ArtsWatch

I’m hoping that there’s more to Nuttin' But Stringz than met the ears Monday afternoon at the Kimmel Center. The violinist brothers from Queens, NY, bill themselves as genre-blending classical hiphopsters. The hip hop part I got. But where was the classical? Their set lasted 43 minutes, and in that time they brought children up on stage for a talent contest; led a participatory build-a-rap-song session, and did three numbers themselves. But at no time could I detect anything sampled from Bach or Vivaldi, as one of the brothers told me they'd be doing. Maybe they’ll come back someday and prove us dense and terribly tin-eared. Decide for yourself.

Speaking of the Kimmel, its leaders very nicely gave themselves a report card sent out Monday in press release form, trumpeting a $900,000 surplus for the year on a $35.5 million budget. Not bad, especially if it turns out to be true. The figures are unaudited, and the last time the Kimmel announced a pre-audit surplus of $1.2 million the number quietly changed to $800,000 by the time an audit was done.

We might wander down to Independence Mall tonight at 8:30 for the Philly Pops concert with Peter Nero. It’s free. The forecast calls for weather in the mid-60s - sweater weather on the 4th of July! – and I plan to find out whether you can hear the music from Franklin Fountain, the wonderfully retro ice-cream parlor at 116 Market Street.

What a great vibe last night on the lawn in front of Independence Hall. Peter Nero and the Philly Pops played American repertoire (Gershwin, Copland, Bernstein, Morton Gould), the sky was wispy streaks of pink and blue, the weather was extremely fine. Perhaps a couple thousand listeners gathered around. When the elements come together, music outdoors is one of life's great sensations. You have another chance to see sky with your Bizet: The Philadelphia Orchestra plays a Spanish-themed concert July 21 at 7 p.m. in West Philly's Clark Park.

Philadelphia institutions are loaning several objects to the Princess Grace exhibition this summer in Monaco. Philadelphia Museum of Art associate curator of costumes and textiles Kristina Haugland is flying to Monaco today with Grace Kelly’s wedding dress, matching shoes, prayer book and headpiece.
And Drexel University College of Medicine is lending a portrait of Princess Grace’s mother, Margaret Kelly, who served on the college’s board when it was the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.
The wedding dress and related items from the PMA will travel under the watchful eye of Haugland, who will put the dress on the mannequin when they arrive in Monaco. Actually, the mannequin in question is flying half dressed. “The bodice is very delicate, so we decided to do the most difficult part of dressing her here at the museum,” said Bernice Morris, a Mellon Fellow in costumes and textiles conservation. “When she gets there she has to put the skirt on with all the petticoats underneath and put the veil on, put the headpiece on and then make the train look especially good.”
For the record, many of us also find it hard to travel with petticoats and trains attached.

She was the youngest-ever winner of the Naumburg International Cello Competition’s first prize. She was good enough for an Avery Fisher Grant. She was sufficiently nimble in the orchestral realm to serve as associate principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic for seven years. But after one season in Philadelphia, she’s outta here.
Philadelphia Orchestra principal cellist Hai-Ye Ni was not awarded tenure by a panel of colleagues in the orchestra, and now she is leaving. The Chinese-born cellist will play through the end of the season at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, an orchestra spokeswoman confirmed.
(That’s about the time the collective bargaining agreement expires for all the ensemble’s musicians. Contract negotiations continue.)
Almost all new members of the orchestra are subject to a one-year probation period, but it is highly unusual not to award tenure. At the end of the orchestra’s U.S. tour, virtuoso tuba player Carol Jantsch and principal hornist Jennifer Montone passed probation. Montone has given up her principal horn spot in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra after hedging bets and splitting time between the two ensembles for a season.
But Ni - who started training in her native Shanghai, eventually moving on to an obscure conservatory in New York called the Juilliard School – resigned from the New York Phil in December, a Philharmonic spokesman said.
Who is next up in Philadelphia’s apparently treacherous principal cello chair?
No decisions have been made about a new principal, an acting principal, or even whether auditions will be held. “It’s up in the air, and there is no timetable,” said orchestra spokeswoman Katherine Blodgett.
Despite the school-of-hard-knocks treatment Ni got from colleagues, if auditions for the orchestra’s principal cello job are held, it’s likely they will draw a flock of hopefuls from Los Angeles to New York, and from within the orchestra’s own section.

Pomona, a strapping, nude, 70-year-old female of variegated bronze-green complexion, was spied this morning exercising in the sunlit arcade of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Perelman annex.
The sculpture by Frenchman Aristide Maillol, shown in a photo here by Tom Gralish, was the first art to move into the Perelman (with some qualifications), which the museum is preparing to open around Labor Day. Staffers were moving the bronze about to see how real art works in the new spaces, to determine how high sculptures should sit, to watch how hard shadows and diffuse sunlight change the way sculpture looks.
What pieces of art will eventually will go in the spacious glass-covered walkway between the old Reliance insurance building and Gluckman Maynor’s bright, contemporary addition (price tag for the entire project $90 million) has yet to be decided.
“She was just something to bring over on a Monday morning. She’s going to be a stand-in for all her friends,” said museum director Anne d’Harnoncourt of Pomona. “It’s a very exciting moment when the first work of art enters the building. And there she is. I think it looks amazing. She looks like she’s always been here.”
What d’Harnoncourt could see going there are tall Japanese porcelain vases, or Indian sculpture, a David Smith, or…
“We’re going to have all kinds of interesting times. We’re going to be learning and making the most of it,” she said.
“The light changes very dramatically during the course of the day and with weather. The sun this time of year is at its highest, but most of the time light will come in at an angle, which will make interesting shadows and shapes.”
D’Harnouncourt says the Maillol was the first art to enter the door at the Perelman, but we respectfully beg to differ. The building inside and out is decorated with more iconography as art than a lot of museums have on display – much of it naturalistic, such as squirrels and owls. And then there are the Paul Manship panels already installed in the library: four bronze reliefs from 1914 symbolizing earth, wind, fire and water. They were originally designed for an American Telephone & Telegraph building in New York.
Also yesterday staffers from the museum were trying out a sculpture in the roomiest room in the Perelman, a 40 x 100 space that rivals the largest exhibition space in the museum’s main building. Actually, the large work is a fake. It looks like Anselm Kiefer’s Palette with Wings, made of lead, tin and steel, but it was a clever paper proxy on wheels made by the museum’s staff. It, too, will be moved around to see how art looks in place. There's no need to take chances moving around the delicate real thing, which is in storage.
Said d’Harnoncourt as staffers set it up:
“I think it’s a little beefier than the original, but it’s great.”

Mentioned only vestigially in the many fine obituaries of Beverly Sills last week was the soprano’s Jewishness. But listening to Sills (nee Belle Silverman) on the walk to work today I recalled that the two Jewish classical-music figures who had enough of a mass-media presence to be discussed in my non-classical household when I was a child were Sills and Itzhak Perlman.
You just can’t overestimate the message it sent to a consciousness in the formative stage to hear authority figures speaking with awe about one of their own breaking through the goyishe ceiling.
It meant nothing less than the world opening up, quite specifically, to you.
To translate that concept into 2007 terms, I’m eager for the arrival of an analogous African-American figure in the instrumental realm. Yes, pianist André Watts is big to anyone who has been to an orchestra concert in the past three decades. But he’s never headed an arts institution, appeared as guest host on The Tonight Show or had his own talk show on network TV. Sills was opera for millions of people - many of whom had never actually been.
Today’s media world is more finely segmented than ever, so it’s hard to imagine any classical figure breaking through to household-name status (unless Paris Hilton has been secretly taking bassoon lessons). But think of the power the first Tiger Woods of classical music will have in becoming a beacon to millions of African American children.

What a strange, ghostly place is the Eakins Gallery at Thomas Jefferson University.
I stopped in this morning to see what’s left. Thomas Eakins’ portraits of Rands and Forbes are gone, of course. Jefferson has sold them off, leaving in their place only discolored outlines on the walls where they once hung. Like crime-scene chalk-lines for art.
The Gross Clinic’s departure has produced an even more ghastly souvenir – a life-sized digital reproduction of the masterpiece. A Jefferson spokeswoman says a faux-Forbes and faux-Rands are on the way.
Susan Eakins’ Portrait of a Soldier (the original) still graces the foyer outside the Eakins Gallery. So does Minerva, the 2d-century torso (with later additions) – both of which you can see, albeit through glass, without asking the guard to go through the ballet of calling for a replacement for himself while he walks over and unlocks the Eakins Gallery for you.
“There’s nothing to see in there,” he repeatedly tells me, though he eventually relents and lets me in.
What will Jefferson do with the Eakins Gallery (whose inhabitants are now called "Fakins" by some)?
Will the Susan Eakins go back to the French Benevolent Society, from which the work is on long-term loan? What of Minerva?
Jefferson has no plans to re-purpose the space, the spokeswoman said.
In the meantime, almost no one comes to visit the Eakins Gallery anymore, the guard told me. I tried to take some photos of this unique post-art scene, but he said no pictures were allowed.
No kidding.

Kimmel Center Presents has booked its first-ever concert in the big hall in the month of August: the Boston Pops plays its Kimmel debut with conductor Keith Lockhart Aug. 21 in Verizon Hall. Joining them are Broadway singers Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley in a program of Broadway tunes. The Pops also excerpts music from films. Kimmel Center Presents has never before booked a concert in Verizon in August, a spokesman says. Too many people away at the shore, they’ve feared, but maybe the Boston Pops name is enough to draw them back to terra firma. On the program: the “Prelude” to Ben-Hur by Miklós Rózsa (pictured).

The Philadelphia Boys Choir and Chorale has named Anne Hagan its first executive director. Hagan was assistant vice president of Institutional Advancement for Drexel University...American Masters’ “John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature” features scenes shot in Philadelphia’s Conservation Center for the Arts and Historic Artifacts, and uses the Academy of Natural Science’s copy of Audubon’s Birds of America and some of the original Audubon bird specimens in the Academy's collection. The show airs on PBS July 25...Speaking of Birds of America, the American Philosophical Society has taken out its copy of the 40”x 26 ½” folio (pictured), which has never been on public display, as part of its exhibition, “Undaunted: Five American Explorers, 1760-2007, which runs through December...The Wilma Theatre’s Blanka Zizka will guest-direct Janácek’s Kát’a Kabánova for the Academy of Vocal Arts in February. The opera will be sung in Czech...Stephen Wilcox, a University of Pennsylvania Ph.D student, was one of seven composers chosen for the Minnesota Orchestra’s 2007 Composer Institute.

A minor artistic coup at the Opera Company of Philadelphia. The troupe is about to sign Maurice Sendak's Houston Grand Opera production of Hänsel und Gretel for the Academy of Music this November. You probably know this already, but Engelbert Humperdinck, the composer, was a Wagner devotee, and Hänsel und Gretel is his singular masterpiece. I’ve been showing the kids the DVD for weeks, and they’re mesmerized by it. Me? I am counting the days to Dec. 24, when we’re all planning to hear Vladimir Jurowski conduct it at the Met. Look for more on the Opera Company of Philadelphia's take on the production in The Inquirer tomorrow. Not that I'm taking credit for it or anything, but anyone remember me bemoaning the disappearance of this piece a while back?

A savvy reader emails to say that the Boston Pops concert announced for the Kimmel looks rather more like a Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra concert than a Boston Pops Orchestra concert.
Can't be, say I. The Boston Symphony Orchestra's website calls the group performing here Aug. 21 the Boston Pops. Ditto the Kimmel Center. On questioning, however, the Kimmel Center's publicist makes some calls, and it turns out that the group coming to Verizon Hall is an ensemble called the "Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra."
The Boston Pops Orchestra, we learn, is made up of players from the BSO minus 12 principal players; the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra is a group of freelancers assembled by BSO management. So says the BSO website. The name "Boston Pops" (notice without the word "orchestra") can apply to either group, a Kimmel spokesman says.
The blurring between the names "Boston Pops" and "Boston Pops Orchestra" may be unimportant to some, but to those expected to actually show up and play the concert it matters absolutely.
And yet it's a distinction that went right by us, and, call us mind-readers, a distinction we doubt the larger public takes the trouble to notice.
Keith Lockhart (pictured) will be on the podium. No word, however, on whether this is Keith Lockhart the conductor or some other Keith Lockhart. It's probably Keith Lockhart the conductor, but it obviously doesn't pay to make reportorial assumptions.

The New York Philharmonic has named Alan Gilbert its next music director. Gilbert, 40, (pictured) attended the Curtis Institute of Music and once was a substitute violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He starts the new gig in 2009. The Phil also apparently thinks it has a commitment from a conductor named Riccardo Muti to spend six to eight weeks guest conducting and leading tours. He has no title, no "formal" contract, the New York Times is reporting today. Said Philharmonic president Zarin Mehta: "He's free and he's Italian." We're not sure what the "Italian" reference means, but the "free" part in Philadelphia meant that Muti was free to show up to conduct only when he felt like it. Good luck to them all.

Two of the three finalists in the William Kapell International Piano Competition have local ties: Sara Daneshpour studied with Leon Fleisher and Eleanor Sokoloff at The Curtis Institute of Music until graduating in May; and Spencer Myer has been on the roster of Astral Artistic Services since 2003. The competition's final round is tomorrow, Saturday, in College Park, Maryland, when the two face off with Russian Sofya Gulyak...An exhibition featuring paintings of German artists Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter (whose 180 Colors from 1971 is pictured) opens tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and runs through Nov. 25...The Philadelphia Orchestra plays its last free neighborhood concert of the summer tomorrow at 7 p.m. in West Philadelphia’s Clark Park. Associate conductor Rossen Milanov leads a Spanish-themed program including Chabrier’s España, Bizet’s Suite No. 2 from Carmen, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol...Philadelphia Orchestra principal hornist Jennifer Montone has joined the faculty of the Juilliard School...Gustavo Dudamel is not yet music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but you can hear what the fuss is about on iTunes with a new Deutsche Grammophon release of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra culled from two performances in January by the Philharmonic and the 26 year-old Venezuelan conductor...Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, leaders of the Manayunk-based internationally busy architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, were honored Wednesday at the White House with a National Design Award (pictured with First Lady Laura Bush in an AP photo)...The Franklin Institute has announced a free Aug. 16th symposium with the peppy title of "The Peopling of Ancient Egypt: Indigenous African Civilization, Pharaoh Tutankhamun and His Family." Translation: what race were the peoples of Egypt before the time of King Tut? Discuss. Five experts help inform the dialogue...The Haddonfield Symphony emailed us to crow about New York Philharmonic music director-designate Alan Gilbert, who, we had forgotten, from 1992-97 directed the ensemble we like to call the Academy of St. Haddon in the Fields.

If you're the type who thinks this sort of thing significant, you'll want to know that the Tut show now being hosted by the Franklin Institute sold its millionth ticket yesterday, officials said. Actually, only 882,000 visitors have shown up, but we're sure the missing 12 percent will remember that they've bought tickets and rush in to use them soon. The Franklin says it's on track now to become the most peopled of four U.S. venues hosting the show, beating out Chicago's attendance of just over a million. Perpective: Philadelphia also had the show for the longest duration of the four venues.

The stress must be getting really bad in the New York Philharmonic. AP reports that cellists are leaving good-paying jobs to join the emergency-medical profession.

One of the least talked-about aspects of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's re-do of the former Reliance Standard and Life (office) Building into the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman (art) Building is a planned structure to be added over the entrance of the historic building: an enormous sign. The LED sign won't be there when the building opens in the fall, says George Ross, the museum's manager of capital projects. And so it probably won't be factored into architecture reviews and other coverage of the building's opening. Plans are still under development. But the 20-foot-high white lighted sign will use advanced technology to change its message - from words, to something more artistic. A rendering shows it with the letters "PMA," but any image is possible, suggesting that if done well the sign could do both the traditional job of advertising of what's inside, and be, in and of itself, a piece of art. The city was a pioneer in the concept of signage-as-high-design with the erection of the landmark PSFS Building. Though many spaces in the Perelman building are already named, this one is still looking for funding, says Ross. The price tag is somewhere between $800,000 and a million, he estimates.

The University of the Arts has a new president: Sean T. Buffington, associate provost for arts and culture and director of cultural programs at Harvard University since 2005.
Buffington worked at Harvard for 13 years, as assistant director of the alumni association; in the development office, with responsibility for strategic planning and fundraising for several new cross-disciplinary programs; as assistant provost for Interfaculty Programs; and deputy chief-of-staff to the president and provost.
That's a lot of titles for a guy who is just 38 years old.
Buffington, who reports to work at Broad and Pine August 15, follows Miguel Angel Corzo, who held the post for seven years.

There was hope this season of an early contract settlement with musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra, but that chance is all but gone now. Insiders say that no talks are scheduled until the week before opening night, in September. Expect a new pact to pick up where the last one left off, with more changes in work rules and greater flexibility for management.

A couple of non-musical observations from the Mann Center this week. At the showing of a new Peter and the Wolf film, one could picture Disney execs slicing out frames showing (you'd better sit down for this) one of the hunters smoking. The scene where the bully throws Peter into a garbage dumpster and stands over him with a gun would no doubt have made it in fine.
And sharp-eyed orchestra fans might have noticed a rare sight on stage: an African American woman. For the first time in about 20 years, according to players, an African American woman has been hired as a substitute in the ensemble. The musician, a violist, is a Baltimore freelancer. Being a sub in the orchestra is a common way of landing a job as a fulltime member, and the orchestra hasn't hired a new African American member since its first three in the 1970s.

AP is reporting the death of Ingmar Bergman. He was ''probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera,'' Woody Allen said in 1988. Lots will be published today on Bergman and his films, but AP’s brief mention of The Magic Flute (pictured) hardly captured what was so beautiful about his handling of Mozart. Bergman was at the height of his fame when the film (made for TV) came out in 1975, and yet he resisted the idea of opera as vehicle for the director’s ego. Whatever nice production touches it has, and it has plenty, it takes the position that opera is first and foremost about music.

I'll be heading north this week to Saratoga Springs to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra in its other summer home, at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. I hope to file a couple of stories for the paper and post a few blog updates. And no, the race track doesn't look like this anymore - but mighty close to it.