AMSTERDAM — A scrum of international TV reporters, photographers and other media packed the Gallery of Honor at the Rijksmuseum on a recent spring morning, while producers negotiated with publicists for time to shoot spots in front of Rembrandt’s 1642 painting “The Night Watch,” the museum’s crown jewel.

After 10 years of renovation at a cost of almost $500 million, the Netherlands’ national museum of history, art and culture was finally ready to greet its public.

From the outside, the museum is an imposing presence at the north end of Amsterdam’s Museum Plaza, which is also home to the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum, which unveiled an addition last year.

The original architect of the Rijksmuseum, Pierre Cuypers, designed the building at a time when railway stations and civic buildings were overtaking the cathedral as a city’s prime architectural wonder. Though he designed many churches and cathedrals in his career, he is probably best known for the Rijksmuseum and Amsterdam’s Central (rail) Station.

Cuypers’ central Gallery of Honor of the Rijksmuseum, with its stained glass entrance hall, side chapel galleries and altarpiece “Night Watch,” is a church in all but name.

Ever alert to anything remotely papist, King William III refused to set foot in “that cathedral” when the museum opened in 1885. His great-granddaughter Queen Beatrix appeared to have no qualms about reopening the museum last month before she stepped down as monarch.

After Cuypers died in 1921 the museum was stripped of its decorations and divided up; galleries built within galleries.

“When we arrived here, the building was dark, dim, and I would say sad,” said Antonio Ortiz, half of the Spanish architecture firm Ortiz y Cruz responsible for the renovation. “It was very difficult to orientate yourself, and the building could not accommodate the increasing amount of visitors.”

The building they delivered, along with restoration architect Van Hoogevest and designer Jean-Michel Wilmotte, restores Cuypers’ original vision, including terrazzo floors in the Great Hall and embellishments originally present in the Gallery of Honor.

More importantly, they have created a space that is full of light and life. Gray-blue paint, wood floors and the absence of direct light make the galleries feel warm, almost sensual. In the instances where no glass or display case was necessary, Wilmotte did not use one. A set of 10 15th century copper statues, called “The Weepers,” are close enough to touch.

Taco Dibbits, director of collections, was responsible for deciding which 8,000 pieces (less than 1% of the total collection) made the final cut. The museum is famous for its collection of Dutch masters, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, Franz Hals and Jan Steen.

“The 10 years of this renovation project gave us the possibility to entirely reinvent the display of our collection,” he said. “Chronology is a natural way of structuring history. We therefore made a mixed display. You will find galleries with furniture, objets d’art and paintings [all together].”

The scaled-down rooms keep the museum from being exhausting like the Louvre or the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Here, altarpieces and statuary are mixed in with glass, wedding chests and the red wax seals of once-important men.

A crown built of cheap material by the English intended to impress the King of Ardra (now part of Benin in West Africa), kept as spoils by the Dutch when they intercepted the English ship, conveys more about Golden Age colonialism than even the simplest book.

Six toques worn by Dutch whalers for warmth and identification, like jockeys’ colors, were found on their owners’ skeletons nearly 400 years after they were buried.

In the southwest corner is the restored library Cuypers designed, the largest public art research library in the Netherlands. Books, monographs and periodicals both scholarly and popular, as well as a handful of children’s books fill every inch of the four stories of shelves.

There are no video screens in the museum, a decision made on the basis that the technology is usually obsolete the moment it is installed. “We believe the works of art speak for themselves,” said Dibbits. “[Not using computers] shows that this art, like all great art, is contemporary.”

In the late afternoon of a preview day, after nearly everyone had left, there was a chance to see “The Night Watch” with just a security guard for company. Much bigger than the “Mona Lisa” at the Louvre, it has a powerful physical presence. The figures paused, not frozen.

“We want to make old masters relevant for a present-day audience” said museum general director Wim Pijbes. “The museum wants to inspire and also offer at the same time a chance to reflect.”

First published in the Los Angeles Times

BERLIN — In a hotel in the embassy-heavy streets in the city’s center, Lang Lang sits on a bright red couch, a modestly daring complement to the room’s elaborate Bauhaus paneling. He has just come from a conference in Cannes where he gave a speech to the who’s who of the music biz about classical music, social media and building music schools in China.

The window is open and outside, a woman shouts enthusiastically into a megaphone. Her acolytes answer her calls with equal vim. Inside the normally happy-go-lucky, 30-year-old pianist is doing some protesting of his own.

When he plays with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Hall in May, it will be Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a piece second perhaps only to Grieg in the most-played concerto table. For core classical music fans, playing popular pieces is nothing more than pandering to the lowest common denominator.

“I totally disagree,” Lang says of this assertion. “A lot of what you call the great repertoire is popular, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great work. I mean, come on. Rachmaninoff 3 is great. There shouldn’t be ‘If this work is so popular, then don’t do it.’ In the art world it is only what you feel right to perform.”

He is more exasperated than angry, but at the suggestion that commercial success and artistic integrity are mutually exclusive, the nicely glowing coals burst into flames.

“I think it’s totally wrong,” he says, his face a mix of annoyance and incredulity. “No great artist in the world that I know will make a sacrifice to play with someone just because the name is big. I think this doesn’t happen in our world. You ask Zubin Mehta, you ask Mariss Jansons, Sir Simon Rattle, Barenboim. ‘Use him because he sell tickets.’ Nobody says that because they don’t care!”

Perhaps in his world, this is true. Lang has been on the classical A list for nearly a third of his life, and most of the artists he collaborates with probably don’t have to take on projects that don’t interest them to sell tickets.

“The point I must make very clearly — and this has nothing to do with myself — is I’m not saying that if you’re not commercially successful it’s because you aren’t good enough, but you can’t say that because others are commercially successful you’re better because you’re a real artist. The only way you can talk about this is because of one word: jealousy. I’m pretty positive about it.”

The next day at an open dress rehearsal for concerts with Gustavo Dudamel and the Berliner Philharmoniker, Lang ambles onstage, sits down at the piano and gives the orchestra a G sharp. Dudamel gives the downbeat and the orchestra gets down to the business of rehearsing Bartok. In the third movement, schoolboys in the audience imitate Lang’s bouncing style, only stopping when, from five or six seats away, their teacher makes it clear they bop at their peril.

The night of the concert, the Philharmoniker is abuzz. Bartok is not the most immediately rewarding concerto for the audience, so Lang holds nothing back. His movements are more exaggerated — at one point it seems as if he is trying start a lawn mower — but it is a mistake to think it is just showboating. Lang recognizes that we hear as much with our eyes as our ears and Bartok needs bigger signposts than Mozart. The audience, enraptured, explodes.

It was the spare beauty of Mozart that got him back to the keyboard after his piano teacher kicked him out because he had no talent. At 9, Lang did the sensible thing and quit. For three months, he refused to touch a piano.

“People were begging me to [play], but I said I wasn’t a musician anymore and I had given up,” he recalls. “But they found the score of Mozart’s Piano Sonata K.330 and they were saying, ‘This is beautiful music, play for us.’ Somehow I started playing and said, ‘Why should I stop? This is a stupid decision.’ Gradually, I started to feel connected to music again.”

When some time opens up between all the piano playing, award accepting and sponsor placating, Lang likes to participate in the education projects managed by his Lang Lang International Foundation for Music. But classical music remains his first love and his passion and he speaks of it lovingly.

“It gives us a complete freeing of feelings, emotions, structures and imagination,” Lang explains. “Pop artists like Alicia Keys or Lady Gaga studied classical piano before. Training in classical music gives you very solid ideas on how to build music. When you hear the music it becomes part of you and it shouldn’t be too hard to understand. If that’s the case, I as a Chinese would never play classical music.”

First published in the Los Angeles Times

DORTMUND, Germany — At 5:30 p.m. backstage at a concert hall here a few weeks ago, a security guard delivers a small brown bag from a chocolate shop in Paris. Devouring the contents is not a folk-rock pixie and her gang of bearded sidemen but eight mostly middle-aged ukulele players. Still, they are rock stars of a certain kind.

In 2 1/2 hours, 1,500 Germans of all ages and social classes will lose their minds when the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain takes the stage.

It’s not just the Germans. On Sunday, the Ukulele Orchestra plays the first of six shows in California as part of an 11-date tour of the western United States. Not bad for something that started as a joke nearly 30 years ago.

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times

“At the time when we started, we were all doing other things musically,” says George Hinchliffe, the band’s spokesman. His South Yorkshire lilt has been flattened somewhat by years in London, but the pragmatism and subtly wicked humor typical of Northern England remain.

“I’d been in a soul band backing aging Motown artists visiting England. Everyone had different histories,” he says.

“The ukulele was an outsider instrument in the ’80s and we thought playing was just going to be amusement for us. We put a poster up and lots of people came and then a couple weeks later we did another gig and then we were on BBC Radio 1 within a month of starting. Not long after that we were on live television.”

Knowing a good thing when he saw it, Hinchliffe suggested the group use its fee from the television appearance to make an album. A Japanese television station licensed the material and that was that.

The ukulele is often thought of as a novelty instrument. There is comedy to be mined from its size, it doesn’t sustain well and is limited harmonically to simple chords. Performers either have to dazzle with super quick playing (the “Wizard of String” Roy Smeck) or some sort of trick (Tiny Tim), both strategies the Ukulele Orchestra is not especially interested in.

Having eight players solves the texture problem and gives the band a hugely deep well of skill and personality to draw from.

Said Hinchliffe, “If Peter sings a song, it becomes this over-the-top Mario Lanza thing. If Dave sings it, it is a sort of proto-punk thing and if Kitty sings it, the song is a dark Bertold Brecht/Hans Eisler kind of thing.

The Ukulele Orchestra does some original material, but most of its numbers are covers. One of its most often requested re-interpretations is Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” and the theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” both of which are retired from the regular rotation. Finding the right balance between the old stuff and new material is something all bands struggle with, but having eight members who each have an equal say can be complicated.

“It’s a sort of benign fascism enforcing the spirit of communism,” says Hinchliffe with a laugh. “Kitty and I are the owners of the brand since we were founder members, but because we’ve been together for such a long time and we’re all friends, it’s rare for someone to come up with a stupid idea. When [a stupid idea] does [appear], it’s usually mine.”

Group ukulele playing is now an international phenomenon, something the Ukulele Orchestra is at least partially responsible for. The group has grown so popular in Germany, there is even an impostor group that tours the country aping the Ukulele Orchestra as much as it can without being sued.

“The term ukulele orchestra was a bit of an oxymoron like a Sahara Sub-Aqua Club [when the band started], says Hinchliffe, “but it’s really exploded. It’s great.”

After the concert, the groupies gathered — mostly middle-aged men with ukes waiting to be autographed. The band sat around the table, carrot juice, beer and Jube Jubes at the ready. Despite all the time they spend together, the musicians genuinely enjoy each others’ company. After a couple hours of storytelling and belly laughs, the band slopes off to its hotel. Another day of plucking awaits.

BONUS: Ukulele Primer – all you need to know and whole lot more than you don’t – with videos.

First published in the Los Angeles Times

Valentine’s Day: a symbol of the eros-industrial complex created by a cabal of rose growers, chocolatiers, jewelers and calligraphers or the perfect time for true romantics to show the rest of us how it is done?

Culture Monster has analyzed the situation and determined that because music has been getting people busy since long before St. Valentine came on the scene, taking your love to a concert is foolproof no matter what your V-Day philosophy.

To make it even easier, we’ve matched relationship types to an ideally suited show

With the fire of a thousand suns
Your connection is so intense, language alone cannot truly capture the essence of your beloved. The words of the great poets illustrate the impossibility of the task with their inadequacy. Byron and Shakespeare don’t know the half of it. Handily, Cafe Sevilla in Long Beach has the answer: a flamenco dinner show. There’s food, live music and some very intense tap dancing. (6:30 p.m. Saturdays, Cafe Sevilla, Long Beach cafesevilla.com)

I hate you. Don’t leave me
One minute you’re convinced you’ll be together forever, the next it seems even one more second in the presence of your darling is a fate worse than death. For you two, lifetime riders on that most addicting of roller coasters, the choice is clear: “Jekyll & Hyde” the musical. Because nothing says I love you like epic mood swings and late Victorian power ballads. (Through March 3, Pantages Theater, Hollywood, broadwayla.org)

Hello? Is it me you’re looking for?
Your thing is new and you don’t want to crush that delicate flower with something super sappy. On the other hand, ignoring the day will probably result in an express ticket back to Singletown. Play it cool with Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley and all sorts of delovely cabaret in their show “He Said/She Said.” And who knows, after a tour of classic songs, sweethearts might just find themselves in love with their joy delirious. (7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, Samueli Theater, Costa Mesa, scfta.org

I will hug him and squeeze him and call him George
The idea of spending two hours separated from your adored one by a seat divider is simply inconceivable. This makes going to the theater, opera, ballet or symphony difficult. In public, at least. The Berliner Philharmoniker is an orchestra sensitive to your smooching needs. Dial up a live concert on the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall, put the lights on low and enjoy some of the greatest playing in the world for just $12. The best part? If you find yourself needing a post-codal cigarette before the recapitulation, there’s no one around to give you a withering stare. (Any time. Anywhere. DigitalConcertHall.com)

All by yourself
Your love life is a barren desert with a tumbleweed the only activity. How about a little schadenfreude? The main character in “The Flying Dutchman” is the ghost of a sea captain cursed to wander the seas until he gets married, but can come ashore to find a girl only once every seven years. Spoiler alert: It turns out some girls are into ghosts (or have dads willing to trade them for the ghost’s treasure). So if that guy can get the girl, there’s hope for you yet. (“The Flying Dutchman” March 9 to 30, Los Angeles Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, laopera.com)

When I’m 64
You’ve done the Valentine’s thing enough times to know that sometimes understated is better. Rather than arranging for a skywriter, why not take your honey to hear the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra play Bach. The music is calm, absolute and surprisingly charming. Everything you need and not a note more. Bach isn’t terribly romantic, you say? Hogwash. Eighteen children don’t make themselves. (7 p.m. Thursday, Zipper Hall, Colburn School, downtown L.A., laco.org)

First published in the Los Angeles Times.

“Not so long ago,” writes Beck Hansen in the introduction to his new collection of tunes, “Song Reader,” “a song was only a piece of paper until it was played by someone.”

Indeed, as far back as “Pride and Prejudice,” all card-carrying members of the middle class had a piano in the parlor and a daughter or five with skills to play it. (Poor Mary. She did try.)

It’s been generations since gathering around the piano to sing the latest hits was a popular way to pass an evening, so why then are Beck’s latest available only as sheet music?

After all, it requires someone to read music to realize the songs, therefore rendering them inaccessible to a large percentage of fans. But it is a genius way to make sure people really engage with the material rather than having it be just another 100 MB on their hard drive.

Each of the 20 tunes in “Song Reader” are individually printed with high-contrast illustrations and detailed faux adverts straight from the first half of the 20th century. Amazon carries it for $22, while publisher McSweeney’s offers “Song Reader” for $34.

Often assumed to be ironic when he is making a genuine joke, Beck has obviously taken great delight in playing with the era’s over-the-top tone of voice. “Now That Your Dollar Bills Have Sprouted Wings” suggests you duet with a bill collector. “Mutilation Rag,” one of the two instrumentals, is conceptual ragtime performance art. The soon-to-be emo classic “Why Did You Make Me Care?” captures all the melodrama of a teenage breakup in shades of blue and yellow.

People who can’t read music shouldn’t feel left out. “Song Reader” is meant to be an objet d’art as much as music maker. Beck wrote the arrangements but collaborated with various orchestrators and graphic artist Jessica Hische to assemble the project.

“The way the whole package was put together and presented was more along the lines of a coffee table book,” said Beck. “It’s something that can actually be read [as well as] something that starts a conversation about our relationship with music now in comparison to how we interacted with music in the past.”

The biggest difference between then and now is that before records, there was no version-in-common of a popular song. If your Aunt Mamie played a wrong note every time in the third bar of “I Love My Wife, But Oh! You Kid!” (real title!) then unless you read music yourself or sang the song at a friend’s house, her version was the one you knew.

The other difference, and perhaps the more difficult one to conceptualize, is the sheer ubiquity of printed music. Nowadays, if you want to learn your favorite music, you either figure it out by ear from the record, sort through hundreds of dodgy tabs online or venture into an old-school music shop on the off chance that what you want is actually in stock.

In the 150 years before World War II, the sheet music market was so lucrative that even composers we consider highbrow today (Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart) wrote pieces in a popular style specifically for amateur, at-home playing. Selling out wasn’t really a thing until the 1970s.

The sheet music for Bing Crosby’s song “Sweet Leilani” sold 54 million copies in 1937. That works out to roughly one copy for every three Americans or, put another way, 14 million more units than “Thriller” has sold since its release.

In the record age, buying sheet music is often disappointing because so much of what we come to recognize as characteristic of the sound is outside of melody and harmony. It’s the quality of the singer’s voice, the ornamentation, improvisation and the layers of texture from the band that make the song what it is.

Finding a way around this required a whole new approach to songwriting and was one of the major challenges of the “Song Reader” project.

“In modern songwriting, you understate things a lot. You go in layers and those layers define the song, often. Stripping it back to the sort of minimal bare bones state, you really get to see what the song is made out of. It made me get rid of things that might be too obscure or were too clever.”

Beck has been collecting sheet music from libraries and thrift stores since childhood and has been toying with songs written in the early 20th century novelty style since 1996. “In 2004 I called McSweeney. We were going to do a book [of songs] that year, but I then got busy. Then, around the third year I was working on it, I started to get cold feet. If you are going to ask people to play your songs, you’d better have some good songs! I put it away for a few years thinking, ‘Oh, someday some really good songs will come along.’ Then I realized that in the last couple of years that it’s more about the idea. You can’t will it to have great songs.”

It may seem that by writing the songs down, Beck is creating the one true version usually represented by the record. While religious devotion to the text and arguments about the intentions of a long-dead composer are the norm in classical music, Beck has another scenario in mind.

“I really feel the songs should be basic blueprints and the people can dress them any way how they want. It was fairly arbitrary what the piano arrangements ended up being, and in a way I felt concerned that if we made something stylistically too much of a jazz swing thing or Dixieland or Burt Bacharach then it skews the song in a certain direction.”

Allowing the performer so much freedom is actually a very old-fashioned idea. Pre-Beethoven, composers regularly left stylistic decisions (slurs, dynamics, accents, etc.) up to the performer and, going even further back, often didn’t even specify which instruments would play which parts. It was assumed that if you could read the music, you would know what to do to make it sound good.

Although he hasn’t ruled out playing a few of the songs himself, “Song Reader” is primarily meant for other people. “I felt I had a lot more leeway to write things that other voices could manage. I hope people record them and they find homes. I could hear things for a female voice to sing or a much more rough, more country voice. All these things open up when you’re not writing for yourself.”

While Beck’s fans will certainly make up the lion’s share of contributions, he hopes some more established artists will take an interest as well. If “I Will Always Love You” has taught us anything it’s that sometimes all a song needs is an iconic performance and it’s a hit forever.

“I’m not sure there are any hits here, [but] occasionally when we were working on the notation and hearing it being played back, I could hear people’s voices in certain things.”

Like Adele, maybe?

“I mean, you know, that would be great,” he said, laughing. “The invitation is open!”

First published in the LA Times

COLOGNE, Germany — On a street corner in the old part of Cologne, a boy of 9 or 10 approximates Christmas songs on his trumpet. Around him, the elaborate huts of the Altstadt Christmas market play a siren song audible only to ladies of a certain age and their long-suffering husbands.

Booths selling the usual beeswax candles, Russian dolls and kitchen utensils made of olive wood you can find at any market are interspersed with those offering Battenberg lace, lamps made of wood veneer and various other hand-crafted items. One booth sells only crèche figurines. Whatever your children broke last Christmas, no matter how obscure (elephant, $96) can be replaced.

Christmas markets in Germany date to the 15th century and although their original function was as a sort of medieval mall, over the years they have become an important part of the country’s social fabric.

During the daytime, the crowd is mostly tourists, hausfrauen and children on school trips. At night, when the market is at its most magical, couples of all ages stroll arm in arm, stopping to sample the Viennese coffee, chocolate from Belgium and Switzerland, and pork and marjoram sausage from the state of Thuringia.

An enormous Christmas tree rises up, towering above the booths. Strings of white lights running from its waist to the nearby rooftops resemble a giant, glowing hoop skirt. The hulking, gothic permanence of the cathedral, now visible only in silhouette, is almost menacing in the face of the temporary frivolity of the season.

The area around Cologne is heavily Catholic. Major church feast days are holidays here, but public displays aren’t really the done thing. The only nod to religion at the market is a Nativity scene of figures carved from logs with a chain saw — one way to make sure no one steals the baby Jesus.

The other thing that is missing is a place to visit Santa. In Germany, St. Nikolaus and his devilish counterpart Krampus come on Dec. 6. Any Santa paraphernalia for sale in the market is for English tourists.

In the spaces between the booths, people stand in groups of three or four, laughing and enjoying one another’s company, much like you would find at a neighborhood barbecue. “This is typical of Cologne and the Rhine area,” said Bernd Niemann, a local psychotherapist. “Everybody is very social. They love to come together and have a party. It’s not like that everywhere in Germany.”

The lubrication for all this conviviality is a mulled wine flavored with cinnamon, cloves and star aniseed called glühwein.

The market in Rudolfplatz, a square about a mile away, is not intended so much for tourists. Much of the Black Forest old worldly charm of the Altemarkt booths has been dispensed with in favor of what appear to be prefab garden sheds. Glühwein and the urge to socialize is bigger than any aesthetic objections, and even on a Monday night the place is packed. With men.

Engineer Fernando Pizer, 33, is meeting with friends. “Monday is unofficial gay night at the market, but only here in Rudolfplatz. You see people you see online in real life.”

The locals may keep the glühwein vendors in business, but they don’t tend to buy the rest of the goods on offer. “I’ve never shopped for a gift here,” said Peter Stamm. “Usually you only get something here if you are desperate for a last-minute gift.”

Pascal Raviol, 43, has been working in Christmas markets for years. A canny businessman, he knows exactly what the market is selling.

“People can access the modern world so easily,” he said outside his chocolate stall, “but what they really want is what is in their heart. What they remember from being a child. We give the people that come here a feeling. We are like actors on the stage.”

For the most part, the locals find tourists’ fascination with the city perplexing. “I don’t understand it because there are much better places in Germany [than Cologne] to visit,” said Niemann. “They bring in a lot of money though, so it’s fine.”

Germany, via Queen Victoria’s German husband, Prince Albert, is responsible for many American Christmas traditions (the tree, ornaments, lights, tinsel, Advent calendars, gingerbread houses and candy canes), and German immigrants have brought Christmas markets to places like Chicago, Cincinnati and Pennsylvania.

Peter Stamm has been to one and found it lacking in one important aspect, “It was very nice, but the glühwein was non-alcoholic. How can you have fun with that?”

First published in the Los Angeles Times

In the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion, there is a village called Cateura built practically on top of the city’s main landfill. Families eke out a living sorting through the trash and selling whatever valuables they can find. Like many high poverty areas, drugs and gangs are rampant and children grow up with little hope of ever doing much more than sorting trash.

A trailer for a new documentary about Favio Chavez, a local ecologist and musician who is teaching the children of Cateura to play music on recycled instruments, has been circulating online at a rather feverish pace. The joy of the boy playing Bach on an oil-drum cello is difficult not to share.

We caught up with Chavez via Skype to find out the whole story.

Although he grew up nearby, Chavez first encountered these children when he worked on a waste recycling project at the landfill from 2006-’08 and got to know some of the local families. Since 2002, he has run a Boys Orchestra in his home village of Carapuengà and one day, he decided to repeat the same thing with the children of Cateura. More than 40% of children in the area don’t finish school because their parents need them to work, so initially the idea of an orchestra was simply to keep the kids from playing in the landfill.

“At first it was very difficult because we had no place to rehearse and we had to teach in the same place where the parents were working in the trash,” said Chavez. “The children knew nothing about music and it was very difficult to contact parents because many of them do not live with their children.”

Eventually, parents began to see that playing music was keeping their kids out of trouble, some even reclaiming children they had previously abandoned.

Soon there were more children wanting lessons than there were instruments, so Chavez experimented with making some out of recycled materials from the landfill. String instruments have traditional tailpieces, fingerboards, scrolls and strings but the body, tuning pegs and other bits are made from whatever is around. “Eventually the recycled instruments were improved, and in many cases, they now sound better than the wooden Made In China instruments the more able children play on.”

The recycled instruments serve another, more practical purpose: The kids can safely carry them. “For many children, it was impossible to give them a violin to take home because they had nowhere to keep it and their parents were afraid they would be robbed or the instrument would be sold to buy drugs.”

Making instruments out of other materials, especially for beginning children is not so unusual. El Sistema, the more famous social music project in Venezuela, has children make their first instruments out of papier mâché until they are ready for real ones. In North America, small children starting Suzuki violin lessons are given a shoebox with a ruler for a neck and elastic bands for strings, so they can get used to holding the instrument.

Chavez has taught more than 120 children in Cateura and currently has 50 students, 25 of which make up the Recycled Orchestra. A recent tour of Rio de Janeiro, Panama and Bogota, Colombia, was complicated by the fact that none of the children had passports, with nearly half not even in possession of a birth certificate. “In some cases, I had to get the parents identity documents too. Now, because they are part of the orchestra, all the children have documents.”

One of Chavez’s best pupils is a 15-year-old girl called Tania. “She began her study with me in Cateura five years ago and now is one of the leading violins in the orchestra, ” Chavez said. “Her father is addicted to crack, but had to stop for two days while he went to court to get permission for his daughter to go on tour. She lives in a single-room shack with her mother and three sisters, so when she wants to practice, the whole family has to leave the house. Because she is advanced, she has a wooden violin from China. It is worth more than her house.”

Chavez is not trying to make top musicians out of his pupils, but rather to show them, and their parents, that studying something is worthwhile. “In 2011 I quit my job to devote full time to the project in Cateura because I noticed that the children have made progress and we are at a time when they definitely are changing their lives through the orchestra.” “We dream that families and children can have a better house and Internet access, so they can connect with opportunities.”

Momentum is definitely building. The Paraguayan government body FONDAC is providing support for a music school, and a recently released excerpt [above] of a documentary about the project is making its way around the Internet. The film, “Landfill Harmonic,” is currently in production. It does not yet have a distributor, but it’s expected to be finished in 2013.

Meanwhile, Chavez will continue his work in Cateura. “Sports can be competitive. Music causes children to connect and feel they are building something together. Our orchestra feels special because the children make beauty out of garbage.”

First published in the Los Angeles Times. Also -the Globe & Mail.

Caruso, Bjorling, Pavarotti, Carreras, Domingo, Alagna, Kaufmann, Florez and (Eric) Cartman. One of these things is not like the other, ’tis true, but there is one way in which they are kind of the same: They have all recorded versions of “O Holy Night.” In fact it seems there is hardly a singer who hasn’t.

Most Christmas music is meant for group singing, so, unless you are a soprano singing the descant, Christmas caroling doesn’t require a lot of vocal skill. “O Holy Night,” on the other hand, written in 1847 by French composer Adolphe Adam as a setting of the poem “Minuit, chrétiens,” offers the irresistible combination of operatic drama and technical difficulty.

No stranger to the dramatic moment, Rufus Wainwright sings “O Holy Night” at all his Christmas concerts. “It’s the most operatic of all Christmas songs, for sure. With that high note near the very end, you go an octave, there’s a lot to aim for. It’s kind of like a slow rising alp that you eventually hope to scale.”

Of course, the higher the drama, the more potential for comedy.

Said Wainwright, “My grandmother always sang it in French, it was her big piece. We’d all do our little Christmas songs and then we would clear the stage and let Grandma end the show with her big dramatic moment. There’s that line, ‘fall on your knees’, and she would fall on her knees in the most funny way. I take it a little more seriously now.”

Finbar Wright has sung Christmas concerts all over the United States for 12 years as part of the Irish Tenors. One night in Houston, things went a bit wrong.

“We had a slightly older guest conductor and he had this kind of thing where he would sing very quietly with the singers,” he said, laughing at the memory. “Over the general clatter of an orchestra and three tenors the audience usually couldn’t hear it, but it just so happened on this night that the first violinist’s microphone was very close to the conductor. He really loved ‘O Holy Night’ and started getting carried away, slightly out of tune and not quite hitting it. He got louder and louder until the first violinist broke down laughing. Then her neighbor started and next thing you know, the whole thing ground to a halt.

“Everybody took it in a great spirit. The conductor was very apologetic, and we just started it again. The funny thing is that the resumed performance had taken on a completely different life because suddenly it seemed like a special emotion had been injected into the whole thing. The humanity had been brought back into the divine.”
As Cartman of “South Park” found out to his detriment in Season 3′s episode “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics,” because “O Holy Night” is not a singalong standard, the words remain for most one of the season’s beautiful mysteries. (How many of us can keep going after ‘dear Saviour’s birth’?).

The high note at the end is what listeners wait for. While the high C-sharp in gospel singer David Phelps’ version is a thing to behold, perhaps the most epic rendering of “O Holy Night” is the hideously out-of-tune version that has gone viral. Originally a spontaneous sendup of all the mistakes amateur singers make, recorded after a long day of work in the studio, the parody was never meant for the general public. In the Internet age, nothing stays a secret for long, and in 2007, after nearly 20 years of remaining anonymous, Nashville arranger Steve Mauldin finally outed himself as the singer.

After 165 years, the opening arpeggios of “O Holy Night” have become a kind of shorthand for “something interesting is starting.” Whatever happens, funny, serious, good or bad, one thing is certain: You’re in for a treat.

The Irish Tenors will try not to get the giggles at the Cerritos Center on Thursday and Rufus will maximize the drama along with his sister Martha at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday and Saturday. For Mauldin’s parody, Google “O Holy Night, Original Singer “or on iTunes look for “Funny O Holy Night.”

Interactive Feature – Vote on which version of O Holy Night you like best

First published in the Los Angeles Times.

On Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving – most people in the US are either camping out for a chance to buy cut-price electronics or preparing enough turkey sandwiches to nourish them through three solid days of American football. Canadian-American singer Martha Wainwright is spending her last day at home in New York signing CDs before an 11-date European tour to support her new album Come Home To Mama.

Signing things is not such an unusual activity for a musician but in this case the discs are going to fans who have supported Wainwright’s fundraising campaign on Pledgemusic.com, a direct-to-fan site started by Benji Rogers in 2009.

Wainwright’s campaign succeeded in raising the $25,000 she needed to bring a band along with her when she tours the US in March 2013. Her label, Cooperative, is not providing any support for either her European or American tours, even though they will benefit from additional album sales generated from the increased exposure. She expects to break even while touring in Europe but it’s the less-certain American market (she’s always been more popular in Europe) where the top-up is needed.

“If I didn’t raise the money,” she says, “I would have to go out on my own, which is fine but sometimes it’s not the best representation of the music. Also, it’s very hard for me to justify going out by myself for an extended period of time because I have a child. I can’t put him in the car for five hours a day and leave him in crappy backstages until I finish.”

Crowdfunding is all the rage these days, with artists as varied as B.B. King, Ben Folds, Emmy the Great and the Libertines all using the platform to fund special projects. In a nutshell, bands post their idea and fans get out their credit cards to help make it happen. Fans are rewarded for their support, with the value and format of the rewards determined by the artist. It can be anything from a download or a special release to a private concert, depending on the scale of the donation.

At the moment, most artists raise funds to make an album but, as smaller record labels struggle to remain profitable, soliciting funds for touring is becoming more and more popular.

“Previously, when album sales were the lion’s share of income, touring wasn’t designed to make money, it was designed to sell albums that would make money,” says?Rogers,?of?Pledgemusic. “That’s one of the big shifts that’s happening now.”

In theory, it seems like an easy way to raise capital. Make a video, post your project and then watch the money roll in. In practice, it takes time to publicise the campaign – an engaged social media audience doesn’t appear overnight – and then, afterwards, to fulfil all the rewards.

Wainwright has previously received no-strings grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. What, then, is the benefit of raising funds from fans instead?

“There is a connection that’s been made,” says Wainwright. “I feel now that there’s an exchange. [Signing CDs] is the least I can do for people that have coughed up $25. It’s like homework. I’m happy to sit here in the sunshine and do this. Perhaps in five years [crowdfunding] will be standard. It’s a very American concept in a way.”

Rogers says: “Fans have traditionally been left out of the music experience until the very last minute. Access to artists [used to be either] at gigs or buying an album in a shop. Now with social networking being what it is, artists have to share as the process happens.”

Rogers’ parents and stepfather were all in the music business and he toured as a musician for years before turning his attention to Pledgemusic. “Unless some miracle happens and albums begin to sell again in the tonnage they used to sell, artists are going to have to look at different ways to monetise their business,” he says. For stadium bands such as the Rolling Stones or Coldplay, this means high ticket prices and merchandise. Artists such as Wainwright, who have a small but highly engaged fan base, find the best way is by offering access to fans.

But there can be pitfalls. When former Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer scored an astonishing $1.2m from a crowd-sourcing appeal in August this year, she came under heavy attack when it became known that for her American tour she had recruited volunteer musicians paid only with “beer, merchandise and hugs”. Palmer discovered that thousands of backers also meant thousands of opinions on how you should spend the money.

So, for Wainwright, is the money worth giving up some control? “I don’t feel like the fans that have donated want a stake in my career as much as they want me to be more visible. I’ve always been a little bit of an underdog and been surrounded by people that are more successful – even within my own family.”

Indeed, Martha is the sister of Rufus and daughter of folk singer Loudon Wainwright III and Canadian singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle. “More people probably know my name than my music,” she adds.

Wainwright admits to a certain level of panic among her colleagues as money seems tight for everyone but the likes of Justin Bieber. Yet even a quick glance at music history will show that for most artists who are happy to exist outside the mainstream, it was always like this.

“My father put his kids through school by getting in his car, going to the gig, selling two or three records at the end of the night and checking into a cheap motel and then going on to the next gig,” she says. “What gets you through and allows you go keep going, even when you’re just playing for 10 people, is the music. I know that sounds tacky but honestly it’s true.”

This piece first appeared in the Financial Times.

LONDON — It’s late afternoon south of the Thames. Outside Henry Wood Hall, the first winter winds dance leaves and cigarette packages while dusk further smudges an already-gray sky. Inside the deconsecrated Georgian church, a man is being driven to murder.

His accomplices, the Philharmonia Orchestra and its principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, are nearly halfway through six hours of rehearsing Alban Berg’s first opera, “Wozzeck.” In performance, the title character’s transformation from gentle soldier to wife-killer takes just 90 minutes.

The 104 musicians occupy one of the few spaces in London where orchestras can rehearse, their stripy sweaters, suede knee-high boots and rumpled blazers in place of tailcoats. Ten white bass travel cases huddle in the corner like giant tombstones.

The other nine soloists, neighbors, fellow soldiers, doctor and wife, fiddle with their phones, popping up occasionally to help Wozzeck on his way to uxoricide.

All this rehearsal is in aid of the Philharmonia’s November tour of the United States. Of the 11 dates, seven are in California. The concert performance of “Wozzeck” (Tuesday at Walt Disney Concert Hall) is one program. Other concerts will include “Symphonie Fantastique” and Beethoven’s Seventh (Wednesday in Costa Mesa, Friday in Santa Barbara) and Mahler’s Ninth (Wednesday in San Diego).

After Salonen’s 17 years as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, bringing the Philharmonia to California is a little bit like introducing the second wife to the family for the first time. Gallantly declining to compare the two, Salonen does allow that the Philharmonia “is one of the best orchestras in the world. It’s a very young orchestra, and its spirit is that of a youth orchestra. Even the older people have somehow kept the sense of adventure, which is rare.”

The Philharmonia regularly receives good notices and more than one critic has floated the idea that it is the best orchestra in London at the moment.

According to Salonen, the Philharmonia’s strength is its flexibility. “The sound is very delicate and transparent, but also it can be tremendously powerful. They have a very wide range of colors, this orchestra. There’s a constant search for the right sound for any given piece of music. You can play old repertoire like Haydn in a sort of period style, no problem, and then move on to Xenakis.”

Inside the hall, the conductor has called time, the players scurrying off for their dinner break. A couple days’ worth of whiskers brings a bit of softness to his customary Euro-mod uniform of black jeans, T-shirt and shoes. Feigning horror at the prospect of being photographed unshaven, Salonen, 52, agrees on the condition that his mother in Finland doesn’t see it.

In the U.K., backstage quarters are, to put it politely, less luxuriously appointed than most in the United States. Salonen’s room at Henry Wood Hall, with its sagging brown couch and feeble Ikea lighting, has all the glamour of your high school best-friend’s basement.

On the table, some dry ham, cucumber and wilted lettuce lie meekly between two pieces of cardboard doing their best to look like bread. Water and a banana also arrive and we get down to the business of why the orchestra is touring “Wozzeck,” composition commissions, conducting operas and how to start a riot.

Orchestras often play big programs when they tour, but bringing “Wozzeck,” with its monster orchestra, 10 soloists and full chorus, is kind of insane. Moving around that many people is expensive, and while Salonen is an established name, Berg is not.

“It’s an idea that was actually born before the subprime mortgage crisis,” Salonen says, laughing. “I thought it would be nice to do something that isn’t the normal touring thing. ‘Wozzeck’ certainly isn’t. The other reason is that it is one of the most important pieces for me in the entire repertoire and I’ve been conducting it since my 20s. In fact, it was the first opera I’d ever conducted.”

Salonen pauses, smiling wryly at the memory (there’s a reason novice opera conductors usually start with Mozart), “Only now can I fully appreciate the fearlessness of those days.”

When the Philharmonia returns to Jolly Old, Salonen will be staying on in Los Angeles to complete another project he started in his 20s: recording the symphonies of Polish composer Witold Lutos¿awski with the L.A. Phil for Sony.

The orchestra recorded the Second in 1984, before Salonen was music director, and the Third and Fourth were one of his first projects when he took over in 1992. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the late composer’s birth, the Polish government has funded a live recording of his first symphony at Walt Disney Hall to complete the cycle. Remarkably, Salonen isn’t the only constant in this project. According to the Phil’s press office, at least 10 musicians in the orchestra will have played on all three recordings.

On Dec. 7, 8 and 9, Salonen will be back at Disney Hall with the L.A. Phil to conduct more Lutoslawski, along with one of his own pieces.

Salonen is well known for his devotion to music of the 20th century, but his connection with Lutoslawski is personal. “He was like my mentor. I find his music to be very powerful and moving. I remember him so well and I miss him still, quite often.” A swig of water, that half smile and then a laugh. “Also it fills my heart with fear, the idea that I knew someone who is now celebrating their 100th anniversary. It makes me realize I’ve been around for quite a while!”

Classical music loves its anniversaries, and in 2013 concert calendars will be awash with Wagner, Verdi and Britten. The more important date for Salonen is April 2, the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” He has taken a break from the piece for a few seasons (“there is other music”), but “The Rite” is still one of the cornerstones of Salonen’s repertoire.

“For me ['The Rite' is] astonishing because it’s so completely new, still. When I listen to some sort of early atonal music from the ’20s, they sound kind of tired to me. Almost academic. ‘The Rite’ is very much alive in the way that Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ is alive or Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie Fantastique.’ This sort of longevity formula, I’d be very happy to know what it is, but I don’t. It’s just there. Some pieces have it and some pieces don’t.”

Perhaps arranging a riot is key? (A century ago, the primitive dancing and ragged music reportedly was too much for some of the Parisian audience. There was punching.)

“Not even that is a guarantee of anything. We actually tested in L.A. to see how many people you need to start a riot. We concluded that you only need 17 or 18 people as long as they are determined, fearless and obnoxious. I think of the rioting in the Muslim world after the pathetic video thing came on YouTube. Even that was most likely kicked off by a relatively small number of people in the core. Very rarely is a revolution done by the majority.”

When Salonen first moved to California 21 years ago, he felt that changing places helped him get away from the orthodoxy of modern European music. Now that he’s sold his Brentwood home and lived five years in West London, have things changed again?

Salonen’s eyes light up. “I don’t have a car anymore, which I love, after 17 years of driving everywhere. Now I take the bus, the Tube or taxis when I need to. Europe, of course, is not the same Europe that I left. I have changed, but also all these cities are so completely cosmopolitan now. I’m very proud to be part of the European Union. Finland has greatly benefited from the openness and dynamic within the Union, whatever some people say.”

One reason Salonen left his Los Angeles job in 2009 was to make more time for composing. Even with a studio in London and a summer home in Finland, however, finding the time, much less the energy, to write on this scale is nigh on impossible when most of your time is spent on the podium.

Classical music plans its seasons and personnel changes at least three years ahead, so his much-sought-after time to compose is only just now materializing.

“From next year on I am finally at my target, which is that I conduct less than 50% of the year. I’m trying to do things that are only essential to me and not to do concerts just for the sake of conducting. For the first time I am where I always wanted to be.”

If orchestra planning moves like molasses, opera houses make the continental drift look like it happened overnight. As such, when he says, “I have some discussions with some people about the ’18-’19 season …,” it is clear he can only be talking about composing a major work. An opera by Salonen based on Danish author Peter Høeg’s “The Woman and the Ape” has been rumored for at least a decade. Is it finally happening, or is it something else altogether?

The hallway is noisy with musicians making their way back upstairs for the second rehearsal session, and all that remains of the sandwich is the shoe-leather crusts.

Salonen waits a moment, relishing the secret. Then, coyly, “I’m still mulling it over ….”

First published in the LA Times