Hope your week is off to a great start!
Continuing the shake-up at the NYPhil, “A Power Vacuum at the Philharmonic” offers further reporting from Sammy Sussman at New York magazine. The April article “A Hidden Sexual-Assault Scandal at the New York Philharmonic” prompted a renewed investigation within the NYPhilharmonic and since then “at least three women have come forward with new allegations” of “sexual harassment, violence, and/or abuse … by musicians employed by the Philharmonic.”
Another musician formerly with the New York Philharmonic describes the reopening of the Kaiser case as “a much-needed opportunity for the orchestral world to examine outdated institutional practices.”
The impact of this whistle-blowing continues to grow, and Katherine Needleman offers impactful interpretation of the unfolding events, on her Substack page. As Needleman observes, “the cultural problems described at the New York Philharmonic in both of these articles are not unique to that one orchestra.”
Katherine Needleman, pictured on https://katherineneedleman.com/
The Lincoln Center Festival (formerly known as “The Mostly Mozart Festival”) will perform Marianne Martines’ Sinfonia in C major (1770), on their concerts August 6 and 7. Music by Caroline Shaw, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Felix Mendelssohn are also on the program. The Martines, quite probably the first symphony to be composed by a woman, is being performed from Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy’s edition by Nan H. Washburn, who first edited it in the 1980s for performance by The Women’s Philharmonic (then the Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic). It was included on their first commercial CD, “Baroquen Treasures.”
In anticipation of the BBC Proms including a work by Vítězslava Kaprálová for the first time (her Military Sinfonietta on August 28), Bachtrak offers an engaging introduction to the composer “Maliciously witty: the music of Vítězslava Kaprálová,” based on an interview with Karla Hartl of The Vítězslava Kaprálová Society. A longer version of the interview is available here. Given Kaprálová’s significance, it is astounding that the enormous Proms festival has never before featured her music! Important women continue to remain “Hidden Figures.”
We continue to work to bring these “Hidden Figures” to light and to bring the “graven images” down off their pedestals. We look forward to hearing from you! [email protected]
