June 29th, 2008

by: Randy Kinkel

June 29, 2008

Bruce Coppock retires as president and managing director of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra

( Phoenix, AZ )
•Coppock retires from SPCO
•Venezuela tries Beethoven in Prisons
•Donizetti in Ball Park Draws crowds in SF

It's this week in classical Music, an update on what's jappening in the classical music world, I'm Randy Kinkel.

Saint Paul Chamber orchestra's President and Managing director Bruce Coppock announced his retirement, effective immediately, because of a return of a rare form of Cancer he was initially diagnosed with in 2006.
He has begun an intensive Chemotherapy treatment regimen at mayo Clinic. Coppock, the longest-serving managing director in the SPCO's 50-year history, was a cellist for 20 years until a hand injury in the 1980s forced him into management; and in that role he oversaw many of the orchestra's key successes and innovations, e In 2004, Coppock persuaded the organization to shed itself of a traditional music director. It has since taken on a series of high-profile artistic partners - de Waart joins SPCO in 2010 - each adding their own distinctive style to the orchestra's sound. Instead of the orchestra's music selections being handed down to musicians from a baton-waving figure on high, the artists themselves were empowered to make those choices. In a statement, Coppock said, "as obsessed as I've been with the SPCO for the last nine years, I've also had a life. And there has come a time when I need to spend 100 percent of my time to focus on my life."

San Francisco Opera's Free Simulcast of Donizetti's "Lucia Di Lammermoor" drew some 23,000 opera fans to AT&T Park last week, according to Opera Officials. It was the secong simulcast the company did from it's home in the War memorial Opera House. The Crowd at the Ballpark that usually hosts the San Francisco Giants got to see Natalie Dessay make her opera debut in the Title role, and at the end of the night opera cast members donned Giants baseball caps, T-shirts, and the team's signature orange foam fingers.

Venezuela has taken it's renowned "El Sistema" concept of youth orchestras that produced Los Angeles Philharmonic Director Gustavo Dudamel and others, and extended them to some of the nation's toughest prisons. Hundreds of prisoners are learning a musical repertoire that includes Beethoven and Venezuelan Folk Songs. "This is our attempt to achieve the humanization of prison life," said Kleiberth Lenin Mora, 32, a lawyer who helped create the prison orchestras, modeling them on the system that teaches tens of thousands of poor children in Venezuela classical music. "We start with the simple idea that performing music lifts the human being to another level." Nurul Ahmad, a Malaysian Law Student who says she is innocent of the drug smuggling charges that put her in the women's Prison outside caracas 7 months ago, says the program means a lot to her. "... when the music begins, I am lifted away from this place." Ms. Ahmad plays violin and sings in the prison's orchestra.

For more on these and other items and events, go to the 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 by Mozart and his contemporaries. I'm Randy Kinkel, for this Week in Classical Music, on listener supported 89-five KBAQ Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.

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