A third senior executive has quit Chicago in what is starting to look like mass flight.

First, Deborah Rutter resigned as president to take over the Kennedy Center.

Then Martha S. Gilmer quit as artistic v-p to go off and run San Diego Symphony.

Now, the CSO’s #3, artistic administrator Nick Winter has announced he’s heading off to the San Francisco Symphony.

Andrew Patner, reporting the latest move, says there’s no sign of progress in landing a new president. We have a list of almost a dozen candidates who refused to be considered for the vacancy. Could it be a collective dread of Chicago winters?

The instrumentation is interesting and the atmosphere cool, but the song is stripped of its low-down-and-dirty intimacy and the translation into Hebrew is downright awkward.

The great singer-songwriter, 80 next month, has  never wavered in his devotion to Israel.

See what you think. Click here.

BBC4, the minority culture channel of the national broadcaster, is relaying a delayed Proms concert tonight.

Excluded from the broadcast is Sonance Severance 2000, a work by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, who is widely regarded as the country’s most original composer.

Why take it off TV? Because the controllers of television are terrified their viewers might switch off at the sound of something unusual.

They did it before with John McLeod and provoked widespread protests, to no avail.

Bring me the head of BBC4.

(If you’re in Britain, you can watch the Birtwistle piece on the BBC iplayer here).

UPDATE: Here’s a further outcry from Susanna Eastburn, head of the compossers’ organisation, Sound and Music.

The comedian who provoked a recent furore with outrageous comments about Palestinians stopped breathing this morning while undergoing throat surgery. She is said to be in a critical condition. Ms Rivers is 81.

Details are still sketchy, but it appears that Neil Y0ung has made ‘a very substantial donation’ to the Jerusalem Foundation, for the purpose of training an orchestra of Jewish and Arab children.

Mark Sofer, the Foundation’s president, said: ‘We’re very grateful to the artist Neil Young for his great generosity in giving to a Foundation that dedicates itself to reducing hatred between peoples – especially in these times when there is so much extremism on both sides.’

Source: Jerusalem Foundation.

We established yesterday that New York and Los Angeles are not the most cultured places to live in the US.

What about Spain, then?

A survey published on El Pais rules out Madrid and Barcelona for all sorts of social reasons.

So where, then?

The best place for a foreigner to live in Spain is, apparently…

click here.

The former lock-out ensemble has announced $13.2 million in four separate gifts. Ten million came from one donor.

The new season opens September 5 with Renee Fleming.

Report here.

This new office block in Amsterdam is known as Mahler 4, because it is situated on Gustav Mahlerlaan.

The composer would have gone berserk.

Specifications below.

• Architect: UNStudio
• Client: Mahler 4 VOF, Consortium G&S Vastgoed, ASR Vastgoed, ING Real Estate
• Location: Gustav Mahlerlaan, Zuid-as, Amsterdam
• Program: offices
• Building area: 28.280 m²
• Volume: 118.878 m³
• Height: 85m, 21 floors
• Status/phase: Realised
• Executive architect: van den Oever Zaaijer & Partners
• Technical Engineering: Van Rossum, Amsterdam
• Installations: Techniplan, Rotterdam
• Contractor: G&S bouw

The Mahler 4 urban complex houses 38.000 m2 of residential spaces, 162.000 m2 of office space and 30.000 m2 of street level retail, cafes, restaurants and a sports centre. The six towers in the Mahler 4 complex range in height from 85 to 100 meters, with each building carrying the name of its designing firm. The Mahler 4 complex has been nominated for the FGH Real Estate Prize 2010.

At a height of 82.5 meters, the UNStudio Tower contains 20 floors of office space and a ground floor with mezzanine. The Royal Bank of Scotland currently occupies 9 floors of the building and the South entrance with commercial space on the Gustav Mahlerlaan.

From Digital Music News.

To enlarge, click here.

Terrific article on Forbes magazine by an HR executive, Liz Ryan, who doubles as a professional opera singer. After years of auditions, it occurred to her that opera singers are uniquely equipped to teach the rest of us how to go about improving our job prospects.

Sample text:

My beautiful and brilliant teacher Winifred told  us “You have no idea what they want. They may have a conception of the role already. If they want Corn Flakes and you’re Raisin Bran, you’re not going to get the role, but that’s okay. Your job is not to try to figure out what they want. Go sing the best version of you that there is at this minute, and forget about everyone else.”

This is the perfect advice for job-seekers. Go to a job interview with an open heart and mind, ready to have a conversation and see whether there’s a resonance between you and the people you’re meeting, enough to have another conversation. You’re not going on the interview to beg and grovel. Your parents didn’t raise a doormat.

You have a tremendous amount to offer your next employer, and the more you can stay in your body and be present, not stepping out of the conversation mentally to critique your performance in the interview, the happier you will be when you go home and reflect on the conversation.

Read more here.

The director’s acceptance speech of the Polar Prize last night:

The Channel 4 documentary on classical musicians who were derailed by drink or drugs went out last night at 11pm.

The underlying story was familiar – a picture of intolerable pressures of high performance – and some of the personal accounts plumbed a deep well of human sympathy.

But the persistent intrusiveness of the medium, the delve for tragic details, verged on the worst excesses of reality TV. It left us feeling with a sensation that both musicians and viewers were being subtly exploited in the service of other agendas – the broadcaster’s obligation to fill its arts quotient, the LSO’s to show public service and the advertisers to be cast somehow as benefactors.

It was not a good feeling.

What did you think?