First pictures of Munich’s blue Ring elicit a number of questions, which I am sure director Kriegenburg will hasten to answer:
1 Why does he need singers to strip off in the middle of the harshest winter Europe has suffered in years?
2 Why is the eyepatch still an essential Wagner accessory? Yes, I know Wotan’s meant to be a one-eyed git, but in a concept production isn’t there a more original way of expressing that?
3 Is this a homage to Ken Russell’s Women in Love?
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4 Couldn’t he find a nicer Marks & Spencer nightie for Catherine Wyn-Rogers?
5 Wtf are these Rhinemaidens going to do next?
with Johan Reuter (Wotan), Sophie Koch (Fricka).
Her redoubtable manager, Charley Marouani, told me a few months back that she was preparing a new tour.
‘A farewell?’ I checked.
‘Pah!’ said Charley.
She’s performing the first of three shows tonight at the Chatelet, in Paris. Bonne anniversaire to the performer who was Madonna, before anyone imagined Madonna. Ah, those hands, those expressive hands!
(and yes, that is her with Miles Davis. It’s from milesdavis.com)
A man claiming to be resurrected multi-award winning maskandi (traditional Zulu folk music) artist Khulekani Kwakhe “Mgqumeni” Mseleku, has been taken in for questioning, KwaZulu-Natal police said on Monday.
“Police opened an inquest docket and we took the man in for questioning yesterday [Sunday],” police spokesperson Colonel Jay Naicker said.
“We have not done DNA tests or taken his fingerprints, but will be taking some samples to verify whether it is him or not. Detectives from the province will head the investigation.”
The singer apparently died in December 2009, after drinking something he got from a traditional healer. He was buried by his family in the KwaGxobanyawo cemetery in early 2010.
“I have been suffering a lot at the place where I was kept with zombies. It was hell there and I am so grateful that I was able to free myself and return to my family and you, my supporters,” The Timesquoted him as saying.
Investigations would determine whether the police needed to file a High Court application to exhume the body thought to be Mseleku’s.
After news broke on Thursday of the man’s arrival at his family’s homestead in Nquthu near Dundee, hysterical fans went to the village, according to weekend reports.
Naicker said investigations would continue on Monday.
And he’s on the telly. Here’s an SABC news report.
Ludivine Cazares, wife of the Bremerhaven conductor held for seven months by a brutal Mexican drugs gang, has spoken for the first time of the ordeal of his abduction, which happened while they were visiting Rodolfo’s parents in Matomoros, a town near the US Border.
‘My mother was forced to lie down in the boot of a car,’ Ludivine told Bild magazine. ‘As she tried to stretch, she touched corpses in plastic bags.’ Held captive in a suburban house, ‘the windows were blacked out, we were finally allowed to remove blindfolds. Our guard played demonstratively with their cartridge belts. I was scared to death.’
Ludivine and her family raised the money to pay four ransom demands, but Rodolfo Cazares has not been released. Friends and colleagues at the Bremerhaven city theatre, where Rodolfo is music director, are rallying round to increase the fund.
Madonna’s appearance at the SuperBowl provoked a slew of commentaries that appear to fall into roughly three lines of argument:
– who knew she was still alive?
– amazing she can walk unaided
– how come they let a wrinkly of 53 loose on a pulic channel at prime time – actually in front of the children?
The diva appeared, needless to say, with a troupe of Roman gladiators and a new release to promote. The voice, to be frank, is no longer the piercing instrument of yore and some of her moves were prudently slowed down. Nevertheless, the force of her personality was not to be denied, as the video (just launched on youtube) forcibly attests.
So why the onslaught of ageism? Because the freedoms of the internet encourage a dangerous conformity, a sclerosis of public opinion. The entitlement of youth and the marginalisation of maturity have become all the more prevalent as establishment media crumble and personal media prevail. Madonna, in this perspective, becomes a heroine of resistance, a fighter for age diversity. Who’d have thought?
Here’s a trenchant blog reflection, well worth reading, from the Canadian broadcaster Catherine Kustanczy.
Mariafrancesca Garritano, who also writes as Mary Garret,
has been sacked by La Scala for defamation after making repeated claims that one in five of the pupils at its ballet school were suffering from anorexia when she studied there, and that the wasting disease was common in the company. Some ballerinas, she said, could not fall pregnant as a result of the deprivation they suffered at school.
Several ex-colleagues have rushed to denounce her, reports Milan artsblog Gramilano, but other voices have been raised in support. Almost every fact in the matter is contested.
In ballet, as in fashion, the A-word is an unmentionable. It may well be that La Scala has shot the messenger and let the rot continue.
She lost her boyfriend the other week in floods of tears. But the self-styled ‘opera singer’ who has never sung an opera is never one to mope.
She was snapped in the wee hours clubbing with Becks and Prince Harry in a place no opera singer would knowingly be seen dead.
His reply: ‘Bela Bartok was and remains my role model. As a musician and as a person. In today’s turbulent times, I think about him every day. What would he say, how he would react? The answer is clear: with integrity, honesty and purity.’
It never fails to amaze me that, nearly 60 years after Stalin’s death and 20 after Karajan’s, there are still music critics around who lavish conductors with the kind of superhuman praise demanded by the great dictators.
The objects of their admiration are, admittedly, fewer than heretofore but the hyperbole remains the same. It is founded on the assumption that a conductor is all-knowing, all-wise and all-loving. The most prevalent object of this false worship is Claudio Abbado, who has acquired something of the aura of a latterday saint (if not higher) since he survived a bout with stomach cancer. Abbado is a man like any other, faults and all. But you’d hardly believe it from his reviews.
A CD review in Friday’s London Times caught my eye. The paper is not online, so I shall not name the offending critic. The works on question are the violin concertos of Berg and Beethoven, played by Isabelle Faust in Bologna with the Orchestra Mozart guided by their artistic director Claudio Abbado, a great conductor whose ability to reach a work’s soul seems only to have increased during his ten years of battling stomach cancer (you can see where this is leading).
The critic continues: Time and again the ear is brought back to the burnished clarity of Abbado’s textures.
If they were so clear, they should be unobtrusive.
Each ghostly strand in the music’s web is picked out in tender pain.
How, exactly?
And it’s Abbado we must thank…
Does he mean God?
The luminous sound of Abbado’s orchestra, a continuing glory
a phrase taken whole from the lexicon of Karajan hagiolatry
infuses the concerto with a real sense of joy.
Either the composer wrote the joy, or it’s not there. It cannot be infused.
Faust is a wonder on this disc, but Abbado is even more so.
Oh, give over. He’s a conductor, doing his job and edited for the record. Nothing miraculous in that.
Abbado, unlike Karajan, never required a diet of hyperbole. So why write, or publish, such guff?
Roberta Flack (‘Killing Me Softly’) dropped off $500 to pay for the funeral of a Bronx teenager, Ramarley Graham, who was shot by a New York cop. More in the New York Post, an indispensable Sunday read.
A long, reasoned article by Geoff Edgers in the Boston Globe magazine today examines some of the causes for Benjamin Zander’s dismissal from the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra and the New England Conservatory but fails, on its own admission, to isolate why he had to be fired.
Zander and his supporters accept that it would have been right and proper to suspend him after a parent complained that he was employing a convicted – albeit rehabilitated – sex offender. He could then have been reinstated after a thorough investigation proved his innocence.
Outright dismissal, with its taint of personal disgrace and the destruction of his widely valued contribution, was excessive. Tony Woodcock, beleaguered president of the NEC, claims he had no alternative. He refused to comment on why Zander had already been forced to resign from the NEC or why his relationship with the conductor had turned from cordial to hostile.
No mention was made of the drinking allegations on the European tour. Woodcock did admit that he had been lax in pursuing other strands of sexual misconduct. ‘I take responsibility,’ he said.
But he remains in the job. Zander has been the victim of his mishandling of the case. The NEC board may need to draw conclusions if it wants to draw a line under this miscarriage of justice.
My own mailbox is full of testimonials to Zander from pupils past and present. None of them sound over-enthusiastic about NEC. I may publish them at some point. Meantime, the good news is that Zander is back conducting the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.
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