… and the judge has to step down from the hearings because she is married to the orchestra’s executive director.

A tale of small town petty crime. Read on here.

$156 million, it says on the press release.

That’s over £100 million, more than any jewellery sale in auction history.

Press release:

MOST VALUABLE SALE OF JEWELRY IN AUCTION HISTORY

 

MOST VALUABLE PRIVATE COLLECTION OF FASHION EVER SOLD AT AUCTION

 

CHRISTIE’S FIRST EVER ONLINE-ONLY AUCTION – CONDUCTED IN PARALLEL TO LIVE AUCTIONS – FETCHES OVER $9.5 MILLION

 

26 ITEMS SELL FOR OVER $1 MILLION; 6 ITEMS FOR OVER $5 MILLION

 

STELLAR SALE RESULTS SET THE PACE FOR CONTINUING SALES OF FINE ART FROM THE COLLECTION IN JANUARY AND FEBRUARY 2012

 

 

New York – The landmark auctions of The Collection of Elizabeth Taylor at Christie’s New York from December 3-17 realized a combined total of $156,756,576 (£100,324,209/ €120,702,563) with every single item sold.  The sale drew unprecedented interest from bidders throughout the world, who gathered in Christie’s flagship Rockefeller Center saleroom to compete in person, on the phone, on-line and by absentee bid to win one of the Collection’s 1,778 lots of jewelry, fashion, decorative arts and film memorabilia. The total far exceeded Christie’s pre-sale expectations for the sale as a whole and for individual items, which were frequently hammered down for five, ten, or even 50 times their estimate in some cases.

 

As one of the most highly-anticipated sales in auction history, the Collection generated intense interest from bidders throughout the world, with 36 different countries represented during the four days of live auctions. This historic sale set a world record for the most valuable sale of jewelry in auction history, and set a new bar for the most valuable collection of fashion ever offered at auction. It also marked the company’s first-ever Online-Only sale, which ran in parallel to the live auctions at Christie’s New York and generated over 57,000 bids and $9.5 million in additional sales. In total, 26 items sold for over the $1 million mark, and numerous new world auction records were achieved – a testament to Miss Taylor’s expert eye for craftsmanship, rarity, and quality in all of the items she chose for her personal collection.

 

Of the sales, Chris Wilding, son of Elizabeth Taylor and member of the Elizabeth Taylor Trust said, “My mother always acknowledged that she was merely the temporary custodian of the incredible things she owned. Today, I think she would be happy to know that her collections will continue to enrich the lives of those who have acquired pieces. My family is proud that our mother’s legacy as a celebrated actress, tireless AIDS activist, and accomplished businesswoman touched so many people’s lives that they wanted to have a part of it for themselves. We could not have carried out her wishes this week without the outstanding help of Christie’s. We are most grateful to the incredibly creative and capable team led by Marc Porter, Chairman of Christie’s Americas, Heather Barnhart, Regional Managing Director, and Stephen Lash, Chairman Emeritus.”
All sales proceeds will be directed to the Elizabeth Taylor Trust. A portion of the profits generated by sales of exhibition tickets, event sponsorships and the ongoing sales of select publications will be donated to The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF).  An estimated 58,000 visitors have viewed highlights from the Collection since September, when Christie’s launched an eight-city global exhibition and tour that reached Moscow, London, Los Angeles, Dubai, Paris, Geneva and Hong Kong. The grand finale of the tour was a spectacular 10-day museum-quality public display of the complete Collection that drew thousands of collectors and fans to the company’s flagship galleries in Rockefeller Center and became the ‘can’t-miss’ event of the holiday season.

 

Steven P. Murphy, Chief Executive Officer, Christie’s International, commented, “The exhibition and sales of The Collection of Elizabeth Taylor in New York have been the crowning achievement to a very strong year at Christie’s. The success of these sales, with bidders participating from all over the world, demonstrated not only a recognition of the taste and style of Miss Taylor, but also the convening power of Christie’s.  I am very proud of our whole team, from all corners of our global operation. Their achievement was successfully bringing this event to fruition in a manner that paid homage to the panache and glamour of Elizabeth Taylor herself.”

Further to the Brussels kerfuffle over French pronunciation, creative consultant Roger Neill has sent me an article he prepared for Vladimir Jurowski on the correct way to deliver an ‘r in German opera and Lieder. I’m delighted to publish it here:

Mahler and the singing of the letter r in German opera and song

 

 

Mahler the opera conductor laid particular emphasis on the importance of correctly singing the letter r in German-language opera and song. The question is: to roll the r at the front or the back of the throat? Which did he prefer?

 

His disciple, Natalie Bauer-Lechner (who wrote down faithfully just about everything she heard him say) reports Mahler as follows: “In singing, everything depends on diction. Interpretation, even from the musical point of view, ought always to be built on the words… The most important thing in a singer is his r; if he can get that right, strange as it may seem, he can’t be entirely bad.”[1]

 

But Mahler did not elaborate on what, for him, was “right”, what “wrong”. How exactly did he wish the r to be sung? At the back of the throat, the uvular r, as in “correct” spoken German (and French)? Or rolled on the tip of the tongue, as in English and Italian?

 

It is the great soprano Lilli Lehmann (1848-1929) who gives us the answer. While Lehmann was never a formal member of his tightly-knit Hofoper ensemble in Vienna, he invited her to visit (and perform) for a period each year from 1898 until 1907 to give what Mahler described as her “annual singing lesson” to the company. Lehmann included in her repertoire over 600 songs and 170 operatic roles. She was initially the pupil of her mother, Marie Loewe in Prague, and was coached by Wagner for his first Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876.

 

Her 1902 book, How to Sing, whilst it covers many areas critical to good singing, sheds no light on the topic. However, in the published lectures[2] of French composer, pianist, singer and teacher, Reynaldo Hahn, he describes a visit he made to Lilli Lehmann’s home in Berlin to rehearse Don Giovanni:

 

“…she welcomed me with a coarse voice, resting solidly on the low register and speaking with uvular r’s of the Prussian variety. I sat down at the piano, and she began to sing. With the first bar she was transformed: ‘Non sperar se non m’uccidi / Qu’io ti lascia fuggir mai.’

 

“It was a stupendous metamorphosis. Suddenly, her voice became feminine, high, with vibrating resonance. As for the r’s, they were rolled, very Italian and bright, surely just as Mozart heard them pronounced and as he himself pronounced them since he was born in Salzburg.”

 

Of course the question remains, how did she pronounce the r’s in German-language works? Her recordings, made in 1906 and 1907, when she was nearly sixty years old, tell a consistent story: Lehmann consistently uses the tip-of-tongue rolled r in all the recordings I have studied closely – in the two Constanze arias she recorded from Entführung, in Beethoven’s early setting of Goethe’s “Freudvoll und leidvoll”, in Schubert’s “Erlkönig” and “Du bist die Ruh”, in “Intermezzo” and “Mondnacht” from Schumann’s Opus 39 Liederkreis, and in the extracts she recorded from Die Walküre (“Du bist der Lenz”) and the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde (“Mild und leise”).

 

Within his Hofoper company, Mahler’s favourite performer was Marie Gutheil-Schoder (1874-1935), Grange describing her as his “most faithful, talented and conscientious collarorator”.[3] In her 1902 recording of Frau Fluth’s “Verführer!” from Nicolai’s Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor, she consistently uses the rolled r, really letting rip on “Mein Ritter, mein Ritter”.

 

Case closed? Perhaps not. Hahn reports that the great Schröder-Devrient (who died in 1860, before Hahn was born), creator of three major Wagner roles, was said to have “gutteralised abominably”.[4]

 

 

 

 



[1]  Gustav Mahler, Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner, ed Herbert Killian, Wagner, Hamburg, 1984, p167, quoted in Henry-Louis de la Grange, Gustav Mahler: Volume 2, Vienna: The Years of Change (1897-1904), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, pp 297-8.

[2]  Reynaldo Hahn, On Singers and Singing: Lectures and an Essay, translated by Léopold Simoneau, Amadeus Press, Portland, Oregon, 1990, p 204.

[3] Grange, p 297.

[4] Hahn, p 82.

It looks really eclectic on paper.

Elena Bashkirova, Barenboim’s wife,  brings her classical crew from the Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival, but the big draw is world star Noa  and there are dj kings from Tel Aviv’s clubland, the Arab-Jewish piano Duo Amal, my favourite oud player Yair Dalal, an Ethiopian ensemble and much else of a bewildering diversity.

Happening in Hamburg, second week of February. More here.

A Facebook page has been opened, calling on the London Philharmonic to reinstate the four musicians it suspended in July for up to nine months over their demand that the Israel Philharmonic be banned from the BBC Proms.

I argued, at the time, in favour of the punishment. I also felt that it was too harsh and advocated an early reprieve.

Now is the time for the LPO to temper justice with compassion. It should restore the four players before Christmas. Draw a line under the unfortunate episode. Put the unhappiness of 2011 behind you.

 

Some weeks ago, the mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham had a dilemma. Rinat is the world’s Carmen of choice and a director asked her to change the way she pronounced her ‘r’ for a Belgian audience at La Monnaie. He wanted it gutturalised rather than rolled.

Have you any idea how difficult it is to sing guttural and sound beautiful? It’s no coincidence that radio people prefer to roll their ‘r’s, as do most opera singers.

Rinat Shaham

Rinat, being a willing trooper, tried the guttural track in rehearsal and brought it off tremendously on stage, saving her rolled ‘r’s for the high-lying passages where she could feel comfortable and no-one else would notice.  We exchanged a few letters about it, and I was really pleased for her.

This morning, after another production – Massenet’s Cendrillon – some half-arsed reviewer on an internet site has attacked her for singing ‘approximate French’. Just the one comment, nothing penetrative about her performance. One cheap shot.

If I hadn’t known that Rinat worked so hard on her French diction, I might have overlooked that as another bit of internet bile, unworthy of attention. But the comment was xenophobic, possibly racist and intended to hurt. It’s bad reviewing, unamplified and without context.

Opera singers have a right to be respected for the heroic efforts they make to sound credible in several languages. Opera houses should not give tickets to critics who display an anti-foreign bias. If Forum Opera wants to be considered a respectable review site, it needs to remove that remark – and its author. Right now.

 

 

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photos (c) Eos Chater

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And this is Good King Wenceslas himself

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Ralph MacDonald started out drumming for Harry Belafonte. In all, he made 400 albums.

http://www.jazzwisemagazine.com/images/newsimages/ralph-macdonald.jpg

His most celebrated composition was Roberta Flack’s Where is the love?

MacDonald was 67 when he died yesterday in Stamford, Conn.

Andrea Bocelli, eat your heart out.  A report in English from Russian Television, with reporter participation.

 

One of the great disappointments of the Obama presidency has been its failure to foster the creative potential of America’s arts. Another, probably unforgettable, was the president’s xenophobic assaults on British Petroleum when a BP rig sprung a bad leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Made us all so  proud to be British (even though BP is not).

This morning at the British Museum, BP reminded us of its continuous investment in UK arts institutions for 24 years and pledged to continue that involvement up to 2017.

Its £10 million ($16m) input will enable the Royal Opera House to put up 21 big screens around the country for free live relays of opera and ballet, Tate Britain to rehang its entire collection, the British Museum to stage a Vikings extravaganza and the National Portrait Gallery to continue its BP Portrait Awards.  ‘We deliver world class programmes to a global audience,’ said BP md, Iain Conn.

Nicholas Serota of the Tate admitted the Gallery had listened to green protests at BP’s pollution, but decided to take the money regardless. BP said it was proud to supply the world’s energy needs. Neil Macgregor of the BM called BP an ‘exemplary supporter of the arts’. Nobody mentioned Barack Obama. What’s he ever done for the arts?

A dozen francophone friends came round last night to hear my programme on Barbara and the effect was unexpected.

We sat, whiskey tumblers and champagne glasses in hand, and gave the speakers our full attention for 45 minutes. It felt like being transported back to the 1930s of our parents and grandparents when radio was the sole domestic source of news and entertainment.

Our younger friends, who had never truly listened to radio before, were unaware of its hypnotic power to evoke a world in sound, without pictures. I quoted them Marshall McLuhan to the effect that what you heard on radio, a ‘hot’ medium, endured longer than what you saw on TV, a cold one.

Here’s another listener‘s account.

It’s hardly worth dying any more.

The Guardian, which has the best pair of eulogy pages in Britain, is cutting back from two pages to one, Press Gazette reports.

That’s bad news for the late lamented, both the famous and those more locally appreciated who receive sweet tributes from their community.

The Guardian is suffering heavy losses and has warned it can barely survive three years at the present rate.

Perish the thought.