Van Cliburn

I will leave it to the professional writers to appropriately memorialize the late Van Cliburn. Few American classical musicians have captured the public's attention as he did. Maybe Leonard Bernstein, whose career spanned 50 years, could come close to matching Mr. Cliburn, who was active for only a couple of decades. 

I was only 4 years old when Van Cliburn took the world by storm and set the Soviet propaganda machine on its ear with his victory in the first Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow. But I remember what a stir that news caused, not just for my parents, who were very much in tune with such things, but among everyone else around me. 

And to top it off, this was no blustery, in-your-face caricature of a Texan, but a shy, gracious, unfailingly polite young Texas gentleman. A friend of mine who once met Mr. Cliburn at his Fort Worth home can vouch for that aspect of his personality.

But one of my cousins can attest to the influence he had, not only on international politics, but on a generation or more of aspiring young musicians, of whom she was one. Van Cliburn showed her that a kid from Texas could make it as a successful concert pianist. And even if the Cliburn-inspired dream of an 8-year-old Dallas girl would never quite come to fruition (I believe she got as far as a bachelor's degree in music), his greatest gift to us all remains -- the hope inspired by his music.

Christmas in February

'Tis the season, as they say.

February is when many orchestras and opera companies announce what they'll be performing in their upcoming season. So while classical music geeks like me can't usually travel to see and hear everything that's going on, we can take a vicarious interest in what we could go see in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston or wherever.

So if you won the Classical Geek Lottery, you could start making plans for:

• New York Philharmonic: Glenn Dicterow is retiring at the end of the 2013-14 season after 34 years as concertmaster of one of the world's top orchestras. He'll be featured as a soloist in several works, including Beethoven's Triple Concerto. He'll be joined in that work by pianist Yefim Bronfman, the Philharmonic's artist-in-residence who recently performed Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 with the Dallas Symphony.
• Carnegie Hall: The venue with some of the most amazingly diverse programming anywhere plans a three-week festival called "Vienna: City of Dreams," which will include orchestral and operatic masterpieces, chamber music and lieder by Viennese composers from Beethoven and Schubert to Berg and Schoenberg, plus seven concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic.
• Philadelphia Orchestra: In its second season under music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphians will honor the 150th birthday of Richard Strauss in several concerts and have commissioned three solo works for three of the orchestra's principal players. They'll also open Carnegie Hall's season.
• Chicago Lyric Opera: A relatively conservative season includes new productions of Wagner's Parsifal, Verdi's La Traviata, Rossini's Barber of Seville and Dvorak's Rusalka.
• Chicago Symphony: In the fall, several concerts will celebrate Verdi's bicentenary, including the Requiem and a concert performance of Macbeth. Next year, they'll do all nine Schubert symphonies and in June, guest conductor Jaap van Zweden will lead Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.
• San Francisco Opera: They'll do a fall season of five operas, including the world premiere of Tobias Pickers' Dolores Claiborne (based on the Stephen King novel). They'll also honor birthday boy Verdi in October with a performance of his Requiem.
• Houston Grand Opera: A world premiere, Ricky Ian Gordon's A Coffin in Egypt, and a North American premiere, Mieczyslaw Weinberg's The Passenger, lead the well-regarded HGO's seven-production season, which also includes Das Rheingold, introducing a questionable production of Wagner's Ring that will span four seasons, much as the Dallas Opera did several years ago. And Houston doesn't forget the old standbys, with Aida, Carmen, Rigoletto and Die Fledermaus.
• Austin Lyric Opera: This small but scrappy outfit will have a three-production season that starts with a couple of heavies: Verdi's Don Carlo in November and Puccini's Tosca early next year. They'll lighten it up in May 2014 with Donizetti's Elixir of Love.

And closer to home:

• Dallas Symphony: A President John F. Kennedy Memorial Concert is planned for the weekend of Nov. 22, and we get a Beethoven festival in May with the Fifth, Seventh and Ninth symphonies and the Fifth Piano Concerto. I think it's interesting that a group that for years has scheduled instrumental soloists almost exclusively now has a season that will include vocal soloists in six sets of concerts. I know they're trying to be frugal, so are vocal soloists cheaper than instrumentalists? Or maybe it just reflects Maestro Van Zweden's clear affection for opera music.
• Dallas Opera: Back up to four operas from this season's three, the company is offering Tod Machover's Death and the Powers, starring a gaggle of robots as well as a handful of singers, and Wolfgang Erich Korngold's Die Tote Stadt with tenor Jay Hunter Morris, framed by Carmen and The Barber of Seville. Each production will have its own conductor, absent the company's soon-to-depart music director Graeme Jenkins.

And, like waiting to find out what movie won the Best Picture Oscar, they save the biggest one for last. The Metropolitan Opera announced its 26-production 2013-14 season today. And the biggest news from that actually came out last fall: that music director James Levine would return to the pit after a two-year absence caused by debilitating back problems. He'll conduct a new production of Verdi's Falstaff along with Mozart's Cosi fan tutte and Berg's Wozzeck.

What's notably absent from the Met's lineup is anything by Wagner. My source in New York tells me they had originally penciled in Parsifal and Tannhäuser, with Levine conducting, but they decided he wasn't up to it. Too bad. I guess you don't always get everything you want for Christmas.

Cafe Isolde NYC

This humble blog usually rocks along with a handful of hits every day, which is fine with me. Then occasionally there will be a spike. Last weekend, I got more than 100 hits on a single day, even though I've been lax lately in updating the blog.

If the statistical elements of Google's Blogger program are to be believed, almost all of those who came here via a search engine were looking for some form of "Cafe Isolde NYC."

So I tried that search myself, and sure enough, the first link is to an item I posted here in November called "Elementary, My Dear Isolde," in which I talked about the TV show Elementary. In the first two episodes last fall, there was a scene involving Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and another in which the show's main characters walked past a sidewalk cafe in New York that had a sign reading "Cafe Isolde."

So welcome to all of you who are looking for Cafe Isolde in New York City. As best I can tell from my own meager Internet searches, there is no such eatery in the Big Apple, although sometimes smaller restaurants fly under the radar.

If anyone knows about such a place, please let me know. But I'm not sure I'd drink anything they had to offer!