July 27, 2005

MSO’s managing director, Trevor Green, says MSO Pops is a way of growing the
Photo: Gary Medlicott

With its face to the future, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is going pop, reports Robin Usher.

Classical music in the 21st century is no place for musical snobs. The need to find new audiences under the pressure of changing musical tastes means orchestras are always seeking to expand their repertoire to appeal to as many people as possible.

While the Melbourne Symphony will celebrate its centenary next year, its managing director, Trevor Green, faces the challenge of ensuring it will still be performing over the next 100 years.

“Our traditional concerts constitute our core business and generate around $5 million a year,” he says. “They’re not changing, but we have to find ways to grow the business.”

He’s introducing a new class of concerts next year, MSO Pops, a series of four programs performed on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons.

“The whole point about the MSO is that we should be able to offer something for everyone,” Green says. “So we need to continue to diversify our output.”

He’s expecting some criticism, but insists the new series will be an extra to the orchestra’s existing performing calendar.

He compares the traditional concerts with reading the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky – too difficult for beginners. By contrast, the first Pops program in March features the music of George Gershwin, including Rhapsody in Blue, Summertime and An American in Paris.

“The idea is to create a subbrand of the MSO. If that points audiences to our other concerts, well and good, but the main aim is to build up a new market.”

Green’s flair for new ventures has already attracted an extra 50,000 people to the orchestra this year, for an increased revenue of about $500,000. The new business has come from such ventures as supporting jazz singer Harry Connick jnr and kd lang, as well as this month’s Classical Spectacular offering in Melbourne and Sydney.

The orchestra also performed the music to Bugs Bunny cartoons in a show produced in partnership with the Arts Centre.

“Shows like these are great publicity for the orchestra,” Green says. “People become aware that we’re around, and enough are coming to see these shows to make a real difference to our (financial) bottom line this year.”

The MSO is big business. Its annual turnover of $20 million is expected to grow to $21 million next year. It has an international reputation after tours to Europe, China and St Petersburg.

But he says audiences for traditional concerts aren’t growing. “Subscribers are getting older, even though our renewal rate is above 90 per cent, which is fantastic by overseas standards,” he says.

Numbers are increasing by about 150 a year, but total subscribers remain below 20,000. This consistency would be the envy of orchestras in the US and Britain.

English conductor Mark Wigglesworth noted when he was here in May that classical music is in poor health around the world. When he was in Pittsburgh earlier this year, audiences at the three performances ranged from a quarter to half-full, making attendances at Hamer Hall’s three concert series seem remarkably healthy.

“In London, we only give one concert, which, of course, will always be full,” he says. “Pittsburgh would sell out, too, if there was only one concert.”

The MSO pioneered the diversification into pop music when it formed a partnership with Elton John in 1986 to support his performances. This has continued, backing such acts as Kiss and Meat Loaf.

The Classical Spectacular concerts, with light shows and fireworks, were introduced in Britain by Raymond Gubbay in the ’80s and are now diversifying into popular operas. They were first performed by the MSO in partnership with the promoter Michael Edgely in 2000.

But this month’s concerts in Melbourne and Sydney were organised by Green and attracted a total of 25,000 people to the combined forces of the MSO, the Melbourne Chorale and Bands of the Royal Australian Air Force.

“It was new to Sydney, but we took $1 million in Melbourne for two concerts in one day. We have to pay the bills, but that’s still a good return for us.”

Green’s decision to introduce the Pops concerts next year, which will include film music, Peter and the Wolf and Christmas favourites, was partly inspired by childhood memories in England, when he first attended a symphony concert in the 1950s.

He attended a performance conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham – the legendary conductor who died in 1961, renowned for his Lollipops concerts.

“I was so excited that I’ve never forgotten the experience. I had no idea whether the music was Italian, French or Chinese, but I was amazed by the incredible sound,” he says. “No system of reproduction, whether CD or DVD, can kill off live music, because there’s nothing that can equal it.”

The introduction of a Pops series would seem to infringe on the territory of the unsubsidised Australian Pops Orchestra, which usually performs three or four concerts of lighter classics a year.

But Green says he believes the orchestra’s manager, Kel McMillan, was planning to retire before the latter suddenly changed his mind. “But I don’t think there’s any conflict,” he says.

McMillan agrees, saying there was no clash because of different repertoires and the continuing loyalty of the two audiences, pointing out the Best of British concert on August 6 was typical of the APO’s offerings.

“The MSO program is slightly more classical than what we do,” he says. “We wouldn’t consider doing Peter and the Wolf for our audience. It’s frightening that everyone seems to be getting older, but there’s room for everyone.”

Sat Jul 9, 1:15 PM ET

PARIS (Reuters) – Claude Simon, the last French writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at the age of 91, Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres said on Saturday.

French media said Simon died in Paris on Wednesday but the news was kept private until after his burial on Saturday.

Donnedieu de Vabres hailed Simon, a writer of France’s so-called “nouveau roman” (new novel) movement alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, as a key figure in contemporary literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1985.

“This novelist incarnates the renewal of French literature in the post-war period,” he said of the author of “The Wind” (1957), and “The Flanders Road” (1960).

“Rejection of conventions, or rather, man’s fundamental originality, are at the heart of his work, the source of his creation,” he added, paying homage to Simon’s writing and his reputation in France and abroad.

Born in Madagascar in 1913, Simon was the son of a cavalry officer killed in World War One. Brought up by his mother in the southern French city of Perpignan, he studied in Paris and at Oxford and Cambridge and fought in World War II.

Captured by the Germans in May 1940, he escaped to join the French Resistance and completed his first novel “The Trickster” — about the 1940 collapse of France — in 1945.

He later settled in Perpignan and grew vines.

His writing often focuses on the permanence of objects and people that have survived through the upheavals of contemporary history.

A cycle of four books: “The Grass,” “The Flanders Road,” “The Palace” and “History,” contain recurrent characters and events.

His style mixes narrative with passages of stream of consciousness untroubled by punctuation — some of his sentences are 1,000 words long — but critics say his works remain readable despite their apparent difficulty.

A Pianist Who Played By His Own Rules
Alexei Sultanov’s Diminuendo in Black

By Tim Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 11, 2005; Page C01

Pianist Alexei Sultanov and his wife, Dace, playing “America the Beautiful” before their November naturalization ceremony in Fort Worth.( – FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM)

For a few months in 1989, a teenager named Alexei Sultanov was perhaps the most celebrated — and certainly the most discussed — young pianist in the world.

He had come to the United States from the rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union to play in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth. The author Joseph Horowitz, who heard him there, called him “a veritable wild child from Tashkent, in the shadow of the Himalayas.” Sultanov’s playing was fast, urgent, hyper-emotional and breathtakingly loud: He pounded the keyboard so hard in performance of Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz No. 1” that a string groaned and snapped.

And yet, on June 11, 1989, Sultanov was awarded the top prize from America’s wealthiest classical music competition — $15,000 in cash, a recital at Carnegie Hall, a recording contract, and sponsored tours throughout the United States and Europe. Upon hearing of his victory, Sultanov mounted the stage as though he were in a “Rocky” movie, grabbed the trophy and hoisted it over his head, triumphant.

It was the last great moment in his career.

Alexei Sultanov, 35 years old, died on June 30 at his home in Fort Worth. The cause of death has not been determined, but Sultanov’s neurologist, Edward Kramer, said it was likely due to a series of strokes the pianist had suffered, beginning as far back as 1995 and culminating in a massive hemorrhage in 2001 that left him partially paralyzed.

Word of Sultanov’s Cliburn victory was carried in newspapers around the globe; his death has attracted scant notice and virtually nothing outside of Texas. The longest obituary, by Wayne Lee Gay at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, began: “Alexei Sultanov soared to musical heights that other musicians only dream of, and crashed to earth with personal tragedy that few have to bear.”

In fact, the “crash” began even before the Cliburn competition was over, for few medalists have ever been so controversial. “Many in the audience adore him,” Horowitz wrote in his 1990 study of the Cliburn competition, “The Ivory Trade.” “The pianists I talk to react with horror or admiration: There is no middle ground.”

That would never change. Denise Mullins, who was the Cliburn Foundation’s artistic administrator in 1989, put the gentlest spin on it in an interview with the Star-Telegram. “He took things to the absolute edge of the cliff, and it was very exciting to hear,” she said. “He wasn’t afraid to take a chance on stage, and there aren’t a lot of pianists who do that. But that worked for him, and it worked against him.”

Some of the Cliburn judges were less kind. The venerable Hungarian pianist Gyorgy Sandor called Sultanov’s win a “tremendous scandal” and suggested that he should have been granted nothing more than a scholarship for further study. Another judge, the British pianist John Lill, wondered aloud “whether the gold medal will weigh too heavily on a performer as young as Sultanov, still not out of conservatory, still not fully formed artistically and yet to learn a breadth of repertory.”

Nor were many of the reviewers helpful. “Alexei Sultanov seems a nice enough young man, with a full head of black hair, dark eyes in an open face and fingers both graceful and strong,” Peter Goodman wrote in Newsday after the Carnegie Hall debut in 1990. “Is it his fault that at age 20 he has not yet got much idea of what Mozart wrote, or Beethoven? Or that he can handle the pyrotechnical aspects of Scriabin, Prokofiev and Liszt, but with barely an inkling of what deeper meanings their music might have?”

And Alan Rich, writing in the pages of the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner, called Sultanov’s first California performance a “generally dreadful concert — easily the worst debut recital I’ve attended since the last Cliburn winner earned his obligatory American engagement.” Still, amidst it all, Rich offered the hope that Sultanov might now “retire from the limelight, find himself a good teacher of art history and aesthetics and come back as a musician — not just a piano player — in four or five years.”

It never happened, of course. Sultanov was now irrevocably caught up in the machinery of the music business, and he didn’t handle it very well. “When you have to play a concert in Warsaw, then hop a plane to London, do three radio interviews in English, then play another concert, it’s an exhaustion you simply can’t foresee,” Mullins said. “There were times when he was difficult. I think he was tired and I think he was frustrated. He loved to enjoy his life. He wanted to see his family. He wanted to see his friends.”

Sultanov fulfilled most of the engagements required of the Cliburn winner and then his bookings trickled off, leaving him a perceived “has-been” in his early twenties. He stayed in Fort Worth and watched other young contestants bask in the moments of Cliburn glory that had once been his. In 1995, he went to Warsaw to play in the Chopin International Piano Competition, where he was a popular favorite and was cited by the Polish critic Piotr Wirzbicki as a great interpreter of the composer’s work. The judges felt otherwise. “The Chopin tradition has certain standards which must be upheld,” pianist and jury chairman Jan Ekier said, in declining to award a first prize.

“Give me a great review or a horrible one,” Sultanov shot back. “If people agree with you too much, that means there’s not much personality. The Polish jurists, on the other hand, wanted waltzes played in a slightly lovesick way for all the grandmothers who probably danced them in Chopin’s own time.”

Later that fall, Sultanov probably suffered his first stroke, but it was of minor consequence and discovered only later. He continued to play until the dreadful day in February 2001 when he walked into his doctor’s office, barely able to speak. Suffering from severe internal bleeding, he slipped into a coma, and when he awakened, a few days later, he had lost use of his left arm and leg.

In his last years, according to Gay, Sultanov “found a new, almost heroic role as a man determined to overcome physical disability. He swam and took up therapeutic horseback riding — and, with his wife playing the cello or the left-hand part beside him, played piano with his right hand at nursing homes, YMCA facilities and group meetings of physically disabled people.” In November 2004, Sultanov was made a U.S. citizen; he played “America the Beautiful” at the ceremony. It was his final public appearance.

“He was always one of a kind, always unique,” his wife, Dace Sultanov, said last week. “He was always at the center of attention, always fiery, brilliant. People loved him or hated him, but more people loved him.”

Whatever one thought of Sultanov’s playing, there are many worse epitaphs than that.