This Week in Classical Music

by: Randy Kinkel

February 08, 2009

Lukas Foss

( Phoenix )
•Composer Luke Foss
•William Friedkin Backs out of Al Gore Opera
•Belt tightening in the orchestral world

This Week in Classical Music 2/08/09

It’s This Week in Classical Music, an update on what’s happening in the classical music world, I’m Randy Kinkel.

Composer Lukas Foss died this past week after suffering a heart attack at his home in Manhattan. He had also been suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He was 86. The composer, who once proudly stated that he never belonged to any school of music, was also an accomplished pianist who played with the Boston Symphony and a conductor who worked with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Jerusalem Symphony and the Milwaukee Symphony. He was known for his musical curiosity and his melding and combining different styles of music, including the avant-garde and minimalism. His Wife Cornelia Foss said he had been working until a year and a half ago, when Parkinson’s had made it too difficult. She said, “It was terribly hard, but he had such an extraordinary spirit he took it all with such grace”

Movie director William Friedkin, who directed films like the Exorcist and The French Connection, has backed out of the La Scala production of “An Inconvenient Truth”, adapted from the Al Gore Documentary. Friedkin cited “Creative Differences” with the Poet JD McClatchy, who’s writing the libretto. The opera’s composer, Giovanni Battistelli, though, says Friedkin left for personal, not artistic reasons; he also criticized Friedkin’s use of special effects in the opera, saying “Opera isn’t Hollywood”. No word yet on a replacement; the opera is scheduled to open in May.

More belt tightening from the Orchestra world: the economy has hit hard there as well: The Shreveport Symphony has cancelled the rest of their season; the financially strapped Charleston Symphony has slashed its budget and promises fewer concerts and fewer musicians; the Portland Maine Symphony Orchestra is cutting jobs, trimming budgets and eliminating programs in an attempt to fill a 220,000 dollar deficit, and Cincinnati Symphony musicians took an 11 percent pay cut, as has the orchestra’s Leader, Paavo Jarvi.

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 for The Mozart Buffet, an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries. I’m Randy Kinkel, for This Week in Classical Music on 89-five KBAQ Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.