The Canadian Opera Company have been looking for a new general director since the much-loved Richard Bradshaw died unexpectedly in August 2007. This morning, the COC announced that German-born Alexander Neef, currently the casting director at the Opera Nationale de Paris, has accepted the post.

Neef is just 34 years old but according to David Ferguson, president of the COC Board of Directors, “He was the unanimous choice of the search committee and of the senior members of the company who met with him.” Ferguson went on to say that Neef’s relative youth was, “one of the things we liked about him as a candidate is that he is young. The COC is facing the challenge of attracting a younger audience and we hope he will give youth his attention.”

The CBC reported that Neef’s major goals for the opera company were to attracting great artists, including more international opera stars; creating a high-quality standard repertoire and adding new operas the COC has never performed and commissioning and producing new operas. He is also working on extending the COC’s planning cycle to help with attracting singers booked years in advance.

The leadership of the COC is not fully settled though since Neef will not be filling the conductor’s role as Bradshaw did. A search for new music director will commence in earnest when Neef takes up his post in October.

CBC | La Scena Musicale | CP

It’s backwards day at The Guardian. Arts critics report on various sporting events while their counterparts head off to see the opera, symphony, a modern dance show, a pop concert and a contemporary sculpture exhibition.

Quite an interesting idea although their editor’s instructions to draw parallels is embraced with a little too much enthusiasm at times.

Far and away the best piece of the whole exercise was created by golf correspondent Lawrence Donnegan who saw Yefim Bronfman and the San Francisco Symphony.

“[W]hen this concert ended the audience went (and I use the following word advisedly) bonkers. This reaction shocked me, because I had no idea that people who were into classical music were also into going bonkers at the end of a performance. It was a bit like turning up at St Andrews and seeing the crusty old gentlemen of the R&A stage-diving after Tiger Woods holed a putt to win the Open.”
[...]
“Yefim Bronfman is a genius, no doubt, but he didn’t write his own script - Brahms did - and the ending hasn’t changed in the last 150 years, and won’t for another 150. Tiger Woods, on the other hand, writes a new concerto every day, each one better than the last.”

Fair enough, although you could say the same thing about sport most of the time. You know that in the end one side will win and the other will lose. The magic comes not from what is happening but how it is happening. Come-from-behind upsets and brilliant displays of athleticism are what make sport so exciting but we have those in music too.

In the ten years Miss Mussel has actively been attending live performances, she has seen a singer totally command the stage by sheer force of personality despite mediocre rep; an orchestra that plays ok most of the time produce a reading of Mahler 5 that was completely out of this world; a young conductor step in at the last minute and bring the house down and musicians displaying such virtuosity that it makes one marvel at the artist’s control over their body.

What’s different, of course, is that there aren’t 60,000 people screaming after a soloist plays a particularly spectacular passage. This is less true in opera, where the audience is more apt make noise when they feel so moved but on the whole great moments are appreciated in reverent silence. Think of that what you like but 2 minutes spent in the lobby at the interval will put quickly to bed the idea that the moment had gone unnoticed.

If sport has one thing art music doesn’t it is the larger sense of community. Not everyone watches hockey, but there must be something special about playing in the Stanley Cup final and knowing that people all over the continent are crouched in their living rooms completely caught up in the excitement and willing you to achieve more than you ever thought possible.

As much as we would like to protest to the contrary, art music will always be a minority concern. Two possible exceptions are the Last Night of The Proms and the Fourth of July concert with the Boston Pops but for the most part, high culture events fail to galvanize a nation the way The Ashes or the Rugby World Cup do. The obvious reason for this is that orchestras are not affiliated with nationality, so no swell of patriotism is felt in the hearts of concert-goers when things are going particularly well. A warm glow and a feeling of gratefulness to have encountered such beauty, yes. God Bless America, no.

The question is then: does its minority interest make art music irrelevant? To the population at large perhaps but in and of itself, no. There many sports that are followed by far less people than the number that regularly enjoys the opera or symphony. Biathalon for example. Or ski jumping. An event’s popularity may decide its merit as a commercial enterprise but not the value of its existence in absolute terms.

Of course, there are some are chomping the bit to point out that art music speaks to the soul while sport is a mere contest. This line of thinking brings us to dangerous territory: The Value Judgment. It is the postmodern fashion to say that nothing is more valuable than something else and that the lines between high and low culture are arbitrary and without meaning. While this is often a wishy-washy cop-out for those that don’t want to be perceived as the snobs they secretly are, in this case the answer is that most disappointing of sporting outcomes (cricket excepted): a tie. As with apples and oranges, one may be preferred over the other but neither is inherently better.

Miss Mussel has given much thought of late as to what exactly a critic’s role in the 21st century. Is it best to get out now and take up plumbing or is a brave new world awaiting just over the horizon? Does criticism even matter any more and if it doesn’t what’s the next step?

In his final column for The Australian, art critic Sebastian Smee tells what he thinks it all means. The entire piece is brilliantly composed and well worth the read. Here is the final paragraph:

Good criticism (and I mean this as an expression of an ideal) should be risky, challenging, candid and vulnerable. It should be urbane one moment, gauchely heartfelt the next. It should kick against cant wherever it sees it, and cherish and applaud not only art but the impulse to make art, for that impulse, which comes out of life as it is lived, is the real mystery, and the source of everything that makes it wonderful.

Hear that sound? That’s the nail being hit right on the head.

Is Gilles Apap the real deal or a gimmick?

Miss Mussel is going to have to take the middle road and say a bit of both. She very much liked the idea of him and his ecumenical approach to high and low art but the reality was, admittedly, a tad irritating.

Remember the kid in high school who was so proud of his alternativeness (alternance?) that he made it a point whenever possible? And then how his earnestness negated any climbing in the coolness rankings that he had previously managed? That’s kind of what happened on Friday night.

The music was good, the orchestra was enjoying themselves and the audience loved it. What ground Miss Mussel’s gears was the constant mentioning of the fact that what was about to happen was different (with the implicated synonyms being more enlightened, right and better) to what the audience was expecting. Just play the music and let Miss Mussel decide if and how it was different to her expectations. This is something she does at every concert, or indeed every time she hears something.

We were treated to a slide show of snaps showing Apap balancing a bass on his head, his house in California, him with his fiddle teachers etc. Perhaps this was an attempt to get help the audience break down the fourth wall, as it were, and get to know the performer. Miss Mussel is still too young yet to be an official grumpy old crank, but this part of the show seemed rather pointless.

The video, in which M. Apap created a raga out of the Paris Métro chime, was relevant to the evening’s program and therefore interesting, so it’s not the interpolated multimedia that is the rub, just randomness, it seems.

Miss Mussel is a big fan of alternative approaches to presenting classical music. The Yellow Lounge and the upcoming NUMUS Revolutions are both brilliant ideas. It’s just that…well…acute self-consciousness/arrogance is awkward in any setting.

What do you think? Is Miss Mussel aging before her time or are her misgivings justified?

A review of the concert is available here.

After a brief hiatus, the indefatigable Sir Donald Tovey is back.

At this time of day, it ought hardly to be necessary to point out that our criterion must not be that of the criminologists who, at the end of the nineteenth century, demonstrated to their own satisfaction that they could not distinguish genius from insanity. I have it on the infallible (or at all events indisputable) authority of my own intuition that such writers are condemned to spend many thousands years in Purgatory collecting statistics of the wild-oat crops sown by ten dull persons for every genius into whose private affairs they have intruded.

Correctness will not prevent the current criticism of any period from manifestly bristling with abnormalities when we look back on it with the light of later knowledge. But critics do not always fail to recognize the important artists of their day. The neglect and poverty in which Mozart died so young would have been an affair of a few lean years if he had survived it. In fact, poor Salieri’s reputation has been terribly blasted by his remark that, Mozart’s death was a good thing for us other musicians, because if he had lived for much longer we should all have starved.

These comments are a propos for Miss Mussel at the moment as she begins the year as a proper music critic. In the ten reviews she has written over the past four months, she has discovered an additional responsibility borne by the critic that goes far beyond writing about the concert and making witty remarks about the state of things, as it were.

The mantle of Curator Of The Arts is heavy, bit unwieldly and, at times, downright bothersome. The community for which Miss Mussel writes is a one paper town, so there is no opposing opinion to temper the occasional bluster. Balancing an honest account of the event with the sometimes competing goal of encouraging the public to attend the next time is tricky and a skill that can only be learned in time.

If there is one thing Miss Mussel could say on behalf of criticism, it’s that critics really do love music (believe it or not) and the whole point of writing about it is to try and get others excited about it as well. Less than successful aspects of the concert are mentioned in aid of improving the next performance as well as illustrating that we were actually there and actively listening.

Although Miss Mussel must admit that it is thoroughly enjoyable to find the correct adjectives and turns of phrase to describe disasters, missteps, laziness or lack of talent, the same pleasure is had when writing about performances that are life-altering in their intensity and wonder. Reporting on a less than satisfactory concert does not give her any joy. Not in the slightest. Sorry to burst your bubble.

In fact, the best concert is when you have no words at all, when all you can do is sit in stunned silence after it is over and feel nothing but grateful that you were able to experience it. That’s what makes this whole endeavour worth it.