Word: conductor
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Allen shows what he can do on the fourth of nine disks that Columbia Records issued in its Black Composers Series, a project that the firm unfortunately seems to have discontinued. With the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, led by Black conductor Paul Freeman, Allen gives a stunning performance of the Violin Concerto (1962) by Black composer Roque Cordero (b. 1917), a native of Panama who for some years has been professor of music at Illinois State University...
...Berlioz' Harold in Italy, and in 1976 was soloist in a New York performance of the Viola Concerto by the late Harvard professor Walter Piston. Two years ago he gave the premiere of a work by a Black composer from Ghana, Samuel Johnson, with an orchestra led by Black conductor Karl Hampton Porter...
Moye made his Boston debut this April in Jordan Hall, playing Saint-Saens' celebrated A-minor concerto at the season's final event offered by Concerts in Black and White, where Black conductor Wendell English leads the multiracial orchestra. The concert was the best by the orchestra this year. And Moye's performance was impeccably elegant--an impression confirmed when WGBH broadcast a tape of the program the next month. Regrettably, none of the Boston newspapers reviewed the event, but a musical genius like Moye ought to be brought back soon--by someone...
Today's U.S. orchestra musicians are better trained, more accomplished, better paid and more widely applauded than ever before. Hence, as they sit onstage performing the masterworks of music history, it follows that they must be serenely happy. Right? Wrong, says Composer-Conductor Gunther Schuller. Symphonic players are "embittered, disgruntled, bored" and "have come to hate music," Schuller maintains. Traveling around the country as a guest conductor, he finds not joy but "apathy and cynicism" abounding in orchestral ranks; despite their high technical competence, the musicians have no "spiritual identification" with the scores they play...
...other orchestral sources around the country are moved, it is mostly to outrage. "Schuller is a fantastic composer and musician," says Irving Bush, trumpeter with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, "but he is an absolutely atrocious conductor. When someone can't conduct at all, of course the musicians are going to be bored." Frank Miller, principal cellist of the Chicago Symphony, defends unionization by recalling the way things were before the union had clout: "Every year, 30 or 40 people were fired for such things as inattentiveness to a particular note." Some musicians concede, however, that the modern union contract...