Lenfests Give to Marian Anderson; Orchestra 2001 Scores

One week they're in Venice, the next in South Philly. Marguerite and H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest have taken the $25,000 awarded to them as part of the Philadelphia Award and turned it over to the Marian Anderson Historical Society. Click on the link, by the way, for a few moments of unbelievably supreme beauty...Orchestra 2001 has won the League of American Orchestras' first prize for programming contemporary music for ensembles in its budget category, which might be no surprise since the only thing they program is contemporary music...You can follow the National Symphony Orchestra on its Asian tour with coverage by the Washington Post's Anne Midgette...Midgette will apparently be back in the country by June 26 to chat with Bang on a Can's founding artistic directors Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe about their work as composers, impresarios, and entrepreneurs. The discussion is hosted by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage...Josef Spacek, the young Curtis Institute of Music violinist who was heard at the last Academy of Music Anniversary concert, has won New Zealand's Michael Hill Competition...The White House is starting a new music series that begins with the Marsalis family, the New York Times reports, and is slated to include country and classical...Our friends at the Daily News have noticed that the Franklin Institute has quietly dropped its name change...You might have guessed that the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Venice Biennale show didn't exist to come out of no where and then just end. I'll have a piece in the Sunday Inquirer explaining how it's part of a larger strategy.