Last time Hilary Hahn made it to the top of the Nielsen charts, she sold just 500 copies in a week.

This time she sold 1341 units of the ‘In 27 pieces’ recording. The album is made up of new commissions.

She’s also #1 on Billboard.

Go, that violin case!

hilary hahn

This is an extraordinary misfortune to befall one of the world’s top violinists. Leonidas Kavakos waits through the orchestral introduction to Mozart’s concerto K216 in Helsinki. His entry is perfectly timed. But atmospheric conditions have caused the E string to go slack.

Here’s what happened.

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Cool as a Finn (which he’s not), Kavakos retunes and starts again.

He had a bad time in Salzburg this summer, squeezing a flabby Cosi fan tutte into an already overcrowded schedule. Now Christoph Eschenbach is being attacked in Vienna for the failure of its new Magic Flute. ‘Meaningless’ said the review in Kurier. Unclean, bloodless, rough sound, said Der Standard. He upset the orchestra, say Kleine Zeitung and Wiener Zeitung. That’s quite a trashing.

 

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photo © Matthias Creutziger

A few years back, a rich German told the Lucerne Festival he’d pay for an opera house. Plans were made, architects engaged. A Salle Modulable was envisaged, a space of infinite flexibility. Then Christof Engelhorn died, in August 2010, before a brick was laid.

His family trust refused to honour the pledge of 120 million Swiss francs. The festival sued. The case has come to court in Bermuda.

It is hardly being reported in Swiss media. So here’s the latest from the courtroom.

It seems likely the outcome will hinge on evidence from Lucerne Festival director, Michael Haefliger, described by the defendants’ counsel as a “master of public relations”.

salle modulable

He smokes crack, threatens homicide, slams into women councillors, he’s Toronto’s finest. Has to be an opera, right?

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Musicians aged 12 to 24 have received notice that one of the country’s premier youth orchestras is no more. SBS Youth Orchestra founder, Matthew Krel, died four years ago and no-one has been found big enough to fit the bill. Sad day. Opportunities for young Aussie musicians just got fewer.

matthew krel

Judge Richard L. Sullivan of the US District Court of the southern district of New York, the man who originally sentenced the opera donor, revoked his bail today. Unless Vilar’s lawyer wins in the Appeal Court, he will return to jail tomorrow.

 

alberto vilar met

After reading about Maria Joao Pires and the wrong Mozart concerto, players in the Berlin Philharmonic pulled a fast one on their soloist, concertmaster, Daishin Kashimoto, by playing the opening to the Mendelssohn concerto instead of the Prokofiev. Was he bothered? Just watch here.

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There has been much press hooh-hah about a bowed keyboard instrument imagined by Leonardo da Vinci and built by an enterprising Pole. But does it pass the acid test of musicology? Apparently not. Here’s a response to the American Musicological Society Discussion List from Professor Edmond Johnson in Los Angeles. Sorry, folks.

I hesitate to represent myself as any sort of expert in the history of bowed

keyboard instruments, but I think I can probably answer Prof.

Warfield’s question about “Leonardo da Vinci’s Wacky Piano.” Basically, it

appears that the instrument built by S?awomir Zubrzycki is not so much a

realization of a design by Leonardo da Vinci as it is a reconstruction of

the instrument described as a “Geigenwerk/GeigenInstrument, oder

GeigenClavicymbel” in the second volume of Michael Praetorius’s Syntagma

Musicum (pp.67-72). Praetorius credits the instrument’s invention to Hans

Haiden of Nuremberg (who had apparently built a working model as early as

1575), and a woodblock illustration of a “Nürmburgisch Geigenwerk” can be

found in Praetorius’s Theatrum Instrumentorum.

The Nuremberg violin mechanism (stringed piano)

To my knowledge, only one historical example of this type of instruments

survives—a 1625 Spanish instrument by Raymundo Truchado in the collection

of the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels—but there have been previous

attempts at making modern replicas (including four different instruments by

the Japanese builder Akio Obuchi).

Now it’s certainly true that da Vinci made some sketches of a

continuously-bowed keyboard instrument (which he dubbed the “viola

organista”) , but the sketches are pretty rough, and most of them show an

action that’s quite different from the one in Zubrzycki’s instrument (which

uses the same rosin-coated wheels as Haiden’s geigenwerk). In short,

Zubrzycki’s instrument seems to me to be a nice reconstruction of a

16th-century German instrument that just happens to share some of the

characteristics of da Vinci’s imagined “viola organista” (which Haiden

almost certainly knew nothing about).

While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “a circus sideshow looking for

suckers,” I think it’s safe to say that the idea of a long-lost instrument

by Leonardo da Vinci makes for far better headlines than “Instrument by

Obscure German Reconstructed… Again.”

 

Best,

Edmond Johnson

P.s. You can find some reproductions of the da Vinci sketches in Emanuel

Winternitz’s “Strange Musical Instruments in the Madrid Notebooks of

Leonardo da Vinci,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 2 (1969), pp. 115-126.

Arts writers and readers are reeling today at the news that Bloomberg is scrapping Muse, the daily board of eight high-class arts stories and commentaries.

Its founder and editor, Manuela Hoelterhoff (pictured with Bloomberg editor in chief Matt Winkler), will stay on the network as chief cultural correspondent, and boy can she write. There will also be an arts blog on the Luxury channel. But Muse is dead. Another arts outlet bites the dust. And other media owners will take this as a signal to shrink their arts coverage still further.

 

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UPDATE: Here’s the internal memo from Matt Winkler.

When we announced the management reorganization a little more than a month ago, we said we wanted to be ideally positioned for growth, foster deeper collaboration, and develop our news products. Since then, we evaluated everything we’re doing to determine what’s working and what isn’t, with the single aim to ensure all we do has maximum impact. One lesson we learned was that we must have the courage to say no to certain areas of coverage in order to have enough firepower in areas we want to own.

It’s against this backdrop that we had to make some difficult decisions today. We were able to reassign a number of people to new positions, and we are grateful for the contributions of those who no longer can be part of our organization. We are convinced that the changes will help us take Bloomberg News to another level of influence.

We decided to scale back arts coverage and no longer use the Muse brand, and we’ll align our leisure reporting with Pursuits and the luxury channel on the Web. Executive Editor Manuela Hoelterhoff, who initiated luxury coverage at Bloomberg, will now oversee new book projects while continuing the cultural coverage for which she received a Pulitzer Prize and Guggenheim fellowship. We will create an editing hub for the Projects team in Washington and no longer have editors dispersed around the world, to further empower the writers; we decided to focus our AV team on LIVE <GO>, which terminal customers depend on, and stop the parallel editing of video that the multimedia team already does. We also decided to concentrate our sports coverage on the nexus with business and no longer do match reports. In beat reporting, we identified some savings thanks to closer collaboration among the newly united teams.

Izvestia reports that four artists have been chosen ‘by tender’ to open the Winter Olympics at Sochi. The results will be announced on CDecember 13 but the paper has been tipped the wink on the favourites. They are (no surprises):

Valery Gergiev, Yuri Bashmet, Denis Matsuev and the Mariinsky ballerina, Ulyana Lopatkina.

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We  guess Gidon Kremer didn’t make the shortlist.