ArtsWatch

The Philadelphia Orchestra began its annual three-week residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center this morning with a rehearsal of the Háry János suite. Shown resting between entrances is tuba player Carol Jantsch. The first concert is tonight, with musicians hoping that the rain clears out before curtain time.

Emanuel Ax replaced André Watts tonight for the Philadelphia Orchestra's opening concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. The two sure are different kinds of pianists. Ax is measured where Watts is volatile. And with Watts, the compensation for a few acts of approximation is a very interesting performance. Ax was a lot of things tonight, but interesting wouldn't be the first word I'd use to describe his Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2. A review is slated for Saturday's Inquirer.
Watts, by the way, is out with an injury, says Charles Dutoit.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has received a gift from California-based Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation to help purchase the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, a group of more than 3,500 photographs (including Nude by Anita Brenner, pictured), and to build study and storage rooms for the photography collection. A museum spokeswoman declined to quantify the gift, but said it was in the tens of millions of dollars...The Curtis Institute of Music has received a qualified approval from the Philadelphia Historical Commission to proceed with demolition of the former Locust Club and partial demolition of other historic buildings to make way for an expansion of the conservatory. Curtis must restore the window in the 1610 Locust St. building, whose facade will be kept, to its original condition, according to a Curtis spokeswoman...The Bryn Mawr Film Institute has received $2.5 million from the state's Capital Redevelopment Assistance Program toward a project that includes the $10 million purchase and renovation of the former Bryn Mawr Theater (nee Seville Theater, 1926) on Lancaster Ave. The film center has raised about half of its $10 million goal, a spokeswoman said...Ross L. Mitchell has resigned as executive director of Laurel Hill Cemetery & Friends of Laurel Hill to become head of the Violette de Mazia Foundation...Samuel Barber's unpublished prelude and fugue for organ - performed only once before, in 1928 - will be played by Paul Jacobs at a Sept. 12 concert at the Tenth Presbyterian Church on Spruce Street. Barbara Heyman came across the work at the Library of Congress in 1984 while researching her Barber biography, and asked Jacobs whether he would want to program it.

A pen pal who heard Condoleeza Rice play in Aspen Aug. 2 offered this account:

You have to give Condi credit for getting up in front of over 2000 people and playing with students who have surpassed her musically. She held her own in one movement of the Dvorak Piano Quintet and a movement of the Brahms Piano Quintet, although I suspect she wasn't familiar with the acoustics of the music tent. Because of that, she didn't give enough weight and therefore relinquished the lead that the piano should have. Still, as one of the students commented, it was a good, just not great, performance. Without a doubt she deserved an A for effort.

CDs stream into the office too quickly to keep up. But after screening them, a few go onto the iPod for closer examination. Here are the recordings keeping me going in these last two weeks of August when live music is scarce.
- Arleen Auger is a wonder in a 1986 recording of the Mozart Mass in C Minor (Phoenix Edition), along with a young Thomas Quasthoff in a 1991 take of the Requiem. Gary Bertini conducts the Kölner Rundfunk Sinfonie Orchester.
- Simone Dinnerstein plays Bach and Beethoven in The Berlin Concert (Telarc), and also a substantive but friendly work by Philip Lasser, the Twelve Variations on a Chorale by J.S. Bach.
- Interesting but hardly brimming with obvious genius is a new recording of the Clara Schumann Piano Concerto in A Minor, Opus 7 with pianist Frederick Moyer. I keep listening for strong ideas but have so far found few. The release comes with MacDowell's Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor, which I remember liking more as a 16-year-old hornist in youth orchestra.
- Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery in a terrifically incisive and colorful recording from Glyndebourne conducted by Vladimir Jurowski.

Photo: boy encounters one of Glyndebourne's production props for Betrothal in a Monastery.

If new Philadelphia schools superintendent Arlene Ackerman has a love for art and music in the public schools, she sure has a funny way of expressing it. As The Inquirer's Kristen Graham reports today, supervision of art and music programs is up in the air. Funders are threatening to pull their support, and the arts community is in a state of great anxiety.
Bad timing, this skirmish. The idea of a first-rate arts experience for Philadelphia's public school children had been gathering steam. The School Reform Commission a couple of months ago had been set to vote on making arts core curriculum, but the vote was delayed pending Ackerman's arrival. Meanwhile, the William Penn Foundation is on course to help develop an ambitious coordinated program to restore weekly arts instruction to all Philadelphia children, and communities across the country are taking similar paths.
I hope that Ackerman's ham-fisted actions will only heighten the arts community's recent enthusiasm for restoring arts experiences to a slice of the city's population that can least afford it.
The school district insists that arts education is still on the agenda.
"We're going through the largest expansion of our arts and music programs in recent history," a school district spokesman told The Daily News.
Great. Maybe someday Ackerman will get around to explaining more specifically what that means.

More today in the Inquirer about the School District's ham-fisted approach to staffing the office of art and music.
It sounds like perhaps some progress is being made. And maybe also some more damage done.
Rule No. 1 in the delicate art of fund-raising: never insult those giving you money.
But schools chief Arlene Ackerman seems to subscribe to a different theory.
From the Inquirer article:
"Ackerman also questioned funders who are 'tied to the people instead of the kids.'"
Among those she was apparently referring to were VH1, which has provided more than $1 million in support to the District's music programs, and radio mogul Joe Field. Both wrote letters of concern about the way the District has handled itself in recent months.
It must be that money to fund art and music in schools is coming in so fast Ackerman doesn't need to worry about charm.

Here's an early (unedited) copy of a review slated to appear in Monday's Inquirer.

By Peter Dobrin
INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC
In the gentle aesthetic cultivated by Nico Muhly, just about anything is likely to turn up. Folk tunes run like a ragged, bright thread through his music, but glints of minimalism peek through the woven assemblages, as does early music, and electronic techniques pioneered three decades before the New York-based composer’s birth in 1981.
Muhly is an even more highly developed polymath than he let on Friday night in a show he and a like-minded band of players brought to the First Unitarian Church at 22d and Chestnut Streets. There’s a pretty, distressed, here-I-brought-you-these-things-I-found-by-the-side-of-the-road quality to the way he puts together sounds. And the folk element is knit together with more urban (electronic) influences in a particularly winsome way.
A good curatorial ear is among his most appealing talents. When he paired violist Nadia Sirota with the sanctuary’s organ and other sounds in “Stay in Touch,” he not only exploited a combination few others might brave. He gave the piece shape and message apart from the novel medium – rises and falls in intensity, that discovery feeling of improvisation, the organized build of minimalism.
Muhly didn’t bring some of his most interesting material from Mothertongue – the electronic manipulations of voice that are heavily influenced by John Adams’ On The Transmigration Of Souls. Rather, from that release the group poignantly animated “The Two Sisters,” a reworking of a folk tune about a girl pushed into the river by her sister, her body found by a miller who refashions her remains into a violin. Anyone who thinks the story uniquely gruesome to our time never heard Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, in which a man kills his brother, whose bones are then made into a flute. Sam Amidon’s hardened consonants and matter-of-fact delivery kept contrived drama at bay. You could strain too hard looking for anything Muhly and Mahler have in common. But both know the musical potentialities of a great story and share an unusual ear for the treatment of folk melodies. And both know that tragedy speaks most powerfully when you give it a light touch and let the facts speak for themselves.

Variety weighs in with a review of In Conflict from the Edinburgh Fringe.
The show, BTW, will run for a scheduled 11 performances (!) at the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe in Temple’s Randall Theater starting Sept. 3 before taking off for off-Broadway.