St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Renovates Powell Hall

This will be the first major renovation to Powell Hall since the symphony took residency there in 1968. The estimated total cost of the renovations is more than 100 million dollars.

The project focuses on renovating the existing structure, built in 1925, as well as adding a 65,000 square foot expansion focusing on community accessibility and connections. The current plan is to make Powell Hall a “state of the art music facility” for the community as well as keeping is historical charm.

The additional space will be used as a learning center and rehearsal space for the symphonies chorus and youth symphonies in the area. It will also be used as a rehearsal and venue space for other music education programs and events.

"[Powell Hall has] superb architecture, which we plan to preserve," said, SLSO President and CEO, Marie-Hélène Bernard. "It has some of the finest acoustics of any concert hall in the country, but like many halls over the years, especially approaching 100 years, there is an aging process. So we need to update. The audience experience has evolved, and the experience of artists has evolved as well."

The new expansion will also hold an updated lobby and backstage space that features dressing rooms, lounges, practice areas and a media library with recording suites. These additions will "help ensure that Powell Hall remains a destination for the SLSO’s many celebrated artistic collaborators," according to a release announcing the plans.
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The project is being done by Snohetta, an architectural firm with a St. Louis based architect of record Christner Architects. The project is still in the planning stages and more information will be released as it progresses.


​                                                                                                   Taylor Gordon

Best Engineered Album, Classical
“Chanticleer Sings Christmas,” Leslie Ann Jones, engineer (Chanticleer)
Producer of the Year, Classical
Judith Sherman
Best Orchestral Performance
“Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3,” Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor (Philadelphia Orchestra)
Best Opera Recording
“Glass: Akhnaten,” Karen Kamensek, conductor; J’Nai Bridges, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Zachary James and Dísella Lárusdóttir; David Frost, producer (The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; The Metropolitan Opera Chorus)
Best Choral Performance
“Mahler: Symphony No. 8, ‘Symphony of a Thousand,’” Gustavo Dudamel, conductor; Grant Gershon, Robert Istad, Fernando Malvar-Ruiz and Luke McEndarfer, chorus masters (Leah Crocetto, Mihoko Fujimura, Ryan McKinny, Erin Morley, Tamara Mumford, Simon O’Neill, Morris Robinson and Tamara Wilson; Los Angeles Philharmonic; Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, Los Angeles Master Chorale, National Children’s Chorus and Pacific Chorale)
Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance
“Beethoven: Cello Sonatas - Hope Amid Tears,” Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax
Best Classical Instrumental Solo
“Alone Together,” Jennifer Koh
Best Classical Solo Vocal Album
“Mythologies,” Sangeeta Kaur and Hila Plitmann (Virginie D’Avezac De Castera, Lili Haydn, Wouter Kellerman, Nadeem Majdalany, Eru Matsumoto and Emilio D. Miler)
Best Classical Compendium
“Women Warriors - The Voices of Change,” Amy Andersson, conductor; Amy Andersson, Mark Mattson and Lolita Ritmanis, producers.
Best Contemporary Classical Composition
“Shaw: Narrow Sea,” Caroline Shaw, composer (Dawn Upshaw, Gilbert Kalish and Sō Percussion)

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Juilliard announces that Pianist, Orli Shaham, will be joining their piano faculty for the 2022-23 academic year.

Shaham is an American pianist, born in Jerusalem, who has an international reputation of being one of today’s most gifted pianists. She is an alumni of Julliard and has previously taught there as an interim faculty member.

Shaham said, "I am honored and humbled to join the stellar faculty at The Juilliard School. In my years as interim faculty, I've seen firsthand how brilliant and inspiring these students are, and I'm thrilled to continue to dig into it all with them!”

Before this accomplishment, she has won the Gilmore Young Artist Award and the Avery Fisher Career Grant. The New York Times has called her a “brilliant pianist”, The Chicago Tribune said she is a “ First-rate Mozartean”, and London’s Guardian called her playing of Proms ‘perfection’.

Shaham was born in Jerusalem to two scientists and grew up in upstate New York. She is currently the artistic director for both the Pacific Symphony’s chamber series Café Ludwig in Costa Mesa, CA, and the interactive children’s concert series in Orli Shaham’s Bach Yard, which she founded as a way for pre-k to early elementary kids to learn music. She is also chair of the board of trustees at Kaufman Music Center in New York City.

Shaham is in the works of releasing the second and third volumes of the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas. This project also includes Vol. 1 and her recordings of Piano Concertos with the St. Louis Symphony. After earning her bachelor’s at Columbia University, where she was a part of the Barnard-Columbia-Julliard exchange she did graduate work at Columbia in historical musicology.

Alongside Shaham, Soyeon Kate Lee and Shai Wosner will also be joining the Julliard piano faculty. They each “possess the rare combination of great artistry and outstanding teaching ability that defines the Juilliard faculty,” said David Serkin Ludwig, dean and director of the Music Division.
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Shaham said, “Congratulations too to my fellow new faculty members, pianists Shai Wosner and Soyeon Kate Lee, I can’t wait to work alongside you and the rest of the Juilliard faculty and staff."

                                                                                                   --Taylor Gordon

  Sarah Cahill, pianist, has just released a new album called, The Future is Female, Vol. 1, In Nature.  The album debuted on March 4, 2022. This album will be the first of a 3 album series featuring 30 solo piano works all composed by women around the world.
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The album is being recorded by First Hand Records. The album series will celebrate women composers from the 17th century through present day.

Cahill started this project back in 2018 and said, “Like most pianists, I grew up with the classical canon, which always excluded women composers as well as composers of color… The Future is Female, then, aims to rebalance the repertoire. It does not attempt to be exhaustive, in any way, and the three albums in this series represent only a small fraction of the music by women which is waiting to be performed and heard.”

Cahill has previously performed The Future is Female as a flexible concert program since the inception of the project. It has been done as evening length recital performances and marathon performances in concert halls, museums and gallery spaces. Recent performances have ran between 4 to 7 hours and the audience has been welcome to come and go as they please.

You can learn more about Sarah and the project here.

                                                                                                     --Taylor Gordon

An opera that was written pre-WWII was rediscovered and made its premiere in Magdeburg, Germany on Feb. 13. Nearly 150 musicians and performers delivered the opera, “Grete Minde” almost 80 years after its composer was murdered in the holocaust.

Eugen Engel, a Berlin businessman and self-taught musician, completed the opera in the early 1930s and tried to get it staged but there was no way for a Jewish composer in Germany to succeed. Engel was murdered in the Sobibor concentration camp in 1943. His work gathered dust inside a trunk for decades.

Jan Agee, Engel’s granddaughter said that her family kept the trunk, but did not look inside until the Jewish Museum Berlin reached out for paperwork for its archives.

“At some point, I opened the trunk and looked in,” Agee recalled. “I didn’t know there were a lot of other papers in there. It later became a mission of mine to figure out what we had.”

It’s a story Engel’s grandchildren pieced together over a period of years.

Grete Minde is a late-romantic opera of 1920s jazz melodies and large orchestral sounds.

Anna Skryleva, a Russian conductor who became the general music director of Theater Magdeburg in 2019, said she played a piano arrangement of the opera at home and was immediately captured.

The musicians – a large ensemble including an organ, two harps, strings and brass, a female choir and solo singers – were supportive and excited to take on this project, Skryleva said. “We are all at great pains to do Engel justice, seeing him as representative of the many composers we never got to know.”

Skryleva and Ulrike Schröder, Theater Magdeburg’s chief dramatic adviser, oversaw the transcription of text by experts of more than 40 individual voice and instrument parts during the worldwide pandemic shutdown.

“We believe he spent almost 20 years composing the opera, working on it in his spare time,” said Schröder.

The entire production cost more than $125,000 to stage.

The source material for the opera is Grete Minde, by the writer Theodor Fontane. The story is based on the true 16th-century story of a young woman who is deprived of her rightful inheritance by officials in her home town and takes her revenge by setting fire to it and burning to death herself and her child.

Parallels can be drawn between Grete Minde and the decimation of the Jews.

“It has everything you may wish from an opera, involving the entire ensemble, a heart-stopping storyline touching on the dream of a better, fairer life versus the dogma and bigotry of bourgeois society, accompanied with gorgeous sounds and catchy rhythms,” wrote Die Zeit’s music critic Hannah Schmidt.

The opera will continue showing in Magdeburg in February and March. The family hopes it will be performed on other stages around the world, with several venues already interested.

​                                                                                                        --Taylor Gordon

A new Opera about the life of Helen Keller will be performed by Opera Birmingham. The opera is titled Touch and will premier in Birmingham, January 2024.


Touch will highlight the Adult life of Helen Keller, the deaf and blind activist, as well as her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy. Themes such as women’s suffrage civil rights and disability rights will be addressed. The opera also aims to reveal characteristics of Keller’s life that are often not talked about.


The show is 90 minutes long, divided among two acts. The show is written and performed in English as well as American Sign Language. Text of the opera will be projected above the performers. The orchestra will consist of: flute, bassoon, percussion, prepared piano and string trio. There will be three main singing roles to tell the story.


Opera Birmingham’s general Director, Keith A. Wolfe-Hughes, said, “It was almost like a lightning bolt hit me, we just had to do this Opera!”


Wolfe-Hughes continues and said, “It’s a story with deep Alabama connections, about two Page 2 of 4 remarkable women who worked tirelessly on so many civil rights issues.”
For more information on the opera Touch, click here.


                                                                                                        Taylor Gordon
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Martha Prewitt sang on the operatic stage for 15 years.  After the death of her father, she gave up opera to take over the family farm.

​More about her is in the New York Times, which you can read here.

Apple has purchased classical streaming service Primephonic, and will be shutting it down in just over a week.  Subscribers to Primephonce will be pushed to Apple Music, which is planning to add classical streaming.

More details can be found here.

German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott has just released a new disk, "Echoes of Life", on which she frames the 24 Preludes of Chopin with more contemporary works, including two written for her.

Of the album she said: “Echoes Of Life is a personal reflection on the thoughts and moments that influence and change our lives. It also portrays the journey and transformation I took to become the person and artist I see myself as today. In interpreting music from composers who, in their own time, challenged the system and redefined music, I see it as my role as a classical musician to carry this spirit forward by not insisting on reproducing bygone traditions and limitations.”

​Ott was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in early 2019, after beginning to experience some health issues in late 2018.  She shared that news via social media.

​An article describing her illness and how she shared it can be found here.

Earlier this week, the Baltimore Symphony fired its principal flutist, Emily Skala, reportedly over her social media posts.  She had been with the orchestra for 33 years.

​The Baltimore Sun has the entire story here.