Philadelphia Orchestra Conductor Change
The Philadelphia Inquirer Blog - Artswatch
Philadelphia Orchestra Conductor Change
Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Classical Music Critic
Jiří Bĕlohlávek has canceled his Philadelphia Orchestra appearances this week. An orchestra spokeswoman says the conductor has a bad back. Juanjo Mena takes over. Soprano Karita Mattila will still sing Strauss' Four Last Songs. The Mahler "Adagio" from Symphony No. 10 also stays. But the Martinu Symphony No. 3 will be replaced by Beethoven's Symphony No. 6. Too bad, that, but we're looking forward to Mattila's debut.
This is the reason that I don't pay for concerts in advance. The Martinu is the one piece on this concert that I had circled as a "must see," and now it's been replaced by Beethoven's 6th, a piece the orchestra has played a billion times before. Bait and switch!— Frank S.- Ditto, Frank S. Sadly, one of the few "unusual" (at least relatively so) programs the Orchestra had programmed this season reverts back to something painfully standard.— hautgirl
Peter Dobrin is a classical music critic and culture writer for The Inquirer. Since 1989, he has written music reviews, features, news and commentary for the paper, covering such topics as the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the Venice Biennale, expansion of the Curtis Institute of Music, the Philadelphia Orchestra's bankruptcy declaration in 2011, Philadelphia's evolving performing arts center and the general health of arts and culture.
Dobrin was a French horn player. He earned an undergraduate degree in performance from the University of Miami, and received a master's degree in music criticism from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Elliott Galkin. He has no time to practice today.
