ArtsWatch

The Philadelphia Orchestra is turning its Beijing concert into a benefit whose proceeds will help rebuild the earthquake-devastated Sichuan school system.
The June 2 concert, with pianist Lang Lang and conductor Christoph Eschenbach, is being recorded and broadcast by CCTV - China's largest TV network- which will feed it to Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV to broadcast it to its viewing audience. The concert will not air live, but by delay no later than June 5 on CCTV and by Phoenix no later than June 8. Potentially hundreds of millions of viewers will see and hear the orchestra.
Negotiations are underway with PBS for a U.S. broadcast, said an orchestra spokeswoman.
The orchestra is waiving its broadcast fee and will make a collective donation to the China Youth Development Foundation, which is coordinating the adopt-a-school program. Over $3 million has been raised from corporations so far, the orchestra spokeswoman said, from Walt Disney Company; Merrill Lynch; Microsoft (China) Co., Ltd.; NASDAQ; Coca Cola China Limited; Motorola China Limited; Tyco Electronics; and Black & Decker.
Broadcasts will solicit individual donations. The campaign will continue to collect donations until June 9. Governor Rendell is supporting the effort, with volunteers from the Commonwealth's Beijing office staffing the campaign.
The orchestra is in the last leg of a three-week tour of Asia. Before China, the ensemble played concerts in Seoul and Japan.
Photo: China Daily

Interesting review of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach in Japan. More reviews as they come.

The Keystone State Boychoir, making its first European tour, leaves town June 19 and stops in Monaco, where it is hosted by Prince Albert II as the guest choir of the annual Fête de la Musique. The boys will also perform with Les Petits Chanteurs de Monaco (the Little Singers of Monaco) and will sing a Mass in memory of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace (pictured here, as if you didn't know). Among the choirboys is Nick Kelly, 15, whose father is John B. Kelly 3d, which means he refers to the Princess as Aunt Grace...Edna Landau, founder and former managing director of IMG Artists, as well as Lang Lang's former agent, has joined the Colburn School - the so-called "Curtis of the West" - as director of career development, a job designed to help prepare music students for the real world...The Inquirer will have more on Anne d'Harnoncourt, the Philadelphia Museum of Art director who died Sunday, this weekend, but here, just in case you missed it, is the New York Times' appreciation...The Betsy Ross House will host an expanded, week-long celebration of Flag Day starting June 8 featuring a collection of rare flags, a street fair, a giant flag composed of Post-It notes, performances, rock and pop bands, and even the traditional June 14 Flag Day ceremony.

- Peter Dobrin and Stephan Salisbury

Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra have agreed to an extention of the conductor's tenure, keeping him there at least through 2017-18, the orchestra announced today.
Welser-Möst became seventh music director in Cleveland in 2002.
The orchestra also announced five new "long-form" works leading up to the orchestra's 100th birthday in 2017-18 - by Marc-André Dalbavie, Osvaldo Golijov, HK Gruber, Matthias Pintscher, and Kaija Saariaho. Not a bad list.

The Comcast building's 87-foot video screen was working Saturday afternoon - and then it wasn't. This large, glowing strip in the new skyscraper's lobby makes an impressive presence for itself. When we wandered in, it was showing waves rolling in. Images were accompanied by possibly new-age electronic music. The screen on which the images are shown is almost invisible, so that when no image is showing, the wood veneer on which the screen hangs magically reappears. Starry shots of the universe came next, for just a moment, and then the images stopped. We stuck around another ten minutes or so, but nothing more happened.
The shops downstairs haven't opened yet, the dancing fountain was working only sometimes, and two other visitors wandered around the lonely plaza. On this day, the building was hardly a generator of street activity.
And yet, despite the heat, despite it being Saturday in a city where everyone seems to escape to the shore on feels-like-summer weekends, Center City was bulging and pulsing. Every few blocks, downtown was casting a different atmosphere, luring a different constituency.
Several hundred David Sedaris readers stood in line on Sansom Street to get a few words with the author, His Royal Quirkiness, hosted by Joseph Fox Bookshop.
The art show in Rittenhouse Square was drawing a steady parade of sidewalk critics. On Walnut Street at 18th, a violinist, perhaps ten years old, was working up an impressive head of steam with something that sounded suspiciously like Paganini, while a Chinese elder held court at 17th and Walnut, smiling through the sound of his pipa.
The great Wanamaker organ was making the building rumble. We didn't even know it was organ day at Macy's. For reasons that are hard to explain, there's something extremely comforting in knowing that you can hear a Star Wars medley on organ while buying tank-tops, Toddler Size Small three for $7, while smelling white-bread toasting nearby in the department store lunchroom.
It may not be Proust, but father and daughter left feeling very happy.
(Inquirer photo: Comcast Tower, the city's tallest, for now.)

American composer Charles Wuorinen (whose photo as a boy, from his website, was just too wonderful to pass up) has been commissioned by New York City Opera to write a work based on Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, the company announced. Obviously it's early in the game for firm answers, but we prodded the 70-year-old composer Monday for a few clues to what will be heard when the work arrives on stage in the spring of 2013.

Why did this project appeal to you?
Well, it has the potential to be a very dramatic thing – operatic doomed love and tragedy, the conflict between love and duty if you will. It’s just the basic material out of which many operas and tragedies can be made. It’s just that the circumstances are updated to our time.

Have you done any work on it yet?
We don’t yet know whether Annie Proulx will do the libretto, so I haven’t done anything directly. We have had a few preliminary discussions and I have a number of other works to get out of the way. I see starting in earnest beginning in 2009.

What will determine whether Proulx does the libretto?
It’s a question of time. We are all very busy. I don’t want to speak for her. I think she wants to, but there may be practical considerations that may get in the way.

What if she doesn’t do the libretto? Would you write it yourself?
We have some other ideas in mind. I doubt I would do it. It’s not a wise idea generally speaking.

What are the big challenges in this project, at least as you see them now?
Without knowing what form the libretto takes it’s difficult to be specific. I think that I would like to have a somewhat larger role for the wives of the two principal characters than in the current story. For questions of vocal balance and for theatrical aspects as well.

Have you thought about structure? Will it follow the film or the original story?
No, I think it will follow the story. The film has its own character, and I am not partial to referencing the film. One thing the film fails to do is to make quite clear the degree to which the landscape, the mountains, the effect it all has on the characters. It’s a very hard and unforgiving environment in which these people have to function and it does prevent them from taking the kind of escape routes they might otherwise have. I know that Annie Proulx is very much engaged by this question, not just in this story but in others that come from the same collection. I want to make sure that we have elements of menace in the landscape clearly delineated.

Who will design the production?
We’re not sure yet. I have a couple of ideas, but I think it’s premature.

Do you see any operatic ancestors to this anywhere in the repertoire?
Oh, I don’t know. Certain aspects of it are pretty generically operatic, but I have no models in mind. It’s a grand tragedy. I think of it that way.

Is hanging this work on a popular film an advantage?
I have no idea. I would imagine that by the time this is produced the film won’t be on people’s minds much anymore. The group interested in the operatic stage is not the same public interested in film. If we’re talking about 2013 at the earliest, I would imagine that the film will pretty much have faded. My interests in this are on the merits of the work.

What does subject matter say to you as far as style?
I am going to set it simply the way I would set anything else. I am not very adept at self-description. People can make their own descriptions of it. I would hesitate to make any descriptive adjectives about what I do.

Would you say that published descriptions of your style are accurate? Is it fair to say that you write using a 12-tone method?
The problem with verbal description of music begins with the incompleteness of the descriptive adjectives and goes on to the trouble that the adjectives mean something different to different people. Generally speaking words that look as if they are technical – such as serial – are really not well understood by most people who use them. They become tags. Other descriptive adjectives that are about aesthetics – beautiful, ugly, lyrical, dramatic, what have you - are almost vacuous. They don’t really say much of anything.

And yet you write frequently about music, and have been described as an eloquent writer.
No. I may be eloquent, but I don’t write often. I think my attitude is that I stand against a kind of pandering in the arts which I think is very destructive in the long run and has the characteristics of confusing high culture and popular culture and has the result of damaging both. Over the years I haven’t deviated much from my principle. I’ve been criticized for not going along with the flow, but I am not going to change my fundamental values because they have become less widely held than they used to be. I think all this discussion of this sort is not helpful, because I think people who have come to my work and understand where it fits in in the larger picture have no difficulty with it.

Does this project involve any special sensitivity to this being about a gay relationship?
I suppose it requires a certain empathy no matter what the relationship is. It’s a story of doomed love, and it happens that in this case a large part of what the story is is a homosexual relationship taking place in a very homophobic society. It’s part of the reason why it appealed to me, because that has resonance in our own day. For better or worse, today we don’t care if a woman has a child out of wedlock, but at the time Faust was written it was an issue. Well, our involvement with that story today is a little put on, a little artificial. However this comes from the land of Matthew Shepard after all, so it makes it a little bit more believable in our own time. People in this kind of relationship had to do what they had to do. They could not fulfill their lives the way they wanted to.

A celebration of Juneteenth National Freedom day has been organized by Independence National Historical Park, culminating in a ceremony honoring African ancestors at Washington Square Park from noon to at least 2 p.m., Friday, June 13.
Washington Square, one of the original city squares, became a potter's field in
1706 and also served as a burial ground for Philadelphia's free and enslaved Africans. Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery, harks back to June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas with the news that war had ended and the enslaved were free.
The June 13th commemoration, a collaboration between the park and the Pennsylvania Juneteenth Coalition, celebrates Juneteenth National Freedom Day, recognized by the Pennsylvania legislature as the oldest African-American holiday observance in the United States. The observance begins at 10 a.m. with tours organized by the Juneteenth coalition. Starting at Penn's Landing, the tours will proceed to Dock Street, where small boats would sail up the creek to bring goods into Philadelphia; Christ Church, where Africans were baptized and married; Franklin Court, site of Benjamin Franklin's home; Carpenters’ Hall, where the First Continental Congress was held in 1774, and Independence Hall.
The tours will end at Washington Square.
Visitors to the square will be able to witness a musical drum, dance, and spoken work re-enactment of a 1783 African ceremony, a tribute to African ancestors buried at Washington Square and to the millions of unmarked graves that exist throughout the United States, a park spokeswoman said.
- Stephan Salisbury

(Illustration: Thomas Nast, "The Past and the Future," Emancipation print, published by J. W. Umpehent 1864, from the Library Company of Philadelphia.)

We know you've been secretly hoping someone would dovetail the two big loves in your life - classical music and athletic shoes. And so Adidas, ever the divining-rod for retail culture's next appetite even before retail culture knows it, has obliged.
Introducing the Lang Lang Adidas Gazelle. Sleek. Aerodynamic. Black. Gold. Hits stores this month.
The $85 shoe has the "Lang Lang name in Chinese at the heels as well as a silhouette of the pianist in typical concert pose. Moreover the inside of the sneaker links to Lang Lang’s music in having golden piano pedals printed on the sock liners," Adidas says.
Buy a pair today, ties the laces together, and throw them over the nearest telephone wire while mumbling a chant for the pianist's career.
Lang Lang, BTW, is to be the subject of a New Yorker profile by David Remnick, we understand from Inquirer colleague Jennifer Lin. Remnick was tailing the pianist in China while Lin met up with the Philadelphia Orchestra on tour in Beijing.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will honor its late CEO with an official "day of appreciation" June 19. On that day, in memory of Anne d'Harnoncourt, the museum will be open free from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., and City Council is expected to issue a resolution honoring the museum's longtime director, who died June 1. An audio tour narrated by d'Harnoncourt will also be available free of charge. A tribute featuring the Philadelphia Boys Choir will take place at 6 p.m.
An official memorial service for d’Harnoncourt has been set for Sunday, Sept. 7, which would have been her 65th birthday.

She's in. She's out.
She's in, but only for a while, and then she's out.
And now - finally? - she's back in.
Hai-Ye Ni, the principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, received tenure at the end of the orchestra's Asian tour, and will continue on in her current job, an orchestra spokeswoman confirmed.
You might remember that a year ago she was given the boot by her colleagues. She huffed and puffed, legally speaking, and won another year.
Players were divided about what to do at the close of this season, but in the end she gathered the support she needed to stay.
Unusually rough entry. Let us be among the first to extend a warm welcome.
A total of 10 first-year orchestra players, by the way, were awarded tenure at the end of tour.

Jeremy Rothman is the Philadelphia Orchestra's new vice president for artistic planning starting Sept. 1. He comes from a similar position at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Rothman (pictured) studied at Eastman, worked a summer at the Marlboro Festival as stage manager, and was an American Symphony Orchestra League management fellow. He once helped Gidon Kremer remember something very important the violinist left behind.
Mario Mestichelli becomes vice president for finance and chief financial officer June 23. He previously worked at PFM Group in Philadelphia.
(Photo credit: Kirsten Beckerman)

C'mon in. It's free.
The Institute of Contemporary Art says that thanks to a gift from a member of its board of overseers, the museum will charge $0 for admission for the next five years.
Glenn R. Fuhrman - big New York money guy, contemporary art collector, alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School - made the gift, which the museum is declining to quantify.
The free-admission policy starts July. 1, and ICA director Claudia Gould says she hopes it will last more than five years.
"The idea is that we would continue it. I believe this is the beginning of our relationship with Glenn. I don't think it's the end. It will take a while for people to know that we’re free, so we are hoping to have other board members give to a marketing campaign we would do in tandem."
Gould declined to say how much the gift was, but would say the money will be spent out over five years, not kept in perpetuity in the endowment.
ICA drew 25,000 visitors for the year ending June 30, an ICA spokeswoman said. So, considering that the museum has always been free to Penn students, faculty, staff and members, and with current admission at $6 per head, it might be reasonable to speculate that Fuhrman's gift comes to about $100,000 per year.
Pictured is a piece from “Mike's World: Michael Smith & Joshua White (and other collaborators),” at the ICA through Aug. 3.

The automaton at the Franklin Institute will make a rare working appearance tomorrow, Tuesday, at 3 p.m.
The little robot, made between 1800 and 1810, is an early (though not the earliest) stab at artificial intelligence. He draws and writes. For conservation reasons, he doesn't get out much any more. But his caretaker, Charles Penniman, will crank him into operation in his current home, the "Amazing Machine" exhibition at the Franklin Institute.
The automaton, by the way, won himself a starring role in Brian Selznick's "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a pretty wonderful book whose narrative is told, in large part, through long stretches of illustration-only pages.

The Philadelphia Orchestra begins its season of meeting the elements this week. Saturday night, the orchestra plays Longwood Gardens (whose Peirce's Park is pictured here). It's the first time the ensemble has matched its plush with Longwood's bird calls and fountain splashes since 1941, which is funny considering the fact that the orchestra and Longwood have something in common: horticulturist and very active orchestra board member, Elise du Pont, who championed the concert at the du Pont-founded and -underwritten 1,050-acre patch of formal gardens, meadows, woodlands and conservatories three miles northeast of Kennett Square.
Tickets are going fast, but are steep ($35 to $150) considering that it's an outdoor concert, and the fact that Longwood certainly has pockets deep enough to underwrite the event a little more generously. Last look at its tax forms reveals a startlingly huge endowment: $572 million. But powering up those lawnmowers must be a big line item these days. And as Longwood's spokeswoman says, fireworks are included, and, for the most expensive tickets, a reception.
In any case, the orchestra presents essentially the same program of Bernstein, Gershwin, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky at Cabrini College the night before, Friday, at 7 p.m., at its first free neighborhood concert of the summer.
Then, Monday night, Yo-Yo Ma opens Philadelphia Orchestra season in Fairmount Park. After the first three nights, the Mann Center concerts take a break while the orchestra heads to Colorado for the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival.

The Curtis Institute of Music has received $1.5 million from Milton L. Rock to create a chair in composition studies, which will be named in his honor. The new faculty chair will be held by Jennifer Higdon, who has been a member of the Curtis faculty since 1994.
Additionally, Curtis will receive a matching donation of $1.5 million from board chairman H. F. "Gerry" Lenfest. Lenfest has pledged up to $17 million to match any gift that endows a faculty chair.
The Rock gift will also establish a student fellowship in which the fellowship holder writes a dance work to be performed by students of the Rock School for Dance Education. Wang Jie (pictured), a twenty-eight-year-old student born and raised in Shanghai, gets the honors this first time.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's first neighborhood concert of the season was rained out Friday night. But violinist Phil Kates wasn't giving up without a fight. He serenaded the crowd at Cabrini College - albeit in the gym - as the rain came down.
Thanks to Joe Kaczmarek for the photo.

The Philadelphia Orchestra dipped a toe into a new summer venue over the weekend - Longwood Gardens. The potential of the orchestra in this setting is enormous. Actually, the Philadelphians did perform here once before, in 1941. Details in tomorrow's paper, or here now.