News Items

New Vivaldi work heard for first time in 250 years

By Paul Tait

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A small part of a newly identified choral work by baroque Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi was played for the first time in about 250 years on Tuesday after being uncovered by an Australian academic.

Janice Stockigt of the University of Melbourne said the 11-movement "Dixit Dominus" for choir and soloists, which she uncovered in Dresden this year, would be played in full in the German city next year.

Stockigt said the work had previously been attributed to Baldassarre Galuppi, a Venetian contemporary of Vivaldi, since it first appeared in Galuppi's name in Dresden's Catholic Court Church in the 1750s.

"I think the music was probably performed during Vivaldi's lifetime and then went to ground under another composer's name," Stockigt told Reuters by telephone from Melbourne.

"I don't think it would have been played at all since then."

Stockigt said she had stumbled across the music while working on a larger project researching the repertory of the 18th century Catholic Court Church in the Saxon capital.

"Something just struck me about the music, it seemed awfully familiar to me," she said.

Stockigt referred her find to Vivaldi expert Professor Michael Talbot, of Britain's University of Liverpool, who examined the manuscript and pronounced it the work of Vivaldi.

While the original work has never been found, Stockigt said copies turned up in Dresden under Galuppi's name during the Seven Years' War about 15 years after Vivaldi's death in 1741.

"Dresden was besieged at this time and so, by the time things got back to normal, Mozart and a whole new style had come in yet again," she said.

Stockigt said "a small snippet" of the 35-minute work was played by a University of Melbourne baroque ensemble and sung to an audience of music students, academics and journalists, with counter-tenor Christopher Field giving the work its first modern performance.

The same piece was played several times over for an enthralled audience.

"It's magic to hear this and it will be even greater when I hear the whole work, I am just longing to hear the choral sections," Stickigt said.

Next year she hopes a complete "premiere" will be performed at the same court where the manuscript had lain since the 1750s.

Vivaldi, the son of a Venetian baker, was ordained a priest before becoming a violin teacher at an orphanage for girls. A prolific composer, he wrote more than 500 concertos but was buried in a pauper's grave after his death in Vienna.

Vivaldi, whose work influenced later musicians such as Johann Sebastian Bach, is best known today for Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons), four concertos from his Opus 8 which remains one of the world's most recognizable pieces of music.

Canada's Charlie Biddle Hailed as Jazz Pioneer

MONTREAL (Reuters) - Tributes began pouring in on Wednesday for Charlie Biddle, the Philadelphia-born bassist who became a pioneering jazz icon while living in Canada for the past 55 years. Biddle died on Tuesday at age 76 after a long battle with cancer.

"Mr. Biddle's extraordinary talent as a bassist, and his work as a promoter, made him a legend of his time," Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien said in a statement. "I know that his passing will deeply affect jazz enthusiasts and indeed all Canadians alike."

Biddle's family were with him at the time of his death on Tuesday evening.

"He passed away at home, surrounded by his family. He was serene," Allan Patrick, Biddle's son-in-law, told Reuters.

A memorial service for Biddle is planned for Saturday in Montreal.

A double bassist, Biddle's jazz career endured more than five decades. He is credited with popularizing jazz in Quebec and launching the careers of young artists in the mainly French-speaking Canadian province.

Just over a week ago, dozens of people braved freezing winter weather to hold a vigil for Biddle outside his home, singing songs after a church service nearby. His wife, Constance, acknowledged the tribute from a window near where Biddle was bed-ridden.

Earlier in January, Biddle was invested as a member of the Order of Canada, one of the country's highest honors. He also received the Prix Calixa-Lavallee, presented by Quebec's St. Jean Baptiste Society, for his contributions to music.

Biddle's four children -- Sonya, Charles Jr., Stephanie and Tracy -- are all active in the province's entertainment industry.

SERVED IN WARTIME

Born in Philadelphia in July 1926, Biddle's family roots stretched back to slave plantations of North Carolina.

After a stint in the U.S. army during World War II, Biddle studied music at Temple University on the GI bill.

The outspoken young musician ventured northward across the border to Montreal in 1948.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Montreal was Canada's main center for entertainment, especially jazz, and a mecca for black entertainers. It was also fertile ground where home-grown musicians such as piano legend Oscar Peterson, a longtime friend of Biddle, could hone their skills before striking out abroad.

Biddle played a big role in that, working in many of the local clubs, and throughout mainly French-speaking Quebec. He also brought to town luminaries of the day such as Johnny Hodges, Art Tatum and Earl "Fatha" Hines.

Later, he rented his own clubs, making them venues for the likes of Bill Evans, Art Farmer and Thad Jones, and an outlet for his own playing when the club scene wilted in the 1960s.

"Charlie rarely traveled outside the province to play, and still he became one of the most recognized names in jazz in the country," Canadian jazz pianist Oliver Jones told the Montreal Gazette.

FELT AT HOME IN MONTREAL

In 1979, Biddle organized a three-day jazz festival, something unheard of until then. Following his lead, the Montreal International Jazz Festival took hold the following year. Many artists and fans say the festival is now the biggest and best in the world.

Biddle said he was attracted to Montreal after his experiences in the segregated southern United States during his Army stint.

"I went down south and saw a different type of white man. I saw somebody who was able to do something to me and I could not retaliate. That is what hurt," he told Reuters during an interview in July 2000.

"I came up here to French Canada and something rubbed off right away. I saw people going through pretty near the same thing as I was going through in the States -- racism."

All along, Biddle retained his American citizenship, not wanting to give it up to become a Canadian. But the law changed in 1990, allowing him to take his Canadian permanent resident status up the final notch, while keeping his American citizenship.

Biddle finally became a Canadian citizen in October 2000.

Music by Glass Binds Film 'The Hours' Together

By Arthur Spiegelman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - As movies go, "The Hours" is different: Three stories unfolding simultaneously in three different time periods featuring three different actresses and a unique score that forces its way into the drama as if it were a key player.

Director Stephen Daldry's adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer prize-winning novel, which is based on Virginia Woolf's breakthrough novel "Mrs. Dalloway," has something setting it apart from other films as the season's most intense period of award-giving begins: a pulsating score by minimalist concert hall composer Philip Glass.

Performed by a piano and 50 violins, the score becomes as much of a character in the movie as stars Nicole Kidman (news), Julianne Moore (news) and Meryl Streep (news). And the story is that Glass got the job in classic, or as some would say, typical, Hollywood fashion.

Director Daldry filmed the movie with temporary music and he and the producers kept wanting a score that sounded more and more like Philip Glass. So they had people come in with Glass-like music until, finally, some one had the bright idea to call for the real Philip Glass.

This slightly miffed Glass because it meant that by the time he came into the editing room, the stars had left and it wasn't until the film's promotional tour that he got to meet them. "At the press junket, I followed Nicole Kidman to the podium and ... it's not so bad to have everyone so wide awake when you walk into a room," he said in a recent interview.

TYING THE BOW

Glass has written scores for more than a dozen previous films ranging from the avant-garde "Koyaanisqatsi" and the slasher flick "Candyman" to the Tibetan-flavored "Kundum," for which he won an Oscar nomination. He said he sees the job of writing music for movies as "tying the bow round the box, not baking the cake."

For "The Hours," with its floating from one story and time period to another, Glass's bow became something that held the whole cake together. He saw his job as uniting the three seemingly disparate stories.

"I used the same music to go between the three time periods and the effect was to bind the film. The music was a bridge .... I am so glad that people are getting it."

Or as director Daldry told Reuters recently: "This film seemed to reject music which was in any way merely emotional wallpaper. It needed a very different sort of music, a music that actually allowed a stream of consciousness to emerge, which was as if it was another character.

"The picture and the music worked in counterpoint to each other. It didn't just link the time periods it worked as a subconscious element. And of course Philip's music is so much about time and the relationships of the different time periods to one another."

Daldry said it was an easy collaboration. "The fantastic thing about Philip is that he is such a good collaborator, so we would score and then record, then score and record again, keep working at it. Not only was he brilliantly patient but he was brilliantly engaged in the whole process.

Said Glass, "I wanted the music to lift you away and I didn't want it to be gloomy and downcast at the end .... Even with all the suicide and death in the movie, I wanted people to feel that life was rich."

A RICH HERITAGE

The film is based on Cunningham's novel which blends the life of British writer Virginia Woolf and the writing of her breakthrough "stream of consciousness" novel "Mrs. Dalloway" in the 1920s with those of a reader on the brink of suicide in the 1950s and with a modern day Mrs. Dalloway, performing decades later the same tasks as the heroine of the novel.

If it sounds complicated, it is: Three stories essentially telling the life and death struggles of three women -- all within the confines of a single day. The film begins with Woolf's real suicide and then proceeds to weave the tale of her battle against depression and mental illness into two other deeply connected stories.

Glass's pulls the movie together with his characteristic hypnotic repetitive phrasings and does it so well that the experts think he is a shoe-in for an Oscar nomination, although he will have stiff competition for the statuette itself.

Novelist Cunningham thinks Woolf would have approved. In liner notes for the CD of the film score, Cunningham said, "I love Glass's music almost as much as I love Virginia Woolf ... When I saw the movie with the music added I thought automatically of how I could use the soundtrack ... to help me with my next book."

Ancient note: music as bridge between species

By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff

It has long been a cliche that music is universal, but now science is proving just how deeply true the old saying really is.

While scientists can't do much better than the rest of us in defining exactly what music is - although they know it when they hear it - they have shown that human appreciation of music is remarkably ancient, begins astonishingly early in life, and to a surprising extent may be shared by whales, birds, and even rats.

In a pair of articles appearing today in the journal Science, several scientists show that musical appreciation is so deep-seated that it may be one of humanity's oldest activities, and that in fundamental ways it even crosses the lines of species. Through such research, they hope, they may come to understand the human mind better, perhaps even learning important clues about how to overcome damage to the auditory system.

"We became human at the point where we started making music," Jelle Atema, a biologist with Boston University's program at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and co-author of one of the Science papers, said in an interview yesterday. But, Atema admits, many animals also produce sounds in ways that, to human ears, meet virtually any definition of music.

Atema, like several of the researchers involved in the Science papers, straddles the fields of music and science: In addition to his work in biology, he plays the flute and even studied under the renowned flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal. He has painstakingly made exact copies of ancient bone flutes in order to play them and determine the kinds of sounds that our distant ancestors may have been making around their campfires. Another of the researchers, Harvard Medical School's Mark Jude Tramo, is a guitarist who was selected to play at a world's fair at the age of 8 and is a member of the performing rights organization ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

"Do musical sounds in nature reveal a profound bond between all living things?" asks one of the articles. And the evidence that it may is broad and very specific. For example:

The "songs" of humpback whales follow many of the same, precise rules that are nearly universal in human music, including the nature of the tonal scale, the way themes are introduced and varied, the use of percussive as well as melodic sounds, and the structures of rhythms and phrasing.

Many species of birds also sing in ways that mimic very closely the rules of human song, including the ways that songs are passed from one generation to another or are shared by a group of peers. Many use note scales similar to those devised by humans, even though an infinite variety of such scales is possible: The canyon wren uses the chromatic scale, while the hermit thrush uses a pentatonic scale. Some even make instruments and play them; the palm cockatoo of Australia, for instance, carefully shapes a drumstick from a twig and holds it in its foot to play on a hollow log.

Music goes back to the earliest ages of human prehistory, and sophisticated flutes have been found that date back as much as 53,000 years. The technology used to make these ancient instruments was much more advanced, Atema says, than that used at the same period to produce utilitarian tools like spearpoints and scrapers. "To see that they spent so much time [making instruments] means music was important to them," he says. Music, some scientists speculate, may even predate language.

Tramo, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, says he is fascinated by the complexity of the human brain's response to music. "There is no `music center' in the brain," he wrote. Nearly every cognitive part of the brain is involved in listening to music, and when we move to the music many of the motor areas are involved as well. "Imagine how much of the brain lights up when we dance!"

But his research on just how the brain processes the sounds of music is much more than just an abstract question or a way of melding his medical and artistic sides. He sees it as a process that can lead to fundamental and important insights.

"The experiences we naturally have in our culture, in the arts, teach us a lot about how the brain works," Tramo said in an interview yesterday. "The next step, in the next few decades, is going to be to bridge that gap between the arts and the sciences."

By learning exactly how the brain processes and decodes the complex mix of tones, rhythms, timbre, and melodic progression that make up music, a more comprehensive understanding of how the brain makes sense of the world around us may emerge. In the same way, other scientists are using responses to visual arts as a way of probing the workings of the human visual system.

"We really want to understand basic sensory physiology," Tramo said. "That understanding in time is going to help scientists in their efforts to help the deaf to hear, and help the blind to see."

This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 1/5/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

Washington Honored Eastwood, Baryshnikov, Others

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It's the closest Washington comes to the Oscars.

Big names from politics and Hollywood, from President Clinton to actor Morgan Freeman, gathered in the nation's capital this weekend to recognize the winners of the 2000 Kennedy Center Honors -- five of the world's top performing artists from the worlds of film, theater, music and dance.

This year's honorees were dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov's, musician Chuck Berry, singer-conductor Placido Domingo, actor-director Clint Eastwood and actress Angela Lansbury.

"Each has given us something unique and enriched us beyond measure," Clinton told a special White House tribute for the artists on Sunday.

"Tonight's honorees have brought to their art form a spark of the new and unexpected. Each has left their form of art more modern, more brilliant and changed for the better," the president added.

The two-day ceremony at the Kennedy Center overlooking the Potomac River marked the 23rd year that Hollywood entertainers have saluted their own and raised money for the center with an extravagant song and dance tribute.

Since the prestigious ceremony began in 1978, 121 artists have been recognized, including singer Bob Dylan, actors Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart, comedian Bob Hope and composer-conductor André Previn.

Lansbury, the veteran stage and film actress perhaps best known for her star role in the television series "Murder She Wrote," said, "I am trying to actively savor and adore all of what is going on, because so often in life these things happen and you race through them" without appreciating what is happening.

Hollywood icon Eastwood -- who made his name starring in movies such as "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and "Dirty Harry" -- said it feels good to be recognized by some of his closest Hollywood friends.

"This is what America is all about," joked Eastwood, a 47-year veteran of the silver screen both as an actor and director.

"Kiddingly, I told Tommy Lee Jones (who is on the board responsible for nominating the recipients) 'Are you the one that got me into this?"' he said.

The artistic community is largely responsible for selecting the recipients. A 103-member panel that includes Jack Lemmon, Kevin Kline and Carol Burnett submit their recommendations to the Kennedy Center board in April -- a list that blossomed to more than 80 people before it was reduced.

The weekend began on Saturday with the awards ceremony and a toast to the honorees at the State Department. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright hosted the festivities, welcoming the guests and praising the recipients for their contributions to the arts.

Still, it was the three-hour gala on Sunday evening that illustrated through artistic expression the impact these honorees have had in their respective fields.

Each was given a unique tribute that included singing, dancing, music and surprise guests honoring their careers and in some cases, offering a glimpse of today's young stars.

Among the tributes was one by two 22-year-old opera stars honoring Domingo and three Broadway stars singing clips from Lansbury's days on stage.

"These people, through their careers, are still thriving and have already left a legacy," said George Stevens, co-creator of the honors production.

"They inspire young people and that is still another part of the legacy," he said.

China's Li, 18, wins Poland's Chopin piano prize

By Christopher Borowski

WARSAW (Reuters) - Li Yundi, an 18-year-old virtuoso from China, has won Poland's Frédéric Chopin piano competition, becoming one of the youngest players to capture the prestigious international prize.

Li charmed the strict, 23-member jury, who had refused to award the first prize in the last two competitions, with his accuracy and meticulous technique in performing difficult piano pieces by the 19th-century Polish Romantic composer.

"The way he plays is very balanced. He is not the type of player which is admired by one part of the audience and hated by the other," said Polish juror Edward Auer after the verdict.

The $25,000 first prize is expected to be Li's pass to lucrative playing contracts with the world's best orchestras.

The competition, held every five years since 1927, is a national event in music-loving Poland.

Past winners of the contest -- such as Garrick Ohlsson of the United States (1970) and Poland's Krystian Zimmerman (1975) -- became classical music stars. Soviet virtuoso Stanislav Bunin won the last first prize in the contest 15 years ago.

"I had a feeling I would win. I thought the audience liked me and I would like to thank them for that," the calm, long-haired player said after the verdict was delivered at the Warsaw Philharmonia Concert Hall late on Thursday night.

The audience gave Li a standing ovation after his final bravura performance of Chopin's E-minor piano concerto with the National Philharmonic Orchestra.

All but one of six finalists chose this more dynamic and emotional of Chopin's two concertos for their final performance.

Argentina's Ingrid Fliter, who played the F-minor concerto, won the second prize and Russia's Aleksander Kobrin came third.

Li outplayed 97 rivals from across the world during the two-week-long competition, that mainly featured Chopin's moody short pieces -- such as Mazurka and Polonaises, which are often based on Polish folk music.

The Chinese pianist is believed to be the youngest winner in the contest. Organisers are uncertain of the ages of the winners before World War Two because all documents were lost during that conflict.

Li, who was born in Chongqing and now studies at the School of Arts in Shenzhen, has already won several piano competitions, including the Stravinsky Competition in the United States when he was just 13 years old.

The Warsaw competition is rivalled in prominence only by the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow and the Queen Elisabeth competition in Brussels.

But the Chopin contest has lost some of its shine in recent years, with many criticising the jury for failing to award a first prize in the last two competitions.

Reuters/Variety

Music Helps the Body Heal

Soothing melodies play part in recovery, therapists say

By Nancy A. Melville
HealthSCOUT Reporter

SUNDAY, Aug. 27 (HealthSCOUT) -- "Music rearranges your molecular structure," Carlos Santana once said. And though it is still only a scientific theory, many patients of music therapy will tell you that songs do indeed improve your physical state.

Just ask Sunny Hadder, a music therapist who, along with hundreds across the nation, is regularly recruited by doctors and nurses to bring healing harmonics to the sick.

"Nearly all of the patients I'm referred to have a positive response of some form or another to hearing the music," she says. "Even if it's a coma patient, the reaction may be in the form of their heart rate fluctuating in response to the music they're hearing."

Hadder shows up at the University of Alabama's hospital twice a week with a cart full of musical instruments, games and activities. She works with both the patient and the patient's family, and specific music therapies are created for each person.

And just as musical tastes can run the gamut, so must Hadder's repertoire.

"The music that's played all depends on the patient's preferences. I'll talk to them or their family if they're non-responsive, and if they like country, I do country," she says. "If they like jazz, I do jazz. If they like hymns and gospels, that's what I do. And if they even want rap, that's what I'll give them."

According to Al Bumanis, a spokesman for the American Music Therapy Association, the principles of music therapy go back to Biblical times, but the modern practice began in the 1950s.

"The impetus for the modern profession came in World War II, when music was used in veterans hospitals. First it was used there as a diversion, but then it was found to be much more than a diversionary activity, so the profession became standardized and took on ethical guidelines and a curriculum and everything. Now you can even get a doctorate in music therapy."

Central to many music therapy techniques are the benefits of rhythm, explains Bumanis.

"Let's say a person had a stroke and they're recovering perhaps a limited use of walking. The music is then used in a scientific way, helping the patient find a rhythm to their gait and maybe gradually increasing the tempo of the music until the person can walk better."

Music therapists often form a partnership with patients, drumming, singing and even writing songs with them, says Bumanis. But less passive techniques are also emphasized, including listening to music or using guided imagery, a technique frequently used with mothers in childbirth.

Bumanis says numerous studies have shown music therapy's benefits can elicit verbalization, increase comfort levels, reduce blood pressure, reduce pain perception, reduce fear, stress and anxiety, and increase a sense of self-worth and self-control.

According to Cleveland dentist Matthew Messina, a spokesman for the American Dental Association, that sense of control is why many dental professionals have become enlightened.

"It gives patients control over something, and that's the one thing that for a long time experts just couldn't put their finger on that that appears to be at the core of patient unease," he explains.

Whether it's a hospital or a dentist's office, he says, "you have to surrender to other people coming into your space, and you give up your ability to decide when you're going to go and how you're going to go. You give up a lot of your autonomy."

What To Do: Visit the American Music Therapy Association for more information on music therapy techniques. And read this article on the history of music therapy.

Occupational hazards of musicians

Being a musician may seem like a great job - but it does have its share of health hazards. Constant exposure to loud noises can damage hearing, and some musicians are subject to repetitive stress syndrome. According to the March 1999 issue of the International Journal of Dermatology, there's a less~obvious risk, too - for skin problems.

When doctors from the Gazi University Medical Faculty in Ankara, Turkey, examined the hands of 97 musicians, they found loads of skin problems. Horn players were particularly prone to reactions to nickle, but there were also reactions to varnish used on instruments - psoriasis, itch and flaky skin.

Excessive sweating of the palms and calluses of the fingertips were also very common.

The study's authors concluded that while many of the problems might be caused by regular contact with skin irritants, others might be the result of emotional stress.

Maybe musicians should play more songs like Whistle a Happy Tune.

~ Sam Uretsky

Columbia, Verve team for Burns' Jazz documentary

By Phil Gallo

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Columbia Records' Legacy imprint and Verve Records are joining forces to release a far-reaching overview in conjunction with Ken Burns' PBS documentary "Jazz."

On Nov. 7, Columbia Legacy and Verve will release a five-CD box set companion titled "Ken Burns Jazz: The Story of American Music" in addition to 22 individual artist discs. There will also be a single disc overview of the 10-episode series, which will air beginning Jan. 8.

Sony Music will release the box set and single disc overview domestically and Verve will release them internationally.

Universal Music Group's Verve label and Columbia possess two of the nation's largest jazz libraries. To make the discs comprehensive, tracks are being licensed from other jazz labels, such as Atlantic, BMG, Fantasy and Blue Note.

A Columbia spokesman said the sets are not meant to be historically inclusive, just representative of the Burns documentary. The five-CD set, which includes music from the shows, is a product of Burns' vision. Repertoire for all the sets is still being worked on.

Among the artists who will have the single disc issued through Columbia/Legacy are Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Herbie Hancock, Fletcher Henderson, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Jelly Roll Morton. Verve will issue sets from Count Basie, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Lester Young, among others.

"This project represents a fantastic opportunity to celebrate over 100 years of jazz history, while at the same time helping a whole new generation of music fans to appreciate the beauty, power and importance of this uniquely American art form," said Sony Music/Legacy Recordings senior vice president Jeff Jones.

A marketing plan for the sets is still in the works. Before the series airs, Knopf will publish a coffee-table book of photographs from the series. After its airing, Warner Home Video will release it on DVD.

Reuters/Variety REUTERS

Pianist Barenboim returns to Argentina

By Brian Winter

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim made an ebullient return to his native Argentina late Thursday almost 50 years to the day after his first public piano recital given at the age of seven.

This time around, there were nine encores -- compared to seven August 19, 1950 -- as an elated Barenboim entertained a sold-out hometown crowd at Buenos Aires' Teatro Colon operahouse with his versatile piano repertoire ranging from Beethoven to tango.

Barenboim, the musical director of orchestras in Berlin and Chicago, has been called "legendary" in the media. His marriage to deceased cellist Jacqueline du Pre was portrayed in the 1998 movie "Hilary and Jackie."

Thursday, the musician beamed when the scattered few who hung around for the final encore serenaded him with a rendition of "Happy Birthday To You" to mark the anniversary.

"I toyed around with the idea of playing the same program as the one I did 50 years ago," he told the audience, gazing far up into the theater's ornate, golden balconies.

"But I was afraid. I was afraid there would be people here with good memories, and they wouldn't like it as much," he added to a wave of laughter and applause.

Barenboim, who left Argentina at the age of 10 when his family moved to Israel, told Reuters after the concert, "It was a very moving occasion for me. When you come on the stage, and it's a public that knows you, it is a wonderful feeling of community. Today had a wonderful touch of sentimentality."

Child Prodigy

Barenboim still had vivid memories of his first recital, given as a child prodigy in a small Buenos Aires salon.

"I remember the sensation, the feeling of immense pleasure, of wanting to make music for the public, and it's something that has remained with me ever since," Barenboim said.

The audience, wowed by the technical skill and emotional power of the boy, kept clamoring for more until the young Barenboim finally came to the front of the stage with an apology -- after the long program and seven encores, he had used up his entire repertoire.

Half a century later, Argentines welcomed him back.

"He's been gone for many years, but he is still Argentine and we are proud of him as our own. He played marvelously tonight," said Ignacio Fernandez, 66, as he filed out of the majestic theater.

Barenboim plans another concert to commemorate the anniversary of his premiere for Saturday night.

But he said he had not yet chosen a venue for his 100th anniversary performance. c

"I'm just now beginning to plan carefully my next fifty years," he said laughing.

Reuters/Variety REUTERS

Bagpipers Play Into Record Books

From AOL News, .c The Associated Press

EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) - It was music to the ears - well, some ears - as 10,000 bagpipers and drummers set a record Saturday for the largest-ever pipe band.

Organizers of the pipe-a-thon, a fund-raiser for the Marie Curie Cancer Care charity, said more than 8,600 pipers set out on a procession from Edinburgh Castle along Princes Street in the heart of the Scottish capital.

The skirl of the pipes could be heard for miles. At one point, a ring of bagpipers in kilts encircled the medieval castle that looms over Edinburgh as pipers from Spain, Alaska, Guam, Canada, the United States, Australia and Hong Kong joined their Scottish counterparts.

Among the visitors were the Texas Firefighters Band and the pipe band of the New York City Department of Corrections.

Prince Charles was to meet participants Saturday afternoon.

A similar event in 1994 attracted 5,000 pipers. Researchers from the Guinness Book of Records were on hand to verify Saturday's feat, organizers said.

AP-NY-08-05-00 1041EDT

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press.

Barbra Streisand announces final concerts

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Veteran singer-actress Barbra Streisand announced Wednesday that she will give four final concerts in September -- two in Los Angeles and two in New York -- then bid goodbye to her career as a public performer.

Streisand, 58, who has acknowledged a lifelong struggle with anxiety over live appearances, "has chosen to conclude her public performance career in the two cities most closely associated with her work," her manager, Martin Erlichman said in a statement.

She will give two farewell concerts at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, on Sept. 20 and 21, and two more at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on Sept. 27 and 28.

Tickets will go on sale through Ticketmaster on July 30 for the Los Angeles concerts and on July 31 for the New York engagements. No information about prices was immediately available.

Those shows will follow a performance by Streisand Aug. 17 at a star-studded fund-raising concert for the Democratic Party in Los Angeles immediately following Vice President Al Gore (news - web sites)'s nomination for president, publicist Dick Guttman said.

For that show, to be held at the Shrine Auditorium, Streisand will share the bill with numerous performers, but "she will be singing the last three songs of the night," Guttman said.

Streisand's last live performance was a sold-out millennium eve concert she gave Dec. 31, 1999, at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, for which she reportedly received more than $5 million.

"She thought that the performance in Las Vegas would be her last one, but there were so many pressures ... from fans and others for her to conclude her career in New York and L.A.," Guttman said. Streisand, born in Brooklyn, currently resides near Los Angeles in the swank, oceanside city of Malibu.

The Grammy-winning entertainer has performed infrequently in public since the mid-1960s. Prior to a pair of New Year's 1993-94 concerts and a six-city concert tour in the spring and early summer of '94, Streisand had not performed live for pay in 27 years, Guttman said. "She acknowledged when she returned in '93 that she was overcoming a fear of public performance," he said.

Other notable Streisand appearances in recent years included a performance at President Clinton's first inaugural ball in January 1993 and a 1996 political benefit that raised $4 million for his reelection campaign, Guttman said. She also staged the 1986 "One Voice" concert at her Malibu estate that raised several million dollars for political candidates she supported.

Although not always popular with critics, and reputed to be arrogant and sometimes difficult with co-workers, Streisand's music won a devoted fan base, and her aversion to live performances has not hurt her commercially.

With 42 gold-certified albums to her credit, she ranks as the biggest-selling female recording artist of all time, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Streisand also won fame as a film actress, making her movie debut in the Oscar-winning role as vaudeville comedienne Fanny Brice in the 1968's "Funny Girl." She has gone on to star in nearly 20 pictures and lately has concentrated on her work as a film and TV producer.

She directed three films that she also starred in -- "Yentl" (1983), "The Prince of Tides" (1991) and "The Mirror Has Two Faces" (1996).

Reuters/Variety

PBS's 'Dvorák': Accentuating the Positive

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 3, 2000 page C01

"Dvorák and America," a PBS special that airs tonight at 10 on WETA, is a rarity: an effort at music history that rises above the usual bromides of television cultural documentaries. The hour-long program explores what was almost a utopian moment in the history of music in America: Dvorák's three-year stay in the United States as head of the National Conservatory of Music.

Music as subject matter for film is usually a disastrous undertaking. Filmmakers are too easily seduced: Music seems to say something bigger and deeper than mere images, so it is used as a gloss. Tell a few intriguing stories, then spin that CD: the orchestra swells and the mind goes elsewhere. The depth of music is substituted for the depth of questioning and analysis.

Director Lucille Carra struggles to avoid the trap by focusing on the social realities of America during the composer's visit, which lasted from 1892 to 1895. She succumbs on occasion to the temptations of cinematography (short reveries that mix Dvorák's familiar compositions with sumptuous natural imagery), but she also includes reference to the economic depression of the 1890s, the poverty of immigrant life and the stark landscape of racism.

Dvorák, the dean of Czech conductors at the end of the 19th century, was enticed to come here to lead the extraordinarily progressive National Conservatory of Music in New York. He came for the money, but he also came with an anthropologist's openness to learning about a new country.

The usual Dvorák myth goes like this: Papa Dvorák, a simple man of humble origins, arrived in America and discovered that, unbeknown to us, America had a treasure trove of native song. He wrote us a dandy symphony that uses some of this material, the Symphony No. 9 ("From the New World"), exhorted us to pay more respect to our folk tradition, and then departed happily for his native Bohemia.

"Dvorák and America" doesn't try to dismantle this myth, but it does show the chips and chinks in the facade. Dvorák is celebrated for his sympathy to the North American vernacular; but figures like Jeanette Thurber, the astonishingly farsighted founder of the National Conservatory who brought the composer to this country, are celebrated as well. Dvorák is a hero in context.

Indeed, Dvorák's time here was influential because the groundwork had already been laid for his visit by people like Thurber, critics like Henry Krehbiel and conductors like Anton Seidl. Dvorák's famous call for American composers to use African American melodies--an exhortation that had the authority of the composer's vast celebrity behind it--was tolerable because it was taken up and promulgated by people like Thurber, Krehbiel and Seidl.

The documentary tries to depict contradictions. Dvorák lived in the New York of Jacob Riis, the Danish photographer and social commentator who exposed the squalor of the city's tenements. He also visited Spillville, Iowa, a Czech settlement of great and sometimes harsh natural beauty. For a brief visit, the composer saw much of the best and worst of the country.

Dvorák was celebrated by wealthy New Yorkers, indeed, was brought to New York by Thurber, herself a member of the elite. But Thurber welcomed African Americans in her conservatory and Dvorák was collegial with the black singer Harry Burleigh, who introduced him to spirituals and other African American musics. The composer's fascination with and appreciation of this music is touching. It doesn't make him a saint--musicians appropriate good music because it's good music, not because it's the right thing to do in a moral sense. But it is evidence of a curious mind, which is more than a lot of European cultural figures brought with them when they visited the culturally insecure Americas of this period.

The only major problem with this documentary is its treatment of music. Although Carra mostly resists the tendency toward sentimentality, music is responsible for most of the lapses, including an irrelevant and mythologizing story about the composer's tender sympathy for a birthing sow during his time in Iowa (accompanied, of course, by beautiful music). Less important, but more annoying for musicians, is the visual use of Dvorák's scores: The camera rarely focuses on the passage being heard, and it often pans over the music backward.

And Dvorák's music is left unanalyzed. It's easy to show beautiful fields and sunsets and make the implicit argument that he responded to the landscape; but did he respond, musically, to the squalor as well? And what would such a response sound like?

Ultimately, the documentary is celebratory, which is understandable but troubling. The seeming cultural tolerance of the National Conservatory was remarkable. But if one reads the rhetoric of the time closely, it quickly sounds patronizing. Thurber once said, "The aptitude of the colored race for music, vocal and instrumental, has long been recognized, but no definite steps have hitherto been taken to develop it."

Ask yourself what she meant by the word "develop," and the utopian moment of Dvorák's encounter with America seems a little less sunny than this documentary ultimately portrays it.

© 2000 The Washington Post Company

Unknown Vivaldi Manuscript for Sale at Christie's

ROME –– A dazzling collection of perfectly preserved 18th-century manuscripts of unknown works by musical masters such as Vivaldi goes on sale here today.

"This is one of the most important collections in private hands of an Italian collection of 18th-century music, which is . . . the peak period for the history of music," said Fabio Bertolo, who is organizing the sale at Christie's auction house.

"If you imagine that this period influenced Bach, influenced Mozart--you can imagine the importance of Italian music in the 18th century," he said before the sale.

Christie's is auctioning 80 chamber music manuscripts from prominent musicians active in Italy. The manuscripts belonged to the aristocratic Calori-Provana-Balliani di Vignola Monferrato family from the northwestern region of Piedmont.

"It was produced from musicians that worked for this court. . . . It brings together a huge collection of manuscripts perfectly preserved during the last three centuries in the hands of heirs and in the hands of private collectors," Bertolo said.

The highlight of the lot, which is being sold together and has a minimum price tag of 180 million lire ($88,630), is the unpublished manuscript of Antonio Vivaldi's "L'Improvvisata."

The piece, a work for strings, was played in public for the first time in three centuries in Christie's fresco-lined auction room Monday evening. Bertolo said none of the pieces in the collection had been performed "in the modern age."

Bertolo, speaking in a book-filled manuscript archive at the auction house's sumptuous headquarters overlooking Rome's Piazza Navona, said "L'Improvvisata" was "one of the most important discoveries" of Vivaldi works.

"Not only Vivaldi but all this collection has never been played. . . . It's an important chapter of the history of 18th-century Italian music," he said.

Bertolo said he expected the Italian state archive--which has a huge collection of Vivaldi music in Turin--to be a keen bidder in Wednesday's sale along with private collectors.

Christie's has no idea what the manuscripts will fetch.

"The value of this lot is quite considerable--it's 180 to 200 million lire [$90,000 to $100,000]--but compared with the historical importance of this music it's nothing," Bertolo said.

Reuters © 2000 The Washington Post Company

Famed pianist Glenn Gould seen as autistic

By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was renowned both for his fantastic talent and for deeply eccentric habits such as rocking back and forth during recitals, humming loudly and conducting the music to himself.

Critics variously described him as "weird," "nuts," "idiosyncratic" and "wacky," and some strongly suggested he was little better than a show-off. But a Canadian musical academic turned medical detective says Gould's behavior shows he was battling Asperger's syndrome, a little-known kind of autism.

Timothy Maloney, director of the music division at Canada's National Library, insists the musical world needs to look again at one of its most charismatic figures.

"Some saw his behavior as a deliberate ploy. To me he was a victim rather than someone who had set out to do something deliberate. This thing ruled him. He was in a lot of emotional pain," Maloney told Reuters in an interview.

His controversial theory will ensure even more attention is paid to the reclusive Gould, who abruptly quit performing in public at the height of his fame in 1964 and turned to media work and recording before dying in 1982 at the age of just 50.

Some 225 boxes of his personal possessions and documents have been turned over to the National Library and are regularly consulted by researchers from all over the world trying to solve the Gould enigma.

'Overwhelmed By The Intensity Of His Playing'

"Gould's superb musicianship captivated many people. Just listen to the interviews of those who saw him in concert -- there was an impact at a deeply personal level," Maloney said.

"People were overwhelmed by the intensity of his playing and how much he put of himself into it. He was unique. No one played like that before or after him."

Maloney's curiosity was sparked by a U.S. psychiatrist's biography of Gould, which mentioned in passing that the odd behavior resembled the symptoms of Asperger's victims. "I went 'Bingo.' I'd suspected for a long time that this was more than just a weirdo," he said.

Once he started investigating Asperger's syndrome, which unlike other forms of autism does not always manifest itself at birth, he found many symptoms that made sense including intense powers of concentration, adherence to elaborate routines and rituals, inability to interact normally with others, abnormal responses to sensory stimulation and intolerance to change.

"There are tremendous assets and liabilities which go with the syndrome. These include perfect pitch, a photographic memory and exceptionally fine motor skills, with lamentable gross motor skills. Gould walked awkwardly but had a fabulous facility with his fingers," he said.

Gould made his public debut at the age of 14 and it soon became clear he was no ordinary pianist. He soaked his hands in hot water before every performance to improve their sensitivity and showed a marked reluctance to change his routine in any way, often placing a small Oriental carpet beneath the pedals before sitting down on his own battered low-slung piano chair.

He could not stand the cold and often wore a hat, scarf, gloves and winter coat, even in summer. He always complained about drafts and interrupted one concert in Jerusalem until a door at the back of the balcony had been closed.

Imagined And Real Illnesses

Gould developed imagined and real illnesses on tour, canceling many concerts. Eventually the pain of public performances became too great and he retired in 1964.

He preferred to keep others at a distance, had few close friendships and never married.

Ray Roberts, who was a close friend over the last 10 years of the pianist's life, says Maloney's theory makes sense. "It certainly fits in with the lifestyle and the profile, how he conducted his life," he told Reuters.

"He was very methodical in some ways and not at all in others. When he focused on something it was so intense as to be detrimental to his health."

This begs an important question: Did Gould have to fight off the symptoms of Asperger's to become a superb musician or did the syndrome in fact help make him a superstar?

"That's a tough question. I suspect the assets it gave him were so important to him that (without it) he may not have been as celebrated a musician and would not have been able to reach such a high a level in the profession," said Maloney.

"Robert Schumann (the 19th century German composer) was in the throes of a massive depression. If he hadn't had those phases, what would his output have been like?"

But Maloney's theory does little to convince Dr. Helen Mesaros, a Toronto psychiatrist who is currently working on what she calls "a psychobiography" of Gould.

Writing in Canada's Medical Post newspaper last month, Mesaros said many of Gould's symptoms can be traced back to his childhood and the insistence of his mother that he focus on the piano to the exclusion of everything else.

"It is known in clinical practice that mental health problems, if untreated, often tend to get worse and become more complex and obscure. This is precisely what happened to Gould," she wrote, adding it was clear the pianist suffered from a form of obsessive compulsive disorder and, by the time he reached 30, was also in grip of severe clinical depression.

"Gould's widely publicized self-neglect, solitude, dependence on the same objects and routines are rather late complications of his mood disorder and underlying personality dysfunction, rather than the neurological deficit called Asperger's disorder," she wrote.

Maloney remains unconvinced, so much so that he is due to present a detailed paper on Gould to the annual meeting of Ontario's Autism Society on June 9.

"I have no doubts. It could happen in a few years' time that someone comes along and proves me absolutely dead wrong but I can't see any possibility that I am," he said.

"I think Gould deserves admiration and empathy from us. He went through his entire life undiagnosed, yet he knew he was different. He suffered emotionally and never had the support system modern sufferers do."

Reuters/Variety

Hollywood Bowl taps gala presenters

By Phil Gallo

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Steven Spielberg, Whoopi Goldberg, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Dreyfuss have been tapped to make presentations at the Hollywood Bowl's annual gala and concert on June 23. Spielberg and Dreyfuss will present the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame Award to composer John Williams, and Goldberg will present the award to Garth Brooks.

The evening will also feature a tribute to the 80-year history of the Bowl, with Goldblum introducing a segment on the 1937 tribute to George Gershwin. Other singers, pop and jazz artists as well as dancers will be announced soon.

Besides a concert featuring the honorees performing with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra under the baton of Mauceri, there will be film clips, dances and fireworks. Proceeds from the evening will benefit the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Education and Community programs.

Reuters/Variety

'Kate,' 'Music Man' Lead Broadway's Tony Nominations

By Christopher Michaud

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An acclaimed revival of "Kiss Me Kate," Cole Porter's musical riff on Shakespeare, scored 12 Tony award nominations on Monday while plays by Eugene O'Neill, Sam Shepard, Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller led the drama category in the running for Broadway's highest honors.

The 2000 Tonys, the top U.S. theater awards, had twosomes in mind, with several artists winning double nominations in the same category, as well as veteran Rosemary Harris competing against her daughter, Jennifer Ehle.

"Kiss Me Kate," with a score featuring Porter classics like "Too Darn Hot" and "Another Op'nin, Another Show," won nominations for best revival of a musical, for leads Marin Mazzie and Brian Stokes Mitchell, director Michael Blakemore, best scenic design, lighting, choreography, orchestrations, costumes and three nods for best featured (supporting) actor.

"Meredith Willson's The Music Man" took nine nominations, including best revival of a musical and best actor for film and television actor Craig Bierko, making his Broadway debut in a role once thought to be owned by the late Robert Preston.

Best new musical nominations went to two dance shows with virtually no original music, "Contact" and "Swing," joining "James Joyce's The Dead," now closed, and "The Wild Party"

The lavish Elton John - Tim Rice musical "Aida", produced by Disney, was overlooked, although John and Rice were nominated for their score as was lead Heather Headley as best actress.

Best play nominees were Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen," Claudia Shear's "Dirty Blonde," Miller's "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan" and Sam Shepard's 20-year-old play "True West" in its first Broadway production.

"Dirty Blonde," a late season transfer from off-Broadway that has been the subject of a raft of articles in The New York Times, won five nominations including a second nod for Shear as best actress in the title role, screen siren Mae West.

Best revival of a play nominees were "Amadeus", Miller's "The Price," Stoppard's "The Real Thing" and the late Nobel laureate O'Neill's "A Moon for the Misbegotten."

Other best revival of a musical nominations went to "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Tango Argentino."

Film actors John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman were both nominated as best actor for "True West" for their roles as dueling brothers in the Shepard comic drama, in which they switch parts every three performances.

Several Hollywood stars who put in Broadway appearances this season were overlooked, including Carol Burnett in "Putting it Together," Woody Harrelson in "The Rainmaker" Olympia Dukakis in the one-woman show "Rose" and Patrick Stewart in "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan."

Other best actor in a play nominees included Gabriel Byrne in "A Moon for the Misbegotten," Stephen Dillane in "The Real Thing" and David Suchet for "Amadeus".

Jayne Atkinson in "The Rainmaker" and Cherry Jones in "A Moon for the Misbegotten" joined Harris in Noel Coward's "Waiting in the Wings" and her daughter Ehle in "The Real Thing" as best actress nominees.

Toni Collette, best known for her Oscar-nominated role as the mother in "The Sixth Sense" won a Tony nomination as best actress in a musical for "The Wild Party," one of two musicals this season based on the Jazz Age poem of the same name. The legendary Eartha Kitt was also nominated for the same show as best featured actress in a musical.

Other best actress nominees were Rebecca Luker in "The Music Man" and three-time Tony winner Audra McDonald in "Marie Christine," a musical retelling of Medea which has closed.

Christopher Walken, best known for playing offbeat characters in films, was nominated for best actor in a musical for "James Joyce's The Dead," joined by George Hearn for "Putting it Together" and Mandy Patinkin for "The Wild Party."

The Tonys loved director-choreographer Susan Stroman this year, handing her four nominations for "Contact" and "The Music Man." She will complete against herself in both the directing and choreography categories.

Michael John LaChiusa also won double nominations for his scores for "The Wild Party" and "Marie Christine."

The lavish production of "Saturday Night Fever," an adaptation of the 1977 film, was completely shut out.

Special Tony will be presented to "Dame Edna: The Royal Tour," while the annual award for regional theater went to The Utah Shakespearean Festival of Cedar City, Utah.

Also honored with special Tonys were actress Eileen Heckart, agent-manager Sylvia Herscher and the "Encores!" series of musical revivals performed at City Center.

The nominations were announced by former "Cheers" co-stars Kelsey Grammer, about to star in "Macbeth," and Bebe Neuwirth at a news conference. They will be presented June 4 at a gala hosted by talk show host Rosie O'Donnell at Radio City Music Hall.

UK's First Classical Music Awards Starts With Bang

By Braden Reddall

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's inaugural awards ceremony for classical music started off with a bang on Saturday, opening with violinist Vanessa Mae hitting her notes backed by pyrotechnics and thundering drums.

The Classical Brit Awards is classical music's answer to annual pop music gala the Brit Awards and an attempt by organizers to reach a wider audience.

Mae, described by a U.S. magazine as "Mozart in Doc Martens," is part of a young generation helping to broaden classical music's appeal.

The 21-year-old, who posed in a wet T-shirt for her first album cover, wore a backless green-sequinned shirt as she strutted around the stage playing a rousing version of "Storm and Devils Trill" to kick off the show.

"Television is a visual medium as well as audio," she told reporters after the performance.

Later, Welsh teenage singing sensation Charlotte Church walked away with an award for British Artist of the Year.

Britons buy more classical albums per capita than their European counterparts and twice the amount bought by Americans, but Church enjoys considerable success across the Atlantic. The 14-year-old's

debut album "Voice of an Angel" launched her to global stardom, but she said she could hardly believe she was currently the most popular British artist in the United States -- ahead of The Spice Girls.

"That is great, but it's hard for me to comprehend. It's so unreal," she said.

"Classical Music For Everyone"

Britain's Minister for Culture Chris Smith, prior to giving Church the award, spoke out against the "stuffy people" who criticized the Oscars-style awards ceremony for its populist presentation of classical music.

"Classical music is for everyone," he said to resounding cheers at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

The industry is hoping to boost sales, which make up six percent of the total in Britain.

Church had also been up for Young British Classical Performer but that honor went to Daniel Harding.

Harding, a 24-year-old conductor who is now music director of Bremen-based Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, beat Church and Mae, among others.

He said in his speech that he was glad to win an award on the same day his favorite soccer team, Manchester United, received a trophy for winning the English Premiership title.

While viewing Church on a TV monitor backstage, Harding said: "She looks like (female pop singer) Britney Spears."

Another member of classical music's younger set, punk violinist Nigel Kennedy, took an award for Outstanding Contribution to Classical Music.

Former Beatle Paul McCartney had been nominated for an award for Album of the Year for his crossover classical album "Working Classical," a tribute to his late wife Linda.

But the award, voted for by listeners of radio station Classic FM, went to "Sacred Arias" by Andrea Bocelli, the world's biggest-selling living classical artist.

The Critics Award -- for recordings by a British orchestra or featured British performer -- went to "The English Songbook" by Ian Bostridge, accompanied by Julius Drake.

Argentina-born Martha Argerich took one of the eight gold trophies for Female Artist of the Year, while Male Artist of the Year went to another Welsh singer, Bryn Terfel.

Album of the Year for an ensemble or orchestra went to Stephen Cleobury and the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, for a recording of Rachmaninov Vespers.

L.A. Philharmonic sets schedule for 2000-2001

By Alan Rich

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Conflict and peace, pessimism and hope -- the intertwined musical emanations from the Los Angeles Philharmonic's 2000-01 seasonal repertory announced Thursday -- form a fair picture of the orchestra itself as it looks ahead to its 82nd season, which opens Oct. 5.

Those emanations are nicely embodied in a series of large-scale choral works threaded through the oncoming season: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony led by Salonen at the season's subscription opener; Britten's "War Requiem"; the seldom-heard "Persephone," as part of a three-week Stravinsky festival; Mahler's Second Symphony; and Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" later on. Although nominally on sabbatical through 2000, Salonen will emerge from work around the house to lead the orchestra's first two program weeks plus an opening-night gala.

Among the season's novelties: Kurt Weill's "Seven Deadly Sins" to honor the composer's 100th birthday -- with rising vocal star Audra McDonald as soloist; Lou Harrison's Indonesia-scented "Suite for Violin, Piano and Small Orchestra"; an Aaron Copland centennial program with legendary singer Marilyn Horne; an evening of John Adams, including scenes from his "Nixon in China"; and a commissioned work by Italian innovator Franco Donatoni, Salonen's former teacher.

Three separate programs will be guest-led by Christoph Eschenbach: two by the Philharmonic and one with Eschenbach's own NDR Orchestra of Hamburg. Other guests include conductor-pianist Andras Schiff, Roberto Abbado, Anthony Pappano and, for the "St. Matthew," renowned Bach specialist Helmuth Rilling. The "Green Umbrella" new-music series will continue, with programs still on the drawing board.

In addition to its customary New York appearances at Lincoln Center, the orchestra will tour to Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, Seattle's new Benaroya Hall, Chicago's Orchestra Hall and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. The experimental "Filmharmonic" project, with newly created music and film intermingled, will be revived at some unspecified date in the near future, managing director Deborah Borda promised, in cahoots with New York-based producers the Shooting Gallery.

Hastily installed last January upon the precipitous (and still unexplained) departure of predecessor Willem Wijnbergen, Borda smiled through her accounting of the orchestra's current deficit, reported at $3.2 million. This, she noted, was almost exactly the size of the 1991 deficit at the New York Philharmonic that she took over there -- and eventually erased.

Reuters/Variety

Trio showcases fiddling virtuosity

By Susan Schwendener

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The string ensemble performing at Chicago's Orchestra Hall on a recent night comprised three virtuosos: two master instrumentalists/composers and the superstar cellist of this generation.

But violinist Mark O'Connor, bassist Edgar Meyer and cellist Yo-Yo Ma delighted the audience not with classics but with a mixture of foot-tapping fiddle tunes, elegant lyrical melodies and rearrangements of American folk songs.

In their fourth appearance on a three-continent tour to promote their recently released "Appalachian Journey," the trio clearly enjoyed revisiting musical territory covered in their 1996 hit, "Appalachia Waltz," also for Sony Classical.

The new album also features guest appearances by country music star Alison Krauss and singer/songwriter James Taylor.

Critics have labored to label the Ma-Meyer-O'Connor sound, describing it as "a hybrid of chamber music and bluegrass," a "middle ground between classical, country, folk music and traditional Anglo-Celtic fiddling styles," or even a "neo-Americana revolution."

But to the musicians it seemed pretty straightforward.

Talent Inspires

"For me, the primary motivation and excitement of this music is the talent pool" Tulsa, Oklahoma-born Meyer has said. "These two guys (Ma and O'Connor) play with such virtuosity and so beautifully that it's always stimulating."

Meyer, the first bassist to receive the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1994, began studying bass at 5 with his father and then with Stuart Sankey. A regular guest at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival from 1985 to 1993, in 1994 he joined the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York, which which he regularly performs.

His compositions for "Appalachian Journey," all trio pieces, include "1B," a violin piece written for his 6-year-old son, "Swell New Tune," "Waltzing with My Aunt Hill Da" and "Indecision."

"We live in such different worlds but we come together, and when we're done we leave with the sense that things are a lot closer than even we thought," O'Connor said in one commentary on the group.

The Country Music Association's Musician of the Year from 1990 to 1995, Seattle native O'Connor says he first picked up a violin at 12 and perfected his fiddling under the tutelage of Benny Thomasson and French jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli.

Original Works

O'Connor's compositions for the album, which the trio played in Chicago, include "Misty Moonlight Waltz," "Poem for Carlita," a love poem for his wife, "Vistas," inspired by three views from his Vista, California, home, "Emily's Reel," a violin piece written for Ma's daughter Emily, and "Limerock," a duet for violin and cello that is a reworking of a violin/bass concert piece recorded with Meyer 10 years ago.

"We wanted to keep the core idea, which is a strong trio with an unusual instrumentation -- most people overlook that -- and expand it a bit," O'Connor said.

Ma, educated at the Juilliard School and Harvard University, may be the public draw for the trio but he too speaks of his artistic growth spurred by the collaboration.

"When I first started working with Mark O'Connor, his articulation was so much like baroque playing that the only way I could match it, and match the speed of his articulation, was to take my modern bow and play it so that it felt more like a baroque bow," Ma said in one commentary.

"So in a funny way I came to playing the baroque cello from watching very carefully a really great fiddler. Because, of course, that is also a centuries-old tradition."

Sony will also release this spring a sequel to the 1999 Ma-Amersterdam Baroque Orchestra recording "Simply Baroque."

The album of Bach chorales and arias transcribed for cello and orchestra and Boccherini concertos features Ma playing his Stradivarius cello reconfigured as a Baroque instrument along with the period-instrument Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra under the direction of Ton Koopman.

Reuters/Variety

Tie Score

A guide to music appreciation
The late John Cage was an American composer who became well known for his inventive works. In 1952, he composed a work entitled 4'33, in which musicians sat on stage for 4 minutes, 33 seconds without playing a note. The composition wasn't fully appreciated at the time, but according to the journal Applied Psychophysiological Feedback, Cage must have written one of the most relaxing pieces in the history of music.

The psychology department of the University of South Alabama wanted to see what effect different types of music had. They found 21 men and 24 women, and randomly assigned them to listen to classical, hard rock, self-selected relaxing music or no music at all.

The results? Classical music induced feelings of relaxation, as did the self-selected relaxing music. And -- perhaps surprisingly so -- the subjects were just as relaxed with no music at all.

So if a group of musicians ever asks for audience requests, ask them to play 4'33. It's really very relaxing.

Sam Uretsky
Copyright © 1999 Rx Remedy, Inc.

Harpist's Music Helps Newborns

By DAVID FREY, Associated Press Writer

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Gentle melodies strummed on a 6-foot tall harp lilt into nurseries where critically ill newborns cling to life at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

"It just puts them in a more restful state," says student musician Betty-Ashton Andrews, who is experimenting with using music to help the infants."It makes it easier for them to grow and heal."

There's only budding scientific proof that such therapy helps newborns, but that doesn't dissuade Andrews, 19, from conducting her once-weekly concerts at the hospital's newborn intensive care unit.

Astride the gilded harp on the NICU's tile floor, Andrews coaxes lullabies, Disney tunes and classical music from its 52 strings, including requests that range from "Amazing Grace" to Lynard Skynard's"Freebird."

Her audience, usually 150 babies, is tucked into incubators and surrounded by nests of tubes and wires connected to respirators, heart monitors and intravenous fluids. Nurses and parents say they note subtle changes in the babies when Andrews plays and most welcome any balm for a trying time.

Staff members say the music provides an antidote to the stress that comes with caring for, and sometimes losing, babies who are premature or fighting diseases.

For the babies, it muffles the frightening sounds of machines and unusual voices, and soothes them to sleep when their mothers can't.

NICU manager Diane Deslauriers said the babies' heart rates seem to go down and they seem to rely less on their respirators when they hear the harp music.

Christa Tuttle of Gallatin drove 50 miles round-trip each day to spend about 12 hours in the NICU with her daughter, Caitlin. Born three months early on Jan. 29, Caitlin relied on a respirator the first three days to help her breathe.

Tuttle cannot say if Caitlin's health improved because of the music, but she says she responded to it.

"Probably the one and only way you can tell is her alertness and her calmness," Tuttle said when Caitlin was still in the NICU."She's relaxed and able to look around and listen."

Caitlin went home on March 19, and"is doing great. She is gaining weight much faster than when she was in the hospital. They say the home environment is best and I see that to be true," her mother said recently.

Vanderbilt has not studied the effect of the music on the children, but Deslauriers said,"If I'm carrying a baby and she calms down, I don't need a research study."

Jayne Standley, professor of music therapy at Florida State University, has conducted several studies at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital's NICU and has found babies who listened to lullabies left the hospital earlier than those who didn't.

By hooking tape recorders to feeding tubes, researchers also found they could use lullabies to teach premature babies to nurse.

"If the baby gets 10 seconds of music and then it goes off, they learn to suck for at least 10 seconds to keep the music on," Standley said.

Standley said research was needed to determine whether harp music was comforting to premature babies. Even though it is apparently soothing stimulation, she said premature babies are highly sensitive and the sounds could be disturbing to them.

At Vanderbilt, most babies dozed peacefully while Andrews played. Some were doted on by nurses and nervous mothers. Few showed signs of the restlessness sometimes exhibited by newborns hospitalized for the first weeks of their lives.

Andrews said she has had only a good response since first playing the harp for hospitalized newborns at Carilion Health System in her hometown of Roanoke, Va. Andrews, who is pursuing a degree in harp performance and considering one in music therapy, said she chose to attend Vanderbilt in part so she could lend her music to its NICU.

"I love to play the harp," she said, and"I get to use it in a way that other people will benefit from it."

Ron Price, who teaches harp and music education at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill., said many doctors are amazed at how quickly patients respond to the music.

"Some will say, 'We don't have anything in medicine that works that quickly,"' he said.

As executive director and cofounder of Healing Harps, Price trains harpists to work with people with physical or emotional problems to soothe their pain.

"We do this all the time in hospitals across the country," he said.

The harp's magic is its acoustics, he said. It mimics the sound of the human voice and affects babies - and adults - like a lullaby.

"The music simply bathes them with healthy sounds," he said."It's sort of like a sound massage."

On the Net: Healing Harps: http://www.healingharps.org
American Music Therapy Association: http://www.musictherapy.org

Boston Symphony Hall celebrates 100th anniversary

BOSTON (Reuters) - Boston Symphony Hall has been bringing Americans music for 100 years, and for the next four days it will really beat the drum.

A lone Japanese Hirado drummer will herald the opening of Saturday night's gala that will feature performances by the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops Orchestras, cellist Yo Yo Ma, singer-composer James Taylor, the Harlem Boys Choir and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

The celebrations of the hall's 100th anniversary kick off Thursday night with a brief concert by American soprano Jessye Norman singing - not Mozart or Straus - but Gershwin. She will be backed by BSO conductor Seiji Ozawa, Pops conductor Keith Lockhart and former Pops leader and composer John Williams.

Symphony Hall has premiered more than 250 works by such composers as Samuel Barber and Béla Bartók as well as Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev and more recently, Williams and Judith Weir.

Built for $750,000 - including the land - the hall was designed by New York architect Charles McKim. Harvard University physicist Wallace Sabine served as the acoustical consultant.

From an acoustics perspective, the 2,625-seat hall's only rivals are Amsterdam's Concertgebow and Vienna's Musikverein, experts say.

Above the second balcony are niches that were designed to enhance the acoustics. The 16 statues of Greek gods and authors served to give the hall a classical look, explained a spokeswoman, adding that at the time Boston considered itself the Athens of America.

The Hall's first concert took place on Oct. 15, 1900.

On Friday, Ozawa, Lockhart and John WilliamsWilliams will appear again together. This time they will unveil a plaque listing giving Symphony Hall National Landmark status.

Reuters/Variety REUTERS

Boston's Symphony Hall to mark 100th anniversary

By Christopher Noble

BOSTON (Reuters) - Boston Symphony Hall, one of world's most famous concert halls, will mark its 100th anniversary this fall with a gentle face-lift and a series of special performances, officials say.

A season-long gala will peak with a four-day centennial weekend starting with a ball and ending with a free open house for the community on Oct. 15 -- 100 years to the day after Wilhelm Gericke inaugurated the facility with a performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, officials announced Monday.

The celebration will highlight Symphony Hall's beloved place in the Boston community, for although the city's ballet and museums often are forced to play second fiddle to New York's cultural institutions, Symphony Hall's preeminence is accepted worldwide.

The hall is considered by many to be one of the three best concert spaces in the world, along with Amsterdam's Concertgebouw and Vienna's Musikverein.

The hall's century-old walls and floors, with scuffed paint and chipped varnish, will remain untouched as the Boston Symphony Orchestra's (BSO) leaders renovate the surrounding rooms and make the auditorium wheelchair accessible.

The building's exterior, which some have called drab and common, will be enhanced and upgraded.

"It is our commitment that we will do all this without in any way affecting the structure of the building or affecting its acoustics," said BSO Managing Director Mark Volpe.

Music Director Seiji Ozawa, who will end a 28-year run in Boston after the 2001-2002 season, told reporters at a news conference that he was excited by the plan to renew the hall.

"I am a very lucky person to have worked in this hall for 26 years," he said. "I am spoiled."

But Ozawa noted that Symphony Hall needed to look better from the outside to reflect better the beauty of its acoustics. He pledged that the renovation would be carried out with care.

"This hall could look better," he said. "We are very careful because you can't get this back if you do it wrong."

Reuters/Variety

Pavarotti Lends Voice to Dot-Com

By Phil Gallo
HOLLYWOOD (Variety) ~ Luciano Pavarotti as Ed McMahon? Only on the Internet.

Tibor Rudas, who produces Three Tenors concerts worldwide, is launching superstartheater.com, with Pavarotti introducing the operatic presentations available on the Web site.

Like Tonos.com, the talent-hunting dot-com run by Carole Bayer Sager, David Foster and Babyface Edmonds, Superstar Theater will run talent contests. The difference here is that frequent users (Superstar judges) will vote on who should win. Winners are being offered the promise of "global exposure."

To celebrate the premiere of Superstar Theater, the Rudas Organization has teamed up with Intervu.net to Webcast the Three Tenors' concert at Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas on April 22.

Those who register with Superstar Theater will be able to view, for free, the Vegas debut of Pavarotti, Jose Careras and Placido Domingo on Superstartheater.com.

South African blacks hit high note with opera

By Shellee Geduld
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (Reuters) - After years of apartheid suppression, black South Africans are raising their voices in the hope of one day stepping onto the global opera stage with the likes of Italian superstar Luciano Pavarotti.

The Choral Training Program, run by Cape Town's Opera House and taking in people from all walks of life, began in 1994 -- the year South Africa held its first democratic elections.

"They are taught Italian and German. They are taught to read music and they are taught music skills," Alec Beukes, public relations officer for the Opera House, told Reuters.

"They are trained by some of the top opera singers in the country ... and they get formal training at the University of Cape Town as well," he added.

Initially limited to providing free choral training for aspiring singers from the black majority, the CTP gradually opened its doors to all comers, provided they are unemployed.

"For the first two years it was only open to people from the black communities, but now it is open to everybody ... so that it is representative of everybody," Beukes said.

Most members live in Cape Town and surrounding areas, with backgrounds as diverse as the plush formerly exclusively white suburb of Constantia and the black shantytown of Khayelitsha.

Auditions for new trainees are held annually. Competition is tough with only 43 people chosen from 200 applicants.

The chorus master at the Cape Town Opera House, Austrian Guenter Wallner, said he found working with the choral training group very satisfying. He said South African singers had natural potential and warned the world to watch out.

"In the next 30 years a lot of opera singers will come from South Africa," he said. "They have such potential ... it's quite a small group you find with these voices ... and you won't find them in another part of the world."

Aspiring divas already have several role models to follow in the international arena. Former CTP student Abel Motsoadi is studying at New York's famed Juilliard School, Angela Gilbert understudied the role of Donizetti's Adelia at Carnegie Hall in 1998 and Sally du Rand is singing in European opera houses.

Wallner said South Africa was ignorant of its own talent. "They are kind of sitting on a treasure but they don't realize that they are sitting on a box that has gold inside."

Choral Training Leads To Greater Things For Some

A spin off of the choral training program, The Vocal Ensemble, was formed three years ago when Michael Williams, organizer of the Opera School, realized that he could use the students as part of the chorus at the Opera House.

"We suddenly realized we had this group of singers that now had gone through the training, had proven themselves and were now looking for work, so we formed The Vocal Ensemble," he said, calling it a natural progression.

"These are singers generally taken from historically disadvantaged communities who have no musical literacy at all and who haven't had the opportunity or finances to study music," he said.

The Vocal Ensemble consists of 24 singers who came up through the CTP and who go out to schools in the city and perform songs from a varied repertoire ranging from classical opera to top 10 hits.

"The kids love it," Williams said, noting that the program ranged from an up-tempo version of Handel's "Hallelujah" to grand opera choruses from "Aida," a medley of songs by Cher and Ricky Martin and Xhosa traditional music.

"It's a range of musical styles, you've got everything from rock to pop to gospel ... from opera to operetta to jazz to blues to chants, everything you can think of that is sung, we sing it," he said.

The group has just finished a three-week tour and is now rehearsing for "The Merry Widow" and "La Traviata," two of the operas planned for the Opera House.

"For the next two months their outreach work or their community work will be concentrated at the Nico Opera," Williams said. "Once the operas are finished we then start with more community work, going out and doing tours."

Sipho Tswane, a CTP trainee, said he enjoyed being part of the program because he was given free musical skills as well as a voice coach. He said getting paid each month was an undeniable factor in remaining with the program, but he would like to study music at the University of Cape Town next year.

Tswane said he had encouraged some of his friends to join the CTP, but so far only one had passed the audition.

"These are role models for communities that perhaps haven't heard this music and perhaps haven't heard the quality of the singing they can provide," Williams said.

Reuters/Variety

L.A.'s Museum of TV & Film Begins Sondheim Retrospective, March 24

There'll be Sondheim, Sondheim and more Sondheim at Los Angeles' Museum of Television and Radio beginning March 24. From then until July 2, the institution will screen television versions of many of Stephen Sondheim's musicals, some never before seen in the U.S., as part of the series "Something for Everyone: Sondheim Tonight!"

The show began playing the museum's New York City branch March 17.

Sondheim, who turned 70 on March 22, was recently profiled in the New York Times Magazine. In addition, he was feted at a San Francisco gala, March 18.

Highlights of the retrospective include:

• Television productions of Passion, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods.
• The U.S. Premiere of the 1976 Japanese television production of Pacific Overtures.
• The U.S. Premiere of the 1996 London production of Company
• A segment of the British series, "Theatreland," featuring songs from the 1997 Bridewell Theatre staging of Sondheim's early work Saturday Night.
• A 1954 episode of the television sitcom "Topper." Sondheim wrote nearly a dozen scripts for the show. In this edition, the ghosts help Topper with a play at his wife's charity club.
• Evening Primrose, Sondheim's only musical written especially for television. The 1966 work -- a collaboration with James Goldman -- stars Anthony Perkins as a poet who hides from the world by spending nights in a department store, only to find a group of people with the same idea are already there.
• The world premiere of "West Side Stories: The Making of West Side Story," a 1996 documentary in which original cast members and crew from the stage and movie production of the musical talk about their experiences.
• A 1958 episode of "The Ed Sullivan Show," in which Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence recreate the balcony scene from West Side Story.
• "Gypsy Rose Lee and Her Friends," the stripper's San Francisco-based talk show. In this 1965 episode, Lee talks with Ethel Merman about Gypsy and shows home movies of rehearsals for the show in the New Amsterdam Theatre.
• D.A. Pennebaker's 1970 documentary, "Company: Original Cast Album."
• A 1971 episode of "The David Frost Show" in which Frost devotes the entire program to Follies, talking with Sondheim, Goldman, Harold Prince and several of the show's stars. Sondheim performs "Can That Boy Foxtrot."
• "Great Performance: Follies in Concert" (1985)
• The 1974 television production of Kaufman and Lardner's June Moon, starring Sondheim as Tin Pan Alley pianist Maxie Schwartz.

Admission to the museum if $6. The museum is located at 25 W. 52nd Street in Manhattan; 465 N. Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, CA. For more information, call (212) 621-6800 in New York; (310) 786-1000 in L.A., or check out the web site at /www.mtr.org.

-- By Robert Simonson

Getting in Verdi Big Trouble

WEDNESDAY, March 22 (HealthSCOUT) -- Not a fan of Wagner, Puccini or Delibes? If sitting through an evening at the opera is your idea of hell, you'll want to stay on Kirk Peters' good side.

Peters is the associate dean of student affairs at Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic, Conn., a school that now offers opera as an alternative to community service for students who've committed minor infractions.

If a student has never been to the opera before, he can shorten or wipe out his hours of community service by attending an opera performance at The Bushnell in Hartford. Peters believes that by exposing the students to a new experience, opera provides a positive alternative to traditional discipline.

The idea took shape while Peters was dealing with a group of students who'd played football on the school's softball field during a rainstorm, damaging the field. Each student had to pay damages and do 10 hours of community service. While handing out these sentences, a student asked Peters if he really liked the opera that was playing. Recalling that he had hated it at their age, Peter asked if any of them had ever seen an opera.

All of the students said no. So Peters made a deal with them: If they went to see an opera with him -- at his expense -- he would cut their community service times in half. "I guess you can call it a punishment, but I want to raise the bar. I want students who normally don't go to events like this to have the experience of taking in an opera," says Peters. "By hook or by crook, I want people to experience the love of opera like I have."

On the first trip, eight students went with Peters to see Bizet's Carmen. Two of the students loved the experience, while four were more non-committal. "Two of the students hated it," says Peters. "They said if it was offered again, they'd rather go outside and pick up trash." Since then, Peters has organized three similar trips to the symphony and another trip to see Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Julie Cresenzi, a 20-year-old communications major in her sophomore year, was one of the students who saw The Magic Flute. "It wasn't as bad as people thought it was going to be," says Cresenzi. But she adds, "I don't think it was a punishment. It's better than picking up trash."

Peters denies that this alternative is in some way disrespectful of opera. "I don't mean to demean the United Cerebral Palsy if I send students there as part of their punishment," he says. "I want them to have an enriching experience, and I know for some people it will be very positive."

But his theory doesn't strike the same chord with the managing director of the Connecticut Opera. Maria Levy says that though Peters' heart is in the right place, "I don't like the fact that it's attached to a punishment. While I encourage people to come, I think it's sad that this is being done under the umbrella of [restitution]."

"There's a punishment mentality around it," says Levy, "and the arts are not a negative thing."

World Fest, Williams tribute to highlight Bowl season

By Phil Gallo
HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - A special tribute to film composer John Williams, the 200th concert appearance of conductor John Mauceri and the return of the World Festival highlight the summer season at the Hollywood Bowl.

The year launches June 23 with the annual opening night gala featuring a tribute to Williams and the Bowl that Mauceri promises will be "full of surprises" and include film clips as well as guest stars. Williams will be honored as the first inductee into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame.

Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra mark their 200th show with a July 8 concert featuring two of Broadway's hottest singers, Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald. The Bowl Orchestra will perform 10 different programs, beginning July 2-4 with Glen Campbell. The schedule includes a concert version of Madama Butterfly on July 9 and Garrison Keillor on Aug. 27.

The World Festival will host six concerts in its sophomore season: a flamenco night on June 25; Miriam Makeba and two other "global divas" July 16; a world blues party July 23, with Koko Taylor, Ali Farka Toure and Alvin Youngblood Hart; a Celtic night July 30 featuring Altan and Natalie MacMaster; former James Brown saxophonist Maceo Parker and Femi Anikulapo-Kuti on Aug. 6; and Brazilian night on Sept. 10, with Jorge Ben Jor and Daniela Mercury. In addition, Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento performs July 1.

A tribute to Mel Torme will feature Maureen McGovern, Cleo Laine and John Dankworth with the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra as part of the Wednesday night jazz series.

The season closes with Itzhak Perlman conducting the Los Angles Philharmonic on Sept. 12 and a fireworks finale Sept. 15, 16 and 17 featuring the Bowl Orchestra and Cannes Film Festival party faves Pink Martini.

The L.A. Philharmonic will perform Thursdays July 13-Sept. 7 as well as at several weekend concerts.
Reuters/Variety

McCartney's publishing company sues MP3.com

By Derek Caney
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former Beatle Paul McCartney's publishing company, MPL Communications Inc., has joined the record industry's battle against digital music company MP3.com Inc.'s controversial database of copyrighted music.

The publishing company, which owns the rights to McCartney's solo catalog as well as songs by Sammy Cahn, Hoagy Carmichael, Buddy Holly and others, filed suit last week in the U.S. District Court in New York accusing the San Diego-based company of copyright infringement stemming from its http://my.mp3.com service.

The suit represents the second wave of attack against the service, which includes a database of over 80,000 copyrighted albums the company has copied. Using MP3.com software, computer users that own one of these recordings can gain online access to the database to listen to those albums over the Internet from any computer.

The service sparked a lawsuit from the trade group Recording Industry Association of America, representing most of the world's largest record labels, accusing MP3.com of violating copyright law by compiling its digital album archive.

"This represents the first lawsuit against MP3.com's undertaken by independent publishing companies," McCartney's spokesman Paul Freunlich told Reuters.

While McCartney isn't personally suing the fledgling company, he is the principal owner of MPL and raises the profile of the record industry anti-piracy crusade by involving one of the best-known names of the rock era.

MPL was joined in its suit by Peer International Corp, whose catalog includes the late Latina star Selena and country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers.

A spokeswoman from MP3.com confirmed it received the suit, but declined to comment on it.

Elaine Combs, a visiting assistant law professor at Rutgers Law School, said: "The crux of the issue is whether or not the existence of this database constitutes a copyright infringement, even if you cannot access the database without having first bought the record yourself."

But a broader issue, experts say, is whether reliance on litigation hampers the development of innovative technology.

"The danger of lawsuits like these is that it attempts to control and shape the development of technology to serve an exisitng business model," said Yochin Benkler, a New York University law professor. "That is a dangerous way to make technology policy.

"The business models need to change to fit the technology, not the other way around," he added.

This service, Benkler said, allows users to listen to their CD's anywhere without carrying their entire collection around with them. "A side effect is that it is possible to copy the music illegally. But it does not outweigh the usefulness of the technology."

Classical Goes Pop in Britain for Glitzy Awards

By Paul Majendie
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's classical music industry Friday took a leaf out of pop music's book -- it announced nominations for a glittering new awards ceremony.

Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney and the Welsh teen-age sensation Charlotte Church headed the candidates for the first Classical Brit Awards to be presented in London on May 6.

Traditionalists may bridle at heavily hyped pop packaging of classical music but marketers have a sharp eye on sales, which make up less than 6 percent of the total in Britain.

So the line-up on the big night will include Vanessa Mae, who posed in a wet T-shirt for her first album cover, the voluptuous Anne-Sophie Mutter and Linda Lampenius, who appeared in Playboy magazine.

Rob Dickins, chairman of the British Phonographic Industry which is organizing the awards, said: "Classical music has spread its influence to encompass all kinds of markets and in doing so is reaching a much wider audience."

Others are not so sure that Oscar-style award ceremonies are the way to go.

Roger Lewis, head of Classic FM, a commercial station with six million listeners, told The Times: "Classical music has taken such a battering over the years we support any attempt to get the music across to as wide an audience as possible.

"But this event will not give the full picture of the breadth of classical activity which we try to cover."

Classical sales in the 1 billion pound record industry fell last year from 7.3 to 5.9 percent.

"Crossover" albums are the biggest hits -- from James Horner's Celtic-style soundtrack for the film "Titanic" to punk violinist Nigel Kennedy's tribute to Jimi Hendrix.

The biggest success has been achieved on both sides of the Atlantic by the diminutive soprano Charlotte Church who is now valued at 10 million pounds after two hugely successful albums.

She is nominated for young British classical performer and female artist of the year.

McCartney, one of the world's most famous pop stars, is another leader in "crossover" classics. He was rewarded with a nomination for best album of the year for "Working Classical," a tribute to his late wife Linda.

Beatles to enter dotcom era 30 years after split

By Sinead O'Hanlon

LONDON (Reuters) - The Beatles will launch their first official Web site this month, 30 years after the group split up, a spokeswoman for the band said Wednesday.

The site, thebeatles.com, will go live Nov. 13 and will be the band's only official presence on the Internet among a flood of unofficial fan sites.

"Over the past few years, given the thousands of unofficial sites, there has been much speculation as to when the Beatles would create their own," the spokeswoman said.

"With a new CD coming out, it is the right time to put them on the Web and into the dotcom era."

The launch of the site will be tied to the release of the band's latest collection, simply called "1," which features all 27 of the Fab Four's No. 1 hits.

The band's management had been resistant to the idea of setting up a Beatles site, but hopes the venture will appeal to a younger audience more familiar with using a computer than an old-fashioned record player.

"They thought it was the right way to show the Beatles to a new generation," the spokeswoman said.

The band's three surviving members, Sir Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, as well as John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, have all contributed to the site.

Despite other celebrities falling victim to cybersquatters -- people who register the domain names of famous people in the hope of making a quick profit -- the Beatles had no trouble registering the name of their choice, the spokeswoman said.

The site will allow visitors to watch footage of the Beatles' performances, contact one another and take virtual tours through the famous Abbey Road studios where the band made most of their music.

A team of Web designers has been working on the site for a year. While the content will initially concentrate on "1," new aspects will be added over time.

Reuters/Variety REUTERS

Beatles Release Own Account of Band's History

LONDON (Reuters) - The Beatles unveil a new book on Thursday, the first account by band members of their sensational rise to fame and the top of the world's music charts during the 1960s.

British publisher Cassell & Co said in a statement on Tuesday that the three surviving members of the original Fab Four collaborated in the 370-page autobiography. It promises to be the "final word" on their much-documented history.

In addition to Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, wife of the late John Lennon, contributed.

Cassell said that more than 1.5 million orders had already been placed for "The Beatles Anthology", which recounts their story from childhoods in Liverpool, northern England,