Office: 222 W. Washington Ave. Suite 460 Madison WI 53703
Performance Venue: Overture Center for the Arts (capacity 2255)
Conductor: John de Main (24th season)
Madison is very proud of its shining new hall, built totally with private funds. The concert hall contains a magnificent Klais concert organ. In fact, the organ took nearly three years to design and build. Including its unique movable chamber, the instrument weighs in at 174 tons and is believed to be the heaviest movable object in any theater in the world.
The orchestra obviously has a wealth of financial support; soloists for the current season include Gil Shaham, Sharon Isbin, Olga Kern, and Christopher O'Riley, among others. Orchestra personnel includes faculty and students from the Mead-Witter School of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, putting into place all the parts for an orchestra of unmatched quantity and quality. In the state's liberal bastion, one would expect that audiences would expect concert programs far beyond the standards of the repertory.
And yet, that's not what is happening. Here are a couple of examples:
- Prokofiev: Love for Three Oranges Suite
- Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto
- Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 3 (who plays that?)
Well, they're all Russian, but it's O - C - S
OR
- Ravel: Mother Goose Suite (this gets trotted out often, but I've heard the MSO play it better under a guest conductor.)
- Barber: Piano Concerto
- Dvorak: Symphony No. 9, From the New World (It's easy to offer a perfunctory reading of this old war horse. Among the most revelatory (to me) was David Becker's effort with the UW-Madison Symphony Orchestra.)
And again: O - C - S
The rest is same-old, same old. Throw in the Rodrigo Concierto as well as the Three-Cornered Hat Suite (those must be popular this year) and look at symphonies by Mendelssohn (5), Brahms (1), and Schumann (1), and things aren't really that thrilling. At least the soloists are of the highest caliber.
John DeMain is, of course, a conductor with many gifts and talents, but sometimes he has appeared to be ill-prepared for the task at hand. Most in the orchestra and many in the music community know that Mr. DeMain longs to conduct opera more than anything else. I understand that he is an entirely different conductor in the pit. It's a difficult task, trying to transfer one's energies and skills between symphonic and operatic work.
Madison audiences deserve that kind of (operatic) effort in the concert hall, and the orchestra needs to define a plan to attract an audience beyond its subscription base.
Madison audiences deserve that kind of (operatic) effort in the concert hall, and the orchestra needs to define a plan to attract an audience beyond its subscription base.
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