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Austin's other live music scene

A month long look at Austin classical music landscape

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Thursday, March 26, 2009

The badges and wristbands to Austin's biggest music conference and party have expired in the self-proclaimed "Live Music Capital of the World." The tens of thousands of diverse musicians and music fans from around the world who clamor to get to Austin annually for the South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival likely still feel the glow of a city that, at least every March, feels like a live music nirvana.

And yet, in Austin, the typical definition of what counts as live music is fairly circumscribed. A roots rock band at a Sixth Street club? A singer-songwriter performing at a farmers' market? Sure.

A chamber music concert in a church or an orchestra in the Long Center? Well, technically, yes that is live music, most people would answer, but ?

Last weekend, while throngs flocked to Auditorium Shores for free SXSW showcases, another, smaller group of people headed to the Long Center for the Performing Arts right across the street. Inside, the Austin Symphony Orchestra played a program of music by mid-century American composers: George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein and the often over-looked Oklahoma-born Roy Harris. It was an eclectic and engaging sampling that ASO conductor Peter Bay and the orchestra musicians pulled off with flair.

And yet the disconnect between the scene inside the Long Center and the scene outside felt profound.

What about that other segment of the "Live Music Capital of the World," the one that doesn't connect to the clubs or to SXSW and or makes it onto the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau official map that's handed to tourists?

Our symphony is nearly a century old. Leading Austin choir Conspirare has netted four Grammy nominations for their recordings. The Austin Lyric Opera premiered a new opera by the ranking American living composer, Philip Glass - a rare feat for a regional opera company. Dozens of classical music groups offer concerts year-round. Presenters such as the University of Texas, the Austin Symphony and now the Long Center regularly bring in renowned performers such as Itzhak Perlman, Kathleen Battle and Yo-Yo Ma.

UT's Butler School of Music continues to ascend rapidly in national rank, and other area universities - Southwestern University and Texas State University - have grown their music programs in the past decade, attracting noted faculty (who often join or start area ensembles) along with guest artists and composers. In fact, our Central Texas university music schools account for the sheer numerical majority of live classical music concert offerings. Their faculty and students fill the ranks of just about every independent classical music group as well as the Austin Lyric Opera and the ASO. And each year, those music schools jettison another round of graduates, many of whom stay in Austin and try to carve out careers.

Still other young musicians land in Austin for the same reason everybody else does: It's a great city to live in and ply your creative trade.

Some succeed. And impressively, some are pushing the boundaries of what classical music can be and how it can be presented in the 21st century. Austin has a tribe of adventurous musicians - composer-performers like Graham Reynolds, Peter Stopschinski, P. Kellach Waddle and Travis Weller; ensemble leaders such as Michelle Schumann and Aurélien Petillot and groups such as the Tosca String Quartet, Audio Inversions and the Invincible Czars - that lead the charge, taking their newly composed classical music to nightclubs, collaborating with filmmakers, dancers and theater companies and otherwise finding ways to challenge the status quo of classical music performance.

In fact, in perhaps a moment of paradox last weekend, Gabriel Prokofiev, the grandson of legendary Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, was in town, but he wasn't seeing the symphony at the Long Center. He was at SXSW. The 34-year-old London-based composer and producer was hosting a showcase for his Nonclassical record label and its boundary-busting musicians (Prokofiev included) who merge classically based composed music with contemporary club music and remixes. And Prokofiev's guests on his Nonclassical SXSW bill? Reynolds, Stopschinski, Waddle and the Tosca String Quartet, several members of whom earlier in the evening had played with the Austin Symphony Orchestra.

For about the next five weeks, I plan to catch as many classical music concerts as I can, bookended by two Austin-centric concerts. Sunday is a solo recital at the Long Center by Anton Nel, the celebrated Austin pianist who will give something of a debut to the stunning Steinway piano he helped the Long Center select. On May 1 is the premiere of Dan Welcher's Fifth Symphony by the Austin Symphony Orchestra, the first time the nearly century old orchestra has premiered a major symphony by an Austin composer.

In between there are three operas, myriad chamber music and choral concerts and solo recitals by famed international stars and local ones.

There's also an abundance of new music by both Central Texas and world composers coming up this month. Beyond Welcher's Fifth Symphony, the UT New Music Ensemble (led by Welcher) reveals brand new sounds on Tuesday , as does the UT Percussion Ensemble on April 14. On April 3 through 5, Southwestern University premieres the new opera "Color of Dissonance" by Jason Hoogerhyde that features a multimedia staging. Wild Basins Winds showcases their members' composing talents. And Reynolds - arguably Austin's most prolific composer - has several debuts this month, including a song cycle about notable Texas women, a collaboration with poet Carrie Fountain that plays April 26. Even the nascent Round Rock Symphony will premiere new music on April 4 and 5.

In print and in the arts blog "Seeing Things" (www.austin360.com/seeingthings) we'll shine the spotlight on musicians and composers, review and report on concerts, check out CDs, note trends and encourage a dialogue with readers. Online, we'll post music files and a gallery of the folks who make up Austin's classical music scene.

Throughout it all, there will be questions. What defines the culture of classical music in Austin? Who is leading the charge? Who brings in the crowds? Where are the disconnects with today's younger audiences and 21st-century lifestyles? And what might be in the future of classical music in Austin?

Stay tuned.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699