This Week in Classical Music-September 6, 2009

September 06, 2009

Erich Kunzel

( Phoenix, AZ )
•Kunzel dead at 74
•Alberto Gonzalez Cantata

This Week in Classical Music 9/06/09

It’s This Week in Classical Music, an update on what’s happening in the classical music world; I’m Randy Kinkel.
Conductor Erich Kunzel has died at age 74. The Longtime leader of the Cincinnati Symphony had been battling cancer since his diagnosis in April. Kunzel got his start with the Cincinnati Symphony in 1965. He rose through the ranks and was also named conductor of the fledgling pops orchestra when it was established in 1977, holding the position until his death. A master showman, Kunzel brought widespread fame to his orchestra through recordings that sold millions of copies, and as host of TV specials and tours both national (from Carnegie Hall to the Grand Ole Opry) and international (including, in 2005, the first appearance of a pops orchestra in China). His schedule included guest-conducting gigs all over the world, from Toronto to Tokyo. Since 1991, he'd also led the National Symphony's annual, televised Memorial Day and Fourth of July concerts presented on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol. Kunzel celebrated his 50th anniversary as a professional conductor during the 2007-2008 season. Honors presented to him over the years included several Grammy Awards, the 2006 National Medal of Arts and being inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame. Kunzel is survived by his wife, Brunhilde.

If you happen to Be in Philadelphia right now you can still enjoy this weekend’s Philly Fringe festival, one of whose offerings is a bit more fringe than usual—it’s “The Gonzalez Cantata”-- a Concert Opera Based on Alberto Gonzalez’s Senate Judiciary committee hearings.—the 40-minute work based on the 2007 hearings is actually sung from transcripts of the hearings. 29-year-old Australian-born Composer Melissa Dunphy wrote the piece while an undergraduate of West Chester University. Dunphy is now working on her PhD in Music Composition at Penn. Said Dunphy: “as much as I disagreed with some of the well-publicized mistakes Gonzales made, I really started to feel sorry for the guy, listening to him struggle his way through the questioning. So I wrote the piece as an exploration of someone who’s having a hard time arguing his way out of a situation. It’s also an exploration of how a man could so brazenly politicize the Department of Justice without really standing up for the reasons he went into politics in the first place. The show has lots of humor, but there are some reflective moments also. I see Gonzales as a tragic figure who’s also simultaneously irredeemable.”
For more on these and other items and events, go to the website, kbaq.org; be listening each week at this time for another update; and join me every Weekday at noon for The Mozart Buffet, an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries. I’m Randy Kinkel for “This week in Classical Music” on 89.5 KBAQ Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.