Two days after the New York Times declared that the Metropolitan Opera was right to go ahead with The Death of Klinghoffer, the father of another Jewish American held hostage and murdered by Islamic militants has added his voice to the chorus of protests at a rally today.
Professor Judea Pearl’s letter reads:
In joining you today to protest the New York Metropolitan Opera production of this opera, I echo the silenced voice of my son, Daniel Pearl, and the silenced voices of other victims of terror, including James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and including thousands of men, women and children who were murdered, maimed or left heartbroken by the new menace of our generation, a menace that the Met has decided to accept and orchestrate as just another activity of normative civilized society, just another phenomenon worthy of artistic expression. They tell us that the composer tried to “understand the hijackers, their motivations, and their grievances.
I submit to you that there has never been a crime in human history lacking grievance and motivation. The 9/11 lunatics had profound motivations, and the murderers of my son, Daniel Pearl, had very compelling “grievances.” In the past few weeks we have seen with our own eyes that Hamas and ISIS have grievances, too and, they, too, are lining up for operatic productions with the Met.
Yet civilized society, from the time of our caveman ancestors, has learned to protect itself by codifying right from wrong, separating the holy from the profane, distinguishing that which deserves the sound of orchestras from that which deserves our unconditional revulsion. The Met has smeared this distinction and thus betrayed their contract with society. I submit to you that choreographing an operatic drama around criminal pathology is not an artistic prerogative, but a blatant betrayal of public trust.
We do not stage operas for rapists and child molesters, and we do not compose symphonies for penetrating the minds of ISIS executioners. What we are seeing here in New York today is not an artistic expression that challenges the limits of morality, but a moral deformity that challenges the limits of the art. This opera is not about the mentality of deranged terrorists, but about the judgment of our arts directors. The New York Met has squandered humanity’s greatest treasure — our moral compass, our sense of right and wrong, and, most sadly, our reverence for music as a noble expression of the human spirit. We might be able some day to forgive the Met for de-criminalizing brutal minds, but we will never forgive them for poisoning our music — for turning our best violins and our iconic concert halls into mega-phones for excusing evil.
Slipped Disc supports the Met’s right to stage this production. The opera exists and has been staged in other countries. To perform it will provoke public debate on important issues. To suppress it would amount to a suppression of free speech.
The Yiddish singer Myriam Fuks is a unique voice on the Brussels music scene, an authentic interpreter of a vanishing legacy in a voice that begins at her boots and gets lower.
Myriam has made recordings before, mostly on the Avanticlassic label, with her former protégé, the violinist Roby Lakatos.
But for this landmark album she has assembled a dazzling array of classical headliners – Kissin, Maisky, Margulis and more.
And on the final track: Martha Argerich. As you’ve never heard her before. Martha, in a Yiddish song.
Check out my Album of the Week on sinfinimusic.com.
We hear that the winner of the cello section, Eun Sun Hong was a student of the president of the jury, Lluis Claret.
The South Korean defeated two Americans, Sarah Rommel and Tony Rymmer, in the final round.
She may be good, but this collusion must stop. Competitions have got to come clean.
UPDATE: Claret has just messaged his student on Facebook: That was great playing!! So proud of you!!
Further details are emerging of the tragic death of Mary Whitaker, a popular violinist with orchestras across New York state.
Police are describing it as a bungled robbery, discounting lurid reports in tabloid newspapers of a sadistic attack. One of the suspects who is being held without bail served nine years in jail for a similar killing in 1991.
Knowing what happened won’t bring Mary back, but it helps to have verified facts in the public domain, erasing the false Daily Mail reports and political agendas that have swirled around this tragedy.
Read a responsible piece of local reporting here.
Here we go again.
The results are in from St Petersburg.
1st Prize -Lubov Stekolschikova.
2nd- Olga Artugina jointly with Olga Yakushina. 3 Price -Ayako Tanabe.
The first prize winner is a pupil of Mikhail Gantvarg, Rector of the St Petersburg State Consrvatoire, head of its Violin and viola department and chair of the Auer jury.
The second and third are pupils of professors Kravchenko and Ivanov, jury members from Moscow.
pictured: Leopold Auer, incorruptible, with student
Финалисты I Международного конкурса скрипачей имени Ауэра ПОБЕДИТЕЛИ I МЕЖДУНАРОДНОГО КОНКУРСА СКРИПАЧЕЙ ИМЕНИ ЛЕОПОЛЬДА АУЭРА 1 ПРЕМИЯ Любовь Стекольщикова (Россия, Санкт-Петербург) 2 ПРЕМИЯ Ольга Артюгина (Россия, Санкт-Петербург) 2 ПРЕМИЯ Ольга Якушина (Россия, Москва) 3 ПРЕМИЯ Аяко Танабэ (Япония, Сайтама) ДИПЛОМ Семен Климашевский (Россия, Санкт-Петербург) Читать далее Состоялось открытие конкурса скрипачей им. Леопольда Ауэра
In the wake of the Indianapolis fiasco, the St Petersburg result confirms the totally compromised status of most major competitions.
After a season when the company teetered on the brink of shutdown, the music director has given up.
Sovrintendente Carlo Fuortes communicates with great regret that the Maestro Riccardo Muti has decided to give up the leadership of the two operas Aida and The Marriage of Figaro in the next season of the Teatro dell ‘ Opera. Maestro Muti attributes this painful decision in his letter to a “persistence of the problems that have emerged during the last few days.”
Italian source here.
JinJoo Cho of South Korea is the winner of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis.
She was one of six finalists, all women, five from South Korea, four of whom were students of members of the jury.
One judge, Miriam Fried, stood down for the final (or was asked to stand down), after half the contestants turned out to be her students.
The winner is a student of the jury president, Jaime Laredo.
If ever there was a time to reform the competition industry, now is it.
- Jinjoo Cho, 26, South Korea (Gold Medal, $30,000)
- Tessa Lark, 25, United States (Silver Medal, $15,000)
- Ji Young Lim, 19, South Korea (Bronze Medal, $10,000)
- Dami Kim, 25, South Korea (Fourth Laureate, $7,000)
- Yoo Jin Jang, 23, South Korea (Fifth Laureate, $6,000)
- Ji Yoon Lee, 22, South Korea (Sixth Laureate, $5,000)
The Brussels Philharmonic has announced the death of its long-standing principal horn, André Van Driessche. He was Belgium’s most influential horn teacher and can be heard on many recordings.
Increasingly creepy, underhand and paranoid, Arts Council England (ACE) is inserting a new clause into its National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) contracts for 2015-18, warning that applicants may lose their grants if they speak or act in a way that has a ‘detrimental effect… on its [ACE’s] reputation as a distributor of public money or as a Government sponsored body.’
Happily, despite the Arts Council’s best efforts, England remains a democracy and arts leaders continue freely to leak their concerns to sites like ArtsPro and Slipped Disc. We’ll keep telling you what’s really going on.
Meantime, word is that chief executive Alan Davey’s desperate bid to grab the BBC Radio 3 vacancy may signify some deeper misunderstanding with his heat-seeking chairman, Peter Bazalgette, whose first executive act was to slash the grant of English National Opera, the company on whose back he rose to the ACE chair. Deeply creepy.
The ACE’s official line on gagging: “Regarding any actions that the Arts Council might wish to take to manage a reputational risk – we fully support artistic freedom of expression and would certainly not consider that using public funds for a play critical of the Arts Council would lead to any breach of our Funding Agreement, but an organisation undertaking any activity which was in breach of any legislation would of course be an entirely different matter.”
They pay people to write such things. They pay them with your tax money.
The suspension of the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra may be an inevitable consequence of the parent organisation’s war on its musicians, but it is hitting students and parents hard.
Paul Murphy, a viola player and spokesman for the musicians, said: ‘We relish and take equally serious our roles as teachers, mentors, and coaches to our young musicians, and we are heartbroken that we are unable to work with them as a direct result of the WAC/ASO’s refusal to extend negotiations and subsequently locking us out.’
This is 16 year-old Rachel, who was desperate to learn and play Shostakovich 4th symphony. More here.
Marian Kouba, who sang 60 roles in Pozan and Warsaw and guest-lead in Berlin and on US tours, has died at a formidable age.
He was famed at home for Radames, Pinkerton and the male lead in Moniuszko’s Halka.
We have also been informed of the death in a New York hospital of the US tenor, Gene Bullard.
A sheriff’s court in Hamilton has found that Graeme McNaught did act in a threatening and abusive manner towards his former partner, the author Janice Galloway. McNaught, 54, had threatened to expose naked pictures of his ex-partner, taken while she was pregnant with their son.
The sheriff declared that he was satisfied five charges had been proven against McNaught after the trial was suspended over fears for the defendant’s mental health. He was found unfit to be given a criminal conviction and will face the court again in a month’s time.
McNaught, a concert pianist, is a lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Read full court report here.
