Leland Smith, who died on December 17 at his home in Palo Alto, California, aged 88, was one of the first to write composing programs for computers. A student of Milhaud and Sessions, he played bassoon with New York City Ballet, Chicago Lyric Opera, Chicago Symphony, San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Symphony before becoming professor at Stanford. The university pays tribute here.

 

Leland Smith with computer music displayed on CRT monitor.05/19/1976

Stepping in late to a production tailor-made for Anna Netrebko, our NYCR critic reckons the Canadian soprano was spot-on. The more so since she was singing opposite Netrebko’s ex.

chuchman met

Photo: Ken Howard

a warm, buttery soprano that could be caressing or cajoling and her expressive, flexible phrasing complemented a delightful physical vivacity that makes her a valuable artist to fill the Met’s light lyric Fach.

Read on here.

We are informed that the Canada Border Services have impounded a violin and three bows belonging to Yosuke Kawasaki, a Japanese-American violinist who has served since 2007 as concertmaster of the National Arts Center orchestra in Ottawa.

Yosuke is accused of failing to declare them and is facing a C$120,000 fine.

Start the outrage now.

kawasaki

UPDATE on upcoming Court hearing here.

Report today in Gazeta (Google translated):

The country’s largest producer of turkey meat ” Evrodon ” meat has begun shipping to retailers. Co-owners of the company are conducted by Valery Gergiev, artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre , and businessman Vadim Benaiah .

Since the new year the company opened a large-scale delivery of chilled meat in retail grocery chains in 12 regions of the country. This is the first attempt to bring produced on an industrial scale meat of this species of bird on the Russian market . Turkey will be sold in Rostov- on-Don, Moscow, Moscow , St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region and other regions of the country . Manufacturer has already signed a contract to supply wholesale and retail supermarkets and shops in the premium segment . Cost of 1 kg of turkey meat in the stores will be about 200 rubles.

gergiev-profturkey

The Orchestra Mozart has announced that it is suspending operations as of today, January 11.

The orchestra, founded in Bologna in 2004 by Claudio Abbado, said it could not continue in the face of financial difficulties. Abbado, who is in deteriorating health, has not conducted since September and any new private sponsorship it could raise was conditional on his involvement.

The nine members of staff left the building yesterday, taking with them all personal effects.

The orchestra has not cancelled a date in Oman at the end of the month with the pianist Maurizio Pollini, it is not clear how this can go ahead.

Claudio_Abbado1

I met the late Israeli leader, who died today, on three or four occasions and have little to add to his political biography. I was, however, surprised to discover that this military man and farmer had a daily need for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. He would play some each morning for several minutes before starting work.

Draw no conclusions from this, except as a testament to the penetrative power of great music.

ariel-sharon

See more here on Sharon’s musical affinities.

There is a September fly crawling across his score and a housekeeper shouting in the background. Salvador Dali could have made this film.

poulenc hands

Philip Nodel has sent us this grim 1981 documentary on how the state controlled creativity and what foreign music it considered acceptable.

Watch, even if you don’t understand a word of Russian. Fabulous music making and blood-chilling comments by the commissar, Tikhon Khrennikov.

khrennikov

Sophia Marl is 104 years old. She went to school in Bayreuth and remembers Cosima Wagner coming to play the piano.

In 1938 she took out a subscription to the opera at Hagen. Her enthusiasm is undimmed to this day.

She regrets the decline in standards of audience dress, but does not at all mind moder productions.

Read a local newspaper interview here (auf Deutsch).

Sophia-Marl

Here’s another of those helpful graphs from Digitalmusicnews.com. The blue bars show the rate of growth of paid downloads in the period before Spotify came on the scene. The black line is the strangling effect that Spotify had on the public’s willingness to pay for music. Chilling.

spotify growth

A visit yesterday from Professor Martin Cloonan of Glasgow University revealed an unexpected statistic. Martin, who is writing a history of the Musicians Union, came to discuss some aspects of its operations in classical music.

As we chatted, I asked about the present state of MU membership in Britain. It’s around 30,000, said Martin, and it’s remained the same since the 1960s.

That, to my mind, is a significant trend. Union membership across the UK  has more than halved, from 13 million in 1979 to six million in 2013. Over that period, the MU has maintained its numbers.

How and why is not immediately apparent. In the orchestral world, the MU has lost all of its former power and adopts a low profile. Yet musicians continue to pay their dues and, as some retire, new ones join.

Any suggestions?

musicians union

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at Stowe, as green and pleasant a public school as you can find in the whole of England.

 

stowe

The head of music is my dynamo friend, Simon Dearsley, who gave me the hard-hat tour of the new music school and state of art concert hall that he has somehow caused to be built. It may be the most perfect recording venue in the country

Simon has just announced its opening:

stowe music school

 

So tonight we opened the New Music School with the inaugural piano concert. Philip Fowke did the honours, and played a stunning recital, rich is musical quality, ferocious technical wizardry and timbre you would not believe could come out of a piano. His arrangement of the Sugar Plum fairy ( and inspired encore) it was hard not to try and step into the piano and work out where he had secreted the Celeste! Staggering. Chopin Ballades 1 & 3, poetic mazurkas, and Philip’s genius program ‘The Art of Encore’ – utterly sublime!

ITS OFFICIAL! ITS ARRIVED! WE HAVE MOVED IN!

THE NEW MUSIC SCHOOL IS HERE! Thank you to all the old stoics over the last 5 years who simply made music no matter the conditions. please come back and see what we have created – I am only sad it did not happen sooner.

DATE FOR DIARY:

MAY 23RD EVENING CONCERT IN MARQUEE –

RUSSIAN NATIONAL ORCHESTRA

LESLEY GARRET SINGING

CRAIG GREEN PLAYING TCHAIKOVSKY 1

CARLO PONTI CONDUCTING

Stowe New Music School Fly-through from thinkbda on Vimeo.