Spring for Music is a multi-year festival of North American orchestras that will have its first outing at Carnegie Hall in May. It aims to celebrate inventiveness in programming and also casts a welcome spotlight on ensembles outside the Big Five group, if that designation still has any meaning. (I'm especially happy to see the Alabama Symphony selected for next year: I wrote about them in 2007.) Tickets for the May concerts are now on sale; all seats are $25.
Update: The New Jersey Symphony just announced its 2011-12 season, and there's happy news for those of us who have long been waiting to hear Busoni's Piano Concerto live: that monumental work will appear on the New Jersey's Spring for Music program in May 2012, with Marc-André Hamelin undertaking the infamously difficult solo part. As far as I can tell, the piece was last done in New York in 1989, with Garrick Ohlsson and the Cleveland Orchestra. Hamelin and Ohlsson have made excellent recordings, and there's John Ogdon's classic account for EMI, but I cherish most a 1988 live recording from the Proms, with Peter Donohoe playing and Mark Elder conducting; the ending is sheer delirium.
