What’s not answered is the question of where Ms. Larionoff sits when one of the other three is present. If she moves to second chair (or even sits home on paid leave), then what really has changed?
And what about tenure? She was tenured as a member of the orchestra. But concertmasters in Seattle don’t have tenure; they are concertmaster so long as the music director wants them to be, and no longer. Did she give up job security in exchange for a title that doesn’t really change how things work?
Once summer gets its hold on Seattle, classical music disappears as quickly as the city’s trademark drizzle. Until this year, the Seattle Symphony put their instruments away and left the summer music making up to the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s festival. Other festivals, on the Olympic Peninsula, the San Juan Islands, and even Portland, Oregon gave listeners reason to travel to more bucolic locales. Some of these far flung festivals offered up orchestral performances, but mostly they were packed with chamber music.
Four hundred and twenty five people filled the small St. Nicholas Recital Hall on the Ivy-like Lakeside School campus on Wednesday night. It was day two of the Seattle Chamber Music Festival. For six weeks each summer, some of the most distinguished musicians make the trip to Seattle and perform a wide swath of the standard and not-so-standard chamber music repertoire.
The small space and sellout crowd pushed my seat for the concert all the way to the front row. Intimate is an understatement. I was close enough to touch the stage and within reach of the musicians on the right side of the stage. Such close proximity makes it easy to focus on the wrong things. Socks, a foot wiggling off a piano pedal, beads of sweat and shimmering attire.
But, once the first ad hoc ensemble launched into the springy melodies of Mendelssohn’s Piano Quartet in F Minor these distractions became an afterthought.
Cirque de la Symphonie. The title says it all, and circus lovers young and old (lots of young) converged on Benaroya Hall Friday night to see how circus and symphony could harmonize in a performance. Aerial artists on that stage? How? Where does the orchestra sit?
The concept worked wonderfully well. Cirque de la Symphonie is a group of top mostly Russian circus artists who have choreographed their acts around classical music, and now travel sharing their art with symphony orchestras: a juggler, a contortionist, two aerial artists, two strong men and a man who spun a huge airy metal-framed cube.
Maria Larionoff, the Seattle Symphony's newly named Concertmaster
Today Maria Larionoff was named Concertmaster for the Seattle Symphony. Larionoff got her start with the SSO in 1990 and since 2004 served as acting Concertmaster.
Larionoff’s selection comes after a period of turmoil with the position that began when, the previous Concertmaster, Ilka Talvi’s contract was not renewed. For two decades, Talvi lead the orchestra; he previously served under Schwarz with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Talvi’s departure set the stage for almost five years of uncertainty for arguably the most important position in the orchestra.
The Independence Day holiday and a short lull in music events have meant not much has happened here. New posts are coming. In the meantime, Melinda Bargreen has joined KING FM and will provide concert reviews for KING e-newsletter subscribers.
After a career with the Seattle Times, Bargreen, left as part of staff restructuring. Her insight and expertise is a great addition to KING.
Finally, some positive news for classical music critics!
Accoring to a report in Musical America, Anne Midgette has been hired by the Washington Post as the staff classical music critic. Midgette has been the interim critic since Tim Page took a buyout a couple of months ago.
It shouldn’t surprise us that there is a flourishing early music scene in Estonia. Just as in Russia musicians under Communism used their art to express their feelings in a way that they could not safely do with words, so they did in Estonia, and the early music revival began there about as soon as it did in Europe.
Tuesday night, a group from the youngest generation of these players came to Seattle under the auspices of the Early Music Guild and Town Hall, the result of a chance hearing by a Seattle couple visiting Tallinn (the capital city) last year.
After 27 years of successfully offering classical music in Bend, Oregon, the Cascade Festival of Music has decided to fold and file for bankruptcy. According to the Bend Bulletin newspaper, the festival ended last fall with $190,000 in debt and successfully reduced that to $93,000. You would think that with all of the new money in the Bend area, that this amount could be easily retired, but the board of the festival says that they cannot make that happen. The Portland Symphonic Choir, of which I am a member, was scheduled to sing Carmina Burana at the festival at the end of August. I know that there are many disappointed singers who were looking forward to a last hurrah with Murry Sidlin, the artistic director of the festival. This was to have been his last year, and James DePreist was appointed to take over the reins next year.
Once summer gets its hold on Seattle, classical music disappears as quickly as the city’s trademark drizzle. Until this year, the Seattle Symphony put their instruments away and left the summer music making up to the 
Cirque de la Symphonie. The title says it all, and circus lovers young and old (lots of young) converged on Benaroya Hall Friday night to see how circus and symphony could harmonize in a performance. Aerial artists on that stage? How? Where does the orchestra sit?
