It’s only taken a couple of millennia, but tonight the great church has announced a breach with its breeches.
The new organ scholar of St Paul’s is going to be Rachel Mahon, 24, presently organ scholar at Truro Cathedral. She’s the first woman to hold any organ post at the Cathedral.
Rachel is Canadian, originally from Toronto. The press release says she sometimes plays in stilettos, which is too much information. Oddly, they forgot to say if she’s the first Canadian to play at St Paul’s.
Rachel joins a team of Organist Simon Johnson, Sub-Organist Timothy Wakerell and Director of Music Andrew Carwood.
Deutsche Welle reports (in Russian) that the Green faction in Munich’s city council want the Russian conductor to explain his letter of support for Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Crimea. Gergiev is due to become music director of the Munich Philharmonic next year.
The new cold war may have consequences for him.
More here (auf Deutsch).
Up to the last board-room minute yesterday, plans were being made for a 50th season of opera in San Diego. Directors and conductors were planning productions. We know of one singer who, just a few days ago, received a signed contract for next season. The suddennes of the decision is perplexing.
So why was San Diego panicked into shutting down?
Was there a financial shortfall that has not been disclosed?
Did its general manager run out of energy after 30 years?
To terminate an opera company with such finality after a season is fully planned begs more questions than Ian Campbell was prepared to answer. Full disclosure will out in due course but, for the moment, there are question marks over this precipitate closure.
In March 1892, the young Strauss met a radical socialist writer in Berlin. John Henry Mackay, Greenock born, was taken as a child back to her family Germany by his widowed mother. He grew into a best-selling literary agitator for social equality and gay rights.
The Anarchists (1991), his semi-memoirist novella caught Strauss’s immediate attention. The composer set two of his poems – Morgen and Heimliche Aufförderung – in the opus 27 songs that Strauss wrote for his future bride, Pauline. Further poems by Mackay were adopted by Strauss as Verführung (Op. 33 No. 1) and In der Campagna (Op. 41 No. 2).
Mackay, under the pseudonym Sagitta, wrote a series of gay novels titled Die Bücher der namenlosen Liebe (Books of the Nameless Love). He was well known for his involvement with Berlin’s gay scene. He died in May 1933, soon after Hitler’s rise to power.
None of the Strauss biographies pay any attention to his collaborator’s political and sexual activism. Strauss was, so far as we know, conservative and straight. Was he aware that his love songs were written by a gay man? Would it have made any difference to him?
The 150th anniversary of Strauss’s birth is being marked worldwide. Mackay’s has passed unnoticed, except in a Greenock newspaper.
Karen Kamensek, busy music director at the Hannover State Opera has decided not to renew her five-year contract beyond 2016. Too much going on elsewhere in her career, apparently.
Karen, Chicago born, has made her way up the German ladder over the past decade from first kapellmeister at Vienna’s Volksoper to music director in Freiburg, deputy in Hamburg and, from 2011, #1 in Hannover. But US opera companies have awoken to her abilities and Karen is keen to be up, up and away.
There was no mitigating factor. Story here.
A small, personal tragedy in a morass of public prosecutions. Full story on BBC Glasgow.
We’ve received sad news of the death of Louise Honeyman, last night, at the age of 80.
Louise managed the London Mozart Players in the 1980s and 1990s. She was the only woman in the country at that time who was in charge of a major ensemble and I was led to believe she was the first ever to head a London band. She was warm, funny, capable, personable, unflappable and totally dedicated to keeping her players in work.
She was also modest to the point of self-effacement. I have no picture of her, but many quiet memories.
Simon Funnell, outgoing MD of the LMP adds:
The LMP are mourning the loss of a member of the family today. To many people, after Harry Blech retired, Louise was the LMP; as you rightly said in your tribute she was fully dedicated to the orchestra which for many years was based in an office in her house. She worked 8am to 8pm most evenings and nobody could ever question her commitment and loyalty to this group of musicians and to ensuring they had huge amounts of work. Louise had a Chef brought in every day to cook lunch for the office team; a daily event which brought the whole team together. We could do with that sort of opportunity for team-building again in the orchestral sector.
In my view during her time running the orchestra she made two key decisions which had an enormous impact. The first was to make the orchestra’s home at Fairfield Halls in Croydon, with financial funding from Croydon Council; a support which lasted 25 years. It was a bold move to take the orchestra away from central London and to an outer London borough, but in doing say it removed the LMP from the morass of orchestras competing for audiences in central London, and gave the orchestra a solid, stable home in one of London’s best concert halls. Secondly, she appointed Jane Glover as Britain’s first female orchestra Artistic Director, at a time when Jane Glover was one of the best known conductors around – a real media figure. This put the LMP on the map and it was the first – and last – time that a British orchestra had women in its two most senior roles.
I only got to know Louise when I took over the LMP five years ago. At the time she was living in Turkey, but she came to one of my first concerts and I am pretty sure it was to check out her third successor. As a woman in her mid-70s she had learned to inhabit the demeanour of an old lady with a twinkle in her eye, which was a good cover for the steely determination which lay underneath. If I got something wrong, or if she thought I had missed a trick, she would be certain to tell me. In the last few years she returned to live in the UK and I saw more of her; she joined the LMP Friends and came to more of our concerts. I particularly admired the way she took an interest in the younger, more junior members of my team, especially those who were female. She would often bring in a speech she had made or a something of interest from her personal archive if she thought it might be of inspiration to a young woman just starting out in this business.
There was much resentment when she and Jane replaced many long-standing musicians with younger players, people like Christopher Newport, Celia Nicklin and Angela Malsbury, were the young, exciting musicians of the future of British orchestral playing, and without that new lifeblood the orchestra would never have survived. Louise took an orchestra which was not taken too seriously and transformed it into one which was highly regarded. Any orchestra manager needs to be a combination of steel fist wrapped in kid glove and Louise was certainly that, though the first time you met her you would invariably see only the kid glove. She had a great sense of humour and twinkle in her eye which was utterly endearing and she never really took much credit for her enormous contribution to the orchestra and would always tell you it was the music director, or the musicians, or her team who were the real heroes.
Its general director Dominique Meyer has given a stark analysis of the budget to an Austrian news magazine, warning he will resign if the house goes into deficit.
He said that after 14 years of stagnant public subsidies, the Staatsoper will not balance its books next season, despite record audience numbers. ‘I’ve never made a loss in my life and I’m not prepared to start making one,’ said Meyer.
He added that Culture minister Josef Ostermayer keeps saying ‘we’ll find a solution. I trust him and believe he understands the situation.’
On his resignation plan, Meyer said: ‘I’m a free man and may find myself confronted with such a decision at some point. Under no circumstances will I allow myself to be manoeuvred into a position where the conditions are not right, in other words, one which forces me to make a loss. This isn’t a threat. I’m not the sort to make threats. But the situation is extremely serious.’
Meyer said all of the house’s financial reserves had been used up. ‘We’re at zero. With the current state of our finances, we’re in a situation for the upcoming season where nothing more goes.’
He had been “ordered” to raise ticket prices. ‘It’s not something I like doing, because I believe that prices in some categories are already very high, even if they’re still nowhere near as a high as in London or Milan.’ Even so, higher ticket prices won’t be enough, he said.
Turning to the issue of the Burgtheater, where Intendant Matthias Hartmann was recently sacked for a spiralling financial scandal, Meyer said he had invited Hartmann to revive his production of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
He also said he could imagine inviting him back to do another new production, insisting that Hartmann’s artistic credentials were not in question.
There is no soft way to break bad news.
The first word came out of the rehearsal room:
Someone just said, “rehearsal was just halted so they could announce this to us. What a sad time. The San Diego Opera is closing it’s doors after the next production of “Don Quichotte.
Hours later, the board of San Diego Opera voted 33-1 to cease operations next month. The company will have sung and played for 49 years.
Ian Campbell, San Diego’s general and artistic director and CEO, said in a statement: ‘We faced an insurmountable financial hurdle going forward. We had a choice of winding down with dignity and grace, making every effort to fulfill our financial obligations, or inevitably entering bankruptcy, as have several other opera companies.
‘Our board voted today to take the first choice.’
Campbell, hired from the Met, has run San Diego since 1983. The company had a $15 million annual budget.
Its closure, coming in the same season as the collapse of New York’s City Opera, is a vital indicator of the frail health of opera in America.
Closures in 2014 cannot be blamed on recession; we’re over that. It reflects a lack of will to sustain an expensive art form.
On top of this season’s two corpses, Houston is cutting back. Insiders are starting to ask, who’s next?
And why the rush to shut down?
photo: Krassimira Stoyanova and Piotr Beczala in San Diego Opera’s recent Ballo. Photo: Ken Howard
Professor Joseph Kerman, who has died aged 90, will be remembered for the phrase he coined to disparage Puccini’s Tosca in his book, Opera as Drama (1952). It earned Kerman the loathing of lowbrows and the envy of his dusty peers in academic musicology.
An American journalist’s son, born and schooled in London, Kerman taught at Princeton, Berkeley and Oxford.
