Festival is a place you come to meet people to have exploration, to have a community that has the opportunity to mingle, to eat meals together, to talk and to share a space and exchange ideas. At the end of the festival, we know the presenters very, very well, we get to know the audience, we get to know where to eat locally, we get to hike a little bit and the audience bonded with us. We have so much to share and it’s a very different sensation from just traveling from city to city and doing one night stands. The setting of the Shaker Village is fantastic. I don’t have the TV to distract me with CNN and 30 minutes of updating in my hotel room. And everyday I would wake up in the same place and it is very close to nature and I get to meet my audience in the daytime.

That’s unusual for musicians and I think it’s unusal for the audience to be that close to the musicians.

And playing the tobacco barn is so unusual. It’s very close to the earthiness of what we do using the chamber music form and its intimacy. It’s a project I really treasure.

Q: Last year, before you came, you said you were curious as to what the venue was going to look like. How did the tobacco barn turn out as a place to play?

WH: I loved it. To have a little bit of cowbell and the birds flying around the Dvorak Piano Quintet is not a bad thing at all.

Q&A: Band composer David Holsinger

Composer David Holsinger, whose latest work will be premiered by the Tiger Symphonic Band at Georgetown College April 24. Photo courtesy of David Holsinger.

David Holsinger’s name might not rank up there with Gershwin or Copland in the household name department, but mention it to almost anyone in the world of concert bands, and their eyes light up.
That’s why Georgetown College’s Tiger Symphonic Band is giddy that it is playing the world premiere of Holsinger’s latest composition, Legacy Music, at its spring concert Thursday. Because of a prior commitment, the composer, based at Lee University in Cleveland, Tenn., can’t be in Georgetown for the concert. But we asked him a few questions via e-mail.

Q: How did you become interested in composing band music?

A: A few years ago I had the privilege of writing a chapter in the first volume of a book set entitled:  Composers on Composing for Band from GIA in Chicago.  Your first question can probably be best answered if I simply extract a portion of that chapter:

I've attended Central Methodist College in Fayette, Missouri, Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg, and the University of Kansas at Lawrence.  At the last two the study of composition was my primary goal.  However, it was an incident at that first small college that set me on the course I travel today.

In the 1950's and 60's, Central Methodist College was a hotbed for music education graduates.  Although very small, with fewer than 1000 students, the college seemed to produce an inordinate number of very good instrumental and vocal educators for the state's public schools.  Almost every music teacher I had in public school had been a graduate of CMC.  Somewhere along the way, I just knew it was the place for me.  I went to Central Methodist to become “the music teacher.”

However, I discovered one thing about my career choice very early in my education.  In comparison to all my classmates, their desire to be a music teacher was CONSIDERABLY GREATER than my desire to be a music teacher.  But, music was all I knew and, of course, everyone back home DID have my future all figured out.  Who was I to argue?  I was having a great time being a college guy, so why buck the system? In the spring of my junior year, everything changed.

LexArts gets $350,000 and another challenge

Lexington mayor Jim Newberry released his budget for the fiscal year 2009 Tuesday, which means LexArts got news about the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government's contribution to its Campaign for the Arts. For the most part, it sounded like a repeat of last year, minus $50,000-to-$100,000, depending on how you take it.

The LFUCG is set to give LexArts, pending Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council approval, a $350,000 contribution to the campaign, and it has issued a $100,000 challenge grant. Last year, the Mayor (copyrighted photo, right, by David Perry) gave the campaign $350,000 and issued a $150,000 challenge geared toward attracting new donors to LexArts. The group met the challenge in September.

With that news, we asked LexArts president and CEO Jim Clark a few questions about the allocation:

Q: How do you feel about the $350,000 contribution to the campaign?

A: I am pleased the Mayor Newberry maintained LexArts’ base level of support.  Knowing the Mayor would be hard pressed to provide the same package as last year ($350k base with $150k Challenge), we budgeted just for the base amount. 

Q: Where does that set the campaign in relation to the goal?

A: We are now just $50k short of the goal which is $1,125,000.

Q: What is the nature of this $100,000 challenge? Is it another new-donor drive or something different?

A: We have not discussed the details yet, but I am aware that Mayor Newberry wants to work with us to craft a plan that helps us attract new or increased gifts – last year we focused only on new gifts which were capped at $1,000 per donor.

Q: How do you feel about having another challenge this year?

A: I feel great and grateful.  This is a difficult budget year, yet the Mayor has maintained his commitment to the arts and culture as part of his economic development strategy for Lexington.  The arts and culture are integral to enhancing the quality of life and making this place attractive to businesses. 

Q: When does the campaign end?

A: The official end date is April 15 and it looks like we are going to be able announce GOAL on that date – of course, we will accept gifts after that date, right up to the end of our fiscal year, June 30.

Introducing Alfred Savia

Alfred Savia conducts the Lexington Philharmonic in a Tuesday night rehearsal. Copyrighted Herald-Leader photos by David Stephenson.

Tonight, Lexington gets to meet candidate No. 5 to succeed George Zack as music director of the Lexington Philharmonic, and he's the closest neighbor of the first audition season.

Alfred Savia hails from Evansville, Ind., where he has been the music director of the Evansville Philharmonic  Orchestra for 19 years. In fact, some mutual players between the Evansville and Lexington Phils were among those who tipped Savia to the Lexington gig, and suggested he might be good for the group.

This evening, he'll take the Lexington Philharmonic out for a test drive at the Singletary Center for the Arts, conducting Gioacchino Rossini's Semiramide Overture, Ralph Vaughan Williams Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8.

Earlier this week, we sat down with Savia at Buddy's for a chat about his music and his interest in Lexington. Here's a transcript of a portion of that interview.

Copious Notes: You easily have the longest tenure at one post of any of the candidates that have come through this season.

Alfred Savia: It's worked out that way. It's fortunate for me to have had a lot of other activities to balance with that. For six of those years, I was the associate conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony.
For three years, I was involved in bringing the orchestra in Orlando back to life. I was associate conductor many years ago when they had a full-time orchestra there, and I was the artistic director as they were emerging. In Indianapolis, even though there were six years formally as associate conductor, I continue to conduct quite frequently there. I was just on the phone with them about some of their summer programs. I do at least half of their summer season, still.

And I have sort of reconnected with the orchestra in New Orleans, where I was resident conductor before Evansville and Indianapolis. I just came back from my third time there since Katrina. Evansville has been a really wonderful base. It's a position that gives me time to do a lot of other things, as well.

CN: How has the New Orleans orchestra fared since Katrina?

AS: It actually had a rough time before Katrina, and one could have thought Katrina would have been the ultimate blow, but it's actually been the opposite. They've really rallied. When I was resident conductor in New Orleans, it was called the New Orleans Symphony. I went there really with the knowledge that things were precarious financially. The executive director was very open. He was a friend of mine and really wanted me to come and the orchestra wanted me there. But he also warned me, and his warnings turned out to be quite true. Fortunately, for myself, I found another position. But that orchestra was teetering many years and eventually did fold. The last concert they gave as the New Orleans Symphony -- before they had a hiatus of 14 months and then began playing again and eventually went under -- I conducted a family series and we added the the Farewell Symphony and had the musicians leave one by one. CNN covered it, and there was all kinds of national attention for that.

But eventually the orchestra reformed and is run as a cooperative orchestra. The board is 50 percent musicians, 50 percent business leaders and community leaders. With most orchestras, the board is non musicians. In this case, it's a cooperative. It took them a while to get a season going. They would just say, 'We're going to get as much work as we can put together and subdivide the pie.' Then Katrina hit, and of course they canceled a major part of the season, the whole first part of 2005 and '06, and they started it up again, I think, around March, and that's when I went in . . . They subsequently invited me back last season and just again this season.

CN: What has made Evansville a great base for you?

AS: Well, first, it's a great orchestra.

Interview: Mandisa

Ardent observers of American Idol and similar shows often say it is better to make it onto the show, be seen by the masses, and bow out early. The idea is you get the Idol exposure, but then you’re free to go get your own record deal and chart your own path, rather than being locked into the prize.

Mandisa (photo, right, courtesy of EMI Christian Music Group), a competitor two years ago in the season that ended with Taylor Hicks as the winner, took her Idol cred straight to the contemporary Christian market. It’s a strategy that has worked out well for the singer, who comes to Lexington Thursday as part of Newsong’s annual Winter Jam tour. Last year, she released her solo debut, True Beauty, on EMI’s Sparrow Records, one of contemporary Christian music’s biggest labels.

The album was nominated for the Grammy for best pop/contemporary gospel album (Israel and New Breed’s A Deeper Level won) and Mandisa is up for female vocalist of the year and new artist of the year in the Gospel Music Association’s Dove Awards.

To preview Winter Jam, we got on the phone to talk to Mandisa about her music and Idol’s devilish judge Simon Cowell. Here are highlights of the chat:

Q: I was just reading your blog and bio on your website, and you were talking about going to Kat’s wedding and meeting Reuben, and it seemed like there is this little American Idol community. Is that the case?

A: There tends to be. When I was on the show, we were all pretty close, especially the girls. So I went to Kat’s (Katharine McPhee) wedding and Kellie Pickler was there -- she was a bridesmaid and I sang at the wedding. And everytime I meet someone from a different season, there sort of is an instant comaradarie. I think it stems from the fact that there are only a few people in the world who know what we’ve been through, and we can kind of talk about and compare our seasons.

Q: Who do you keep in touch with the most?

A: All of the girls from my season: Kat and Kelli and Paris (Bennett) and Lisa (Tucker). I also talk pretty regularly to Ace and Elliott (Yamin). I try to talk to all of them and from other seasons, Melinda Doolittle and I were friends before American Idol. We used to do studio work together.

Q: Obviously, there is a new season rolling ahead. Have you been watching it?

A: Absolutely.

Q: What do you think when you watch it?

A: Well, it’s different this year than last year, because last year had Melinda in it. I’m not coming into it with any sort of bias, and I will say I am very impressed with what I’ve seen so far.

The one thing that is difficult for me to watch is the first few weeks of the auditions. Yeah, I don’t enjoy that much, seeing the people on there that are not so great. But I have a different take on seeing people being ridiculed, because I was one that ridiculed by Simon.

Interview: Yo-Yo Ma

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is one of classic music’s few marquee names among those who aren’t ardent fans of the genre. He’s become an unqualified star through frequent appearances on television and in movie scores, and a number of cross-genre recordings, including a pair of Appalachian projects (Appalachian Journey and Appalachia Waltz) with fiddler Mark O’Connor and bassist Edgar Meyer.

Ma comes to Danville on Sunday, but not to sit in the spotlight alone. He’ll be the cellist in a quartet made up of longtime colleagues Jonathan Gandelsman, Colin Jacobsen and Nicholas Cords. They will perform a concert of works from Central Europe and the Mediterranean, including Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15 and works by contemporary composers such as Giovanni Sollima and Tigran Mansurian.

We took the opportunity of having Ma (photo, above, by Steven Danelian) on the phone last week to talk about a number of things regarding his work and music. Here are excerpts from that chat.

The photos, below, in descending order are Jonathan Gandelsman by Amber Darragh, Colin Jacobsen by Todd Rosenberg and Nicholas Cords by Ingrid Hertfelder.

Q: Being here in Central Kentucky,  I think a lot of people know and love the Appalachian projects you recorded with Edgar Meyer and Mark O’Connor.

A: I love those people and I learned so much from them. The music is so fabulous, I feel really lucky to have had a chance to work with them in depth and over a good period of time. I obviously still keep in touch with them.

Q: Did that bring you to this part of the country very much?

A: Yes, to Tennessee and Texas, but not to Kentucky. But early in my career, I spent a lot of time going to Louisville to work with the orchestra, at first with Jorge Mester, and of course the native-son pianist, Lee Luvisi. I used to see him at a summer festival we played in Vermont, and he was a beautiful, beautiful musician, and very loyal to the state.

Q: What has been the enduring effect of the Appalachian projects in your music and your playing?

A: It opened so many new worlds to me. The idea of two things: One is trans-national music, the whole idea which Edgar and Mark explained to me is that you have the Scottish-Irish music going down to Canada, to Cape Breton, to Appalachia, to Texas fiddling style. It’s an unbroken line where the music is performed differently and in different times, but really, it’s that kind of flow of music for hundreds of years. The second thing is the oral-tradition part, learned and passed on from generation to generation with such devotion and fun and passion.

Q: Was that a jumping-off point? Because certainly you have done numerous other cultural explorations. When did you get interested in exploring distinctive cultural music?

A: I was always interested in exploring all music. I never thought in terms of categories, I just thought within classical music there are so many different styles in terms of both time and geography. How do you go back 300 years and advocate for someone who was writing in that particular voice? What kind of context is it?

Introducing Daniel Meyer

Daniel Meyer conducts this Lexington Philharmonic in a rehearsal Feb. 18 at the Singletary Center for the Arts. Copyrighted LexGo photos by David Stephenson.

Daniel Meyer has had a transitory relationship with Kentucky. Namely, he's mostly seen the Commonwealth while passing through en route from Knoxville, where he was once the assistant conductor of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, to his family home of Ohio. So, when hot browns came up over lunch at Dudley's Tuesday afternoon, he wasn't familiar with the Bluegrass State's No. 1 comfort food.

But when it came time to order, Meyer dove in, ordering the Downtown Debbie Brown, Dudley's variation on the Hot Brown, and in true Kentuckian fashion, he promised to eat light for dinner.

This week, Meyer has been getting a heaping helping of the state he used to just pass through as he is the fourth candidate to to succeed George Zack as music director of the Lexington Philharmonic. Friday night, he'll conduct the orchestra in Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony and Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto with soloist Sara Buechner.

Meyer's current gigs include resident conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony and music director of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra. During our lunchtime chat, in between bites of ham, turkey, cheese, etc., Meyer talked about his career, passion for music eduction and desire to settle down. Here's a lightly edited transcript of our interview:

Q: What attracted you to Lexington?

A: I’ve always had an interest in Lexington because I used to drive by it all the time. I used to be the assistant conductor of the Knoxville Symphony and my family lives in Ohio. I have family in Cincinnati and Columbus and Cleveland. And I’d always drive past Lexington in order to get to Knoxville.
I knew about the Philharmonic, and I knew about its reputation and I knew it was a beautiful community and I knew about the connection to UK School of Music, which is really highly regarded. These were all factors that made this an interesting spot. Not to mention that my wife (Mary Persin, photo, right, courtesy of the Biava Quartet) and I are newly married and looking for a place to put down some roots and start a family, somewhere with a decent airport, where we can get to the places that we need to go, because she’s a performing artist, too. She’s a violist in the Biava String Quartet. So, we’re looking for a base of operations. Right now, I have residency in Pittsburgh and she has an apartment in New York City, so we’re looking to consolidate our efforts.

Lexington had a lot of interesting potential.

Q: Driving through, have you had any chances to stop and look around?

A: Just superficially. Nothing substantial.

Q: How did you get interested in music?

A: My mother was a music teacher in public schools. She taught K through six outside of Cleveland. She started all of us singing when were old enough to sing. I’m the oldest of four kids and we all took piano when were in kindergarten or first grade, and we could take up another instrument when we were in third grade. I took up the violin. My sister took the flute, my other sister took the cello and my other brother took the violin.

Introducing Darryl One

Darryl One, the third candidate to succeed George Zack as music director of the Philharmonic, leads the orchestra in a rehearsal Monday night. Copyrighted LexGo photo by Joseph Rey Au.

Darryl One had an appointment to meet the press Tuesday, but something else came up: a pickup basketball game.

Invited to play a midday  game at the High Street YMCA, the conductor asked to delay a lunch date for 90 minutes.

Some around here might say the third aspirant to succeed George Zack as music director of the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra has his priorities in the right order. And the maestro, who holds a master’s degree from Indiana University, talks enthusiastically about his excitement at being in yet another basketball hotbed.

But that’s only after a good two hours of chatter about conducting and music while sitting at Cheapside Bar and Grill.

One (pronounced Oh-nay) comes to Lexington from Modesto, Calif., where he was the music director of the Modesto Symphony Orchestra Association until 2005. He still lives there with his wife and two teenage daughters. He is still music director of the Victoria Symphony Orchestra in Victoria, Texas. Prior to those jobs, One  was associate conductor of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, Denver Symphony and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. One of the big reasons he likes Lexington is its proximity to his family's home in Chicago and his wife's family in Atlanta.

Our chat was to preview the big concert Friday night, when One takes the podium at the Singletary Center for the Arts to conduct a program of Ottorino Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite III, Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Organ and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5.

Here are a few excerpts from that conversation:

On how he got into music . . .

When I was in high school, math was my, ‘strong suit.’ So, I though that’s what I would want to major in. I was in the high school choir, but I didn’t know too much about music back then. I had played drums in a garage band. We played what was current at that time. This one guitarist liked the Edgar Winter Group, so we did Free Ride and things like that. We played Doobie Brothers. I liked Chicago, but of course, we needed horns like that. These guys wanted to make money, so we tried to be a wedding band and learned things like the Hokey Pokey. It was mostly an opportunity to sock your drums and turn your guitar up high.

In high school I played in the high school jazz band for a while. So, when I went to school, I thought I’d go as a math major and see what I could do with that.

But I wanted to learn more about music. I had drum lessons, but nothing about harmony or theory. So I went to the music department and asked if I could sign up for classes. They were giving placement exams, which were more aural than knowledge, and I scored higher than anybody. So I had to wait a year, because the major section of theory that was being offered that semester was level one, and the theory teacher thought I’d be bored with that. So I came in at level two, and I really liked it.

I thought, maybe I should think about being in music. But I didn’t know exactly what, since I wasn’t a virtuoso violinist or anything. I was a garage band drummer, so I couldn’t make a career at an instrument and performing on it. So I went into composition and liked that. My undergraduate degree was in theory and composition.

But by my senior year, I was assistant to the orchestra for two years and I had already conducted a staged version of Magic Flute. I had the understudy cast for the opera, so I coached them, and as a reward, the conductor gave me the orchestra to do a staged concert version of Magic Flute.
I was a little more enterprising and there was a chamber orchestra and I got wind that the conductor didn’t want to do it. So I went to the head of the music department, and he let me have the chamber orchestra. Now I had a class, and I didn’t have to beg people to play in a pick-up group.

One of the teachers there liked contemporary music, so he put together a contemporary chamber ensemble. But he didn’t want to conduct. He wanted someone else to do it. So, I was director of the contemporary chamber music ensemble, and I had the chamber orchestra, and I was assistant to the orchestra in my senior year, all while being a composition and theory major. Needless to say, I was thinking about conducting more than I was thinking about composing.