Sarah Bryan Miller, the Post's classical music critic, must feeling more like a war correspondent these days. Last week, she reported that the Missouri Synod is seeking to sell KFUO, which would likely leave St. Louis without a classical station -- the speculation is that the buyer would switch to a more profitable format, like sports or country music. Then, this weekend, she packed her bags and hopped on a plane with SLSO as they headed to Ann Arbor and NYC. Thanks to some lousy weather, the musicians touched the tarmac two hours before they were scheduled to be onstage at Carnegie Hall. As the New York Times noted:
"There was no time to check into the hotel, so most of the musicians played in street clothes. Not only that, H K Gruber, the Austrian composer, conductor and self-described chansonnier who was to perform the vocal solo of his own work, 'Frankenstein!!,' the major work on the program, never made it."
So Maestro David Robertson sang the piece, and Ward Stare sat in as conductor. You can read Times reviewer Anthony Tommasini's wide-eyed review of the whole program here; Eddie Silva's account of "the Adventureland Tour," can be found on the SLSO blog, and Sarah Bryan Miller's Culture Club blog posts are here.
Note that The New Yorker and the Times thought that SLSO's performance in NYC was news before Maestro Roberston stepped in to sing "Frankenstein!!" Which is why (I think) it'd be doubly embarassing if KFUO were to go away, only to be replaced by yet another dreadful "oldies" station playing bad top 40 from the 70s and 80s and purporting to be "the music of your life..." --Stefene Russell
