31May

Luisi says he won't take the Met

Fabio Luisi, touring Japan with the Metropolitan Opera, has taken issue with Peter Gelb’s suggestion that he is the logical successor to James Levine. ‘He said nothing about it to me,’ laughs Luisi. ‘I said to my wife, look what’s in the paper…’ In an interview today with the Tages-Anzeiger of Zurich, he says that […]

Click to read more
31May

Have you heard the Palestine Lied?

Rumours have been twittering all day as to who the big celebrity will be on the next Gaza flotilla. The best best is Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple and a veteran pro-Pal activist. Meantime, a bunch of international bandsters have been doing the Geldof thing – ‘Sing out for Palestine’ – for release […]

Click to read more
31May

Breaking up: Netrebko leads new exodus from Japan

Anna Netrebko and Joseph Calleja are today’s dropouts from the Met’s threadbare tour of Japan. Treb says she’s lived through one Chernobyl, can’t face another radiation dose (has she been eating e-coli German cucumbers?). Calleja, the Matese tenor, had ‘last-minute misgivings’. Jonas Kaufmann, Olga Borodina and James Levine were previous pullpouts, the last two on […]

Click to read more
31May

Danes denounce Brazil conductor – but work with him anyway

It appears that the condemnation by Danish musicians of the Brazilian Roberto Minczuk was more ethical than practical. The Odense Symphony Orchestra will start working with Minczuk tomorrow, unwilling to break an existing contract (they should read this in Berlin). The orchestra chairman told local media that the players had made their views known about Minczuk’s […]

Click to read more
31May

How to turn 30 in the best possible way

The cellist Guy Johnston is putting his youth behind him this Thursday. No more BBC Young Musician of the Year. No more poster boy for a big agency. Lovely Guy – he really is – is setting his sights on playing the music he craves with the people he likes best – and in aid […]

Click to read more
31May

Berlin finds new excuses for quitting Salzburg

The new intendant of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Martin Hoffmann, has been explaining their departure from the Salzburg Easter Festival. The festival, he said, was no longer following Herbert von Karajan’s founding principles and the offer from Baden-Baden was not only ‘richer’ but allowed the orchestra to perform at lower ticket prices. You can read […]

Click to read more
30May

Breaking: Denmark boycotts Brazil crisis conductor

News is just in that the Odense Symphony Orchestra in Denmark has refused to work with Roberto Minczuk, who has sacked half of the Brazil Symphony Orchestra and is scouring the world for replacements. The Odense action, backed by the country’s musicians union, represents further isolation for Minczuk and the rump of his orchestra. Here […]

Click to read more
30May

Qatar picks the perfect architect for its tainted World Cup

Reading the German newspapers last week on a train from Berlin to Leipzig, I was startled to read the name of the firm that is designing the stadium for the 2022 World Cup – a tournament clouded by imputations of bribery and corruption on a colossal scale. The firm of architects is called AS&P. That’s […]

Click to read more
30May

Death of a secret genius

The international pianist and pedagogue Vitalij Margulis died yesterday in Los Angeles after a long illness, at the age of 83. His last recital was given in California in November. Born in Kharkov, Ukraine, Margulis studied with his own father, whose teacher, Alexander Horowitz, had been a pupil of Skryabin’s. After a busy, though not […]

Click to read more
30May

Who was Mahler's English girlfriend?

A book on Mahler in Leipzig, published for the city’s historic cycle, reveals a mass of unsuspected detail about his life there in 1886-88. Nothing that changes our fundamental perception of a very young man in an impossible hurry, oblivious to social courtesies. But there are fresh details of his living arrangements in Leipzig and […]

Click to read more
30May

Exclusive: Moscow's plan to commemorate 9/11

I had a call this morning from the conductor Thomas Sanderling, presently on Mahler tour in South Africa. He has been approached by Mikhail Pletnev to conduct the Russian National Orchestra in the city’s tenth-anniversary commemoration of the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001. The work he will perform is Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony. […]

Click to read more