ArtsWatch

Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit has been in charge of the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center for a long time, but now, as the orchestra's all-season chief conductor starting in 2008-09, his presence carries greater authority. Last night's Beethoven Symphony No. 9 here in Saratoga Springs said it was so. A review of the concert will appear in the Inquirer Saturday.

For a few months after the Kimmel Center opened in 2001, visitors noted that the big hall seemed to have a new resident - a quiet, elderly man in rumpled suits who showed up to nearly every concert. He was Russell Johnson, the hall's acoustician, who died at age 83 this week. He is shown above with architect Rafael Viñoly and Wolfgang Sawallisch, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra when it moved into its new home, Verizon Hall. Look here for photos showing the physical manifestation of Johnson's philosophy of adjustable acoustics. Friday's Inquirer carries an obituary.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has hired two new vice presidents. Anna Madonia, vice president of development and board relations, started work July 25, and comes here after a dozen years at the Cleveland Orchestra, the last seven of which with the title of director of development. She arrives not a moment too soon. The orchestra is struggling to complete its $125 million endowment campaign, and the chief fund-raiser job has been vacant since Julie Díaz left a full year ago.
Steven Millen is new manager of orchestra operations. He previously held a similar position at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Millen, who starts work Sept. 10, will be creating a new role at the orchestra, overseeing orchestra personnel and operations, labor relations, electronic media (the photo montage above is promotion from the film Music from the Inside Out), and contracts with venues the orchestra is visiting. Millen will likely get a taste of labor relations Philadelphia style his first day on the job. The Orchestra Association’s current three-year contract with the musicians expires Sept. 17 at 12:01 a.m. – you know, as in just a few days before the first concert of the season. That pact, you might recall, was settled with the intervention of Mayor Street after a bruising, 15-month negotiation.

Carpenter Street near 13th, August 12, 2007, 4:15 p.m., Artist/s unknown

New Street near 4th, August 13, 2007, 10:38 a.m., Artist/s Unknown

5th Street Near Wood, August 13, 2007, 10:53 a.m., Artist/s Unkown (medium: back of a pick-up truck)

The Kimmel Center's "blog" is mostly a marketing vehicle, but programming chief Mervon Mehta has posted a rather revealing tribute to Russell Johnson (left), the Verizon Hall acoustician who died recently. What Mehta reveals, however, is how nervous and resistant the Kimmel continues to be about the outbreak of a truly public discussion on the sound of Verizon.
Mehta writes: "From the moment a new concert hall is contemplated musicians, critics and audiences begin debating its acoustics. It has been my experience that an extremely small minority within those groups have the combination of enough experience, enough technical knowledge and enough understanding of the tuning process to express a complete opinion.
"The 'acoustical history' of the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall has been the topic of many articles that have included proclamations of high praise to expressions of mediocrity both of which were usually accompanied by misunderstandings, included bloated opinions based on single hearings, and relied a huge degree of subjective criteria of what a great concert hall should sound like and even debate about which 'great' halls we should be trying to emulate (or not)."
Okay, message received. We'll all just shut up and listen.
One person, however, who presumably had enough understanding to express a complete opinion was Johnson himself, who issued a report criticizing his own hall's sound.
Will the Kimmel perform the highest possible tribute to Johnson, and do the work it will take to make Verizon a great listening room?

Okay, it's August, but I have to confess that for some time now I have been tracking the fact that tickets for the Metropolitan Opera's Hansel and Gretel conducted by Vladimir Jurowski go on sale today (Sunday) at noon. There are nine performances, but the one that caught my eye is the first - a matinee on Christmas eve day. I am eager to hear what Jurowski - who made a wonderful impression in Philadelphia with Russian repertoire - does with Humperdinck's German folk-tune and basically Wagnerian score.

The Philadelphia Orchestra says that pianist Markus Groh (left) will replace Horacio Gutiérrez in concerts on November 23 and 24. Groh has subbed Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 for Gutiérrez's Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2. The orchestra reports that, according to his management, Gutiérrez has cancelled all of his performances through January 2008 due to primary gastric lymphoma, "which his doctors believe is ninety percent curable with a course of chemotherapy."

Soprano Rose Bampton, 99, died Tuesday in Bryn Mawr. She had a career that took form at the Curtis Institute of Music, ended at the Metropolitan Opera, and made stops in Buenos Aires and on popular American radio shows in between. Off stage she had a razor wit and a finely tuned sense of irony. Look for an obituary in Thursday's Inquirer.

A refurbished underground museum at Franklin Court has made it onto a list of 201 National Park Service projects eligible for federal matching funds over the next 10 years, federal officials announced Thursday.
The $18 million re-do of the bicentennial-era museum — beneath Robert Venturi’s famous “ghost house” image of Ben Franklin’s long-demolished residence — has already attracted a $6 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The 200-plus projects announced form the core of what officials call the “Centennial Challenge” — a push to match $1 billion in federal dollars with $1 billion in private money to spruce up the nation’s parks by 2016, the 100th birthday of the park service.
If congress approves the Bush Administration proposal, $100 million in federal money will be available for matching annually over the next decade.
Several Pennsylvania projects made it onto the list, including the Franklin museum renovation, design and construction of the Flight 93 National Memorial near Somerset, and the rehab of Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg National Military Park.

- Stephan Salisbury

The Philadelphia Theatre Company says that Kathy Bates isn't coming, and so they won't do the world premiere production of Terrence McNally’s drama Unusual Acts of Devotion Oct. 23-Dec. 2. Instead, the new Stephen Sondheim musical revue, Being Alive, will open the troupe's Suzanne Roberts Theatre.
This is what PTC says about the replacement: "Conceived and directed by award-winning musical theater performer Billy Porter, Being Alive blends the songs of Stephen Sondheim with the poetry of William Shakespeare to tell the universal story of man’s seven ages in African-American musical idioms including soul, jazz, blues, R&B, hip-hop, and gospel. Featuring such songs as Anyone Can Whistle, Send in the Clowns, Pretty Women, Children Will Listen, and Being Alive, this musical revue is Sondheim sung in a totally new and thrilling way."
Looking forward to seeing what they mean.
Kathy Bates withdrew from Unusual Acts of Devotion due to health reasons, PTC says.
"Because the world premiere play was written specifically with Ms. Bates in mind, and because the re-casting of a new actress of equal caliber could not be achieved under the time constraints, Philadelphia Theatre Company has decided to postpone the play for a future season," the theater company said in a statement.

Dont' miss Wednesday's letter to the editor in The Inquirer from WHYY board members, who throw around a little corporate jargon ("powerful brand" is my favorite) in defense of WHYY CEO Bill Marrazzo. In a way, it's a classic of the form - a we-have-to-defend-our-guy-because-we-hired-him letter. But the writers, chairman Molly Dickinson Shepard and vice chairman Gerard H. Sweeney, make a startling revelation: "WHYY is in a battle for survival."
That's the story I want to read. It's interesting to know that the board is willing to pay its CEO a half a million a year to run the place. But the question is why, if Marrazzo has been just the guy for the job all these years, is the station still battling for survival?

Diane Claussen is the Philadelphia Theatre Company's new managing director. She starts in the newly created position Sept. 10, just a few weeks before the company moves to its new S. Broad Street home Oct. 21. She will work with PTC's Sara Garonzik. Claussen was managing director of the Paper Mill Playhouse since 2004...The University Museum has a new leader. Richard Hodges has been named director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (pictured), starting work Oct. 1. He had been director of the Institute of World Archaeology at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom...The Curtis Institute of Music has five new board members: Lisa Liem, co-chairman of the Curtis Parents Committee; John H. McFadden, partner of McFadden, Pilkington & Ward LLP; Jeanne McGinn, Curtis faculty member and chair of the Liberal Arts Department; Albert E. Piscopo, president and chief executive officer of the Glenmede Trust Company, N.A.; and Jay H. Tolson, president of Old Lombard, Ltd.