This Week in Classical Music w/ Randy Kinkel 11/18/18

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Masur to Conduct in Milwaukee;

PubTV station launches Arts Channel

It’s “This Week in Classical Music”, an update on what’s happening in the Classical music world; I’m Randy Kinkel.

 As a boy, he watched his father, conductor Kurt Masur, open the new Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig; and now Ken-David Masur is set to do the same thing with the Milwaukee symphony as its next music director.

He’s a conductor with worldwide experience, recognized for his collaborative approach and his love for choral music. 

As music director, Masur will help plan next season’s music, and will begin full time duties with the 2019-’20 season with a 3 year contract. The symphony plans to open its new concert home in the former Warner Grand Theatre, in September 2020. 

“I’m overwhelmed with both excitement and gratitude for the time I’ve already been able to have with the orchestra, and for the extreme warmth that I’ve felt every time that I’ve visited,” Masur said.  The 41-year-old Masur was a unanimous choice of the symphony’s search committee; He and his wife, pianist Melinda Lee Masur, are founders and artistic directors of New York’s Chelsea Music Festival. The Masurs live in Boston, and have children ages 10, 8 and 6.

 

A NYC Public TV station is launching a channel dedicated only to the arts. The “All Arts” channel and streaming service aims to “illuminate the emerging to the established, in dance, film, stories, music, theater, visual art, design and all other forms of creative expression,”

Some content, including an original show, is now available online. The complete network will launch Jan. 28. WNET President Neal Shapiro said “Just like arts themselves, this channel is a blank canvas, and we’re excited to see just what happens”.

The station will pull from four varieties of content to schedule the network.  The channel can time-shift PBS favorites such as Masterpiece, use international acquisitions, draw from a 55-year archive of cultural offerings,  and original content produced specifically for All Arts. Eight-minute episodes of its first new program, Broadway Sandwich, lets viewers hang out with Broadway stars between matinee and evening performances.

The WNET archives include gems such as actress Meryl Streep’s first TV performance. “Perhaps we can capture the next generation of artists in their formative years,” Shapiro said. “I like to think that if we were doing this 60 years ago, we’d catch a young folk singer named Bob Dylan or a new stand-up comic named Richard Pryor.”

 

For more on these and other items and events, go to the website, K-Bach dot org, be listening each week at this time for another update; and join Linda Cassidy for the Most wanted Hour, playing your top 100 classical hits.