February 10, 2008

It’s this week in classical music, an update on what’s happening in the classical music world, I’m Randy Kinkel.

The Alban Berg Quartet is disbanding after nearly 4o years together.  Their farewell season begins next week.  the group began thinking about disbanding in 2005, when Thomas Kakuska, it’s original violist, died of cancer.  He was replaced by his student Isabel Charusius, but it just wasn’t the same.  Cellist Valentin Erben explained, “All of us wanted to go on… and HE wanted us to go on… Isabel does an incredible job.  But there was a big rupture in our hearts. It was such a rich time…I’m grateful I have lived it… Now there is space for something else.”

What do New York Times Classical Music critics listen to for pleasure?  The paper recently came out with a critics’ confessional, of sorts, detailing the guilty and not-so-guilty pleasures of these highly-respected, Symphonic scribes. Anthony Tomassini, for example, loves the sometimes schmaltzy tunes of American Composer Leroy Anderson.  He calls the composer’s “Blue Tango” “Breezy, Tuneful, and Smart.”  Bernard Holland loves the piano music of Federico Mompou, which he says have a simplicity that only an inspired composer could think of.  Critic Allan Kozinn likes the deeply personal styles of past musicians like Horowitz and Thomas Beecham; and Steve Smith admits an obsession with the German Soprano Simone Kermes.

Robert Ulrich, Target Corporation CEO, plans to build a Musical Instrument Museum just outside Phoenix.  According to Ulrich, the museum will be the only free-standing museum in the country devoted to instruments of world cultures.  The $125 million-dollar facility will have 180,000 square feet in two stories, with 75,000 square feet of exhibition space.  Included in the plans are an auditorium, Conservation lab, a recording studio, and galleries where visitors can see and hear instruments being played.  Visitors will also get to try some of the instruments for themselves.  The 5,000 item collection includes a century-old Japanese Gamelan, an original Adolphe Sax Saxophone, and drums from the Congo.  The museum will be open in 2010.

For more on these and other items and events, go to our website kbaq.org; be listening each week at this time for another update, and join me every weekday at noon for The Mozart Buffet, an hour of music of Mozart and his contemporaries.  I’m Randy Kinkel, for KBAQ’s “This week in Classical Music” on listener-supported 89.5 KBAQ, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.