This is Karen Kamensek last night with the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine in Bill Holcomb’s arrangement of Louis Prima’s Sing Sing Sing.

Go, Karen!

 

karen kamensek

(Click ‘Post’ if video fails to pop out.)

Hugues Le Bars, a French composer who wrote nine ballets for the Belgian choreographer Maurice Béjart, has passed away after a long illness. He also wrote soundtracks for nine films. Many of his scores include voice recordings of famous figures, among them André Malraux, Patrice Chéreau and Béjart himself.

 

Hugues Le Bars

We’re getting reports that the musicians have called a meeting Friday to discuss a settlement. Word from the employers’ side is that progress was made yesterday at a meeting with a new federal mediator.

This ten-week lockout needs to end. Nobody’s going to win. There are only losers in Atlanta.

atlanta

His Ring cycle is playing to empty spaces in Birmingham, despite massive discounting on tickets.

His summer tour with the World Orchestra for Peace turned into a one-stop after a failure to attract funding.

His tenure with the London Symphony Orchestra is trickling out on a tide of indifference.

His moral leadership has evaporated.

Valery Gergiev has taken a severe reputation hit this past year, and on two fronts. His unqualified support for Vladimir Putin’s Crimea invasion has deterred sections of the western public, while his fly-by-night, barely-rehearsed performances have left others feeling cheated and a little bored. The gentle Times critic, Hilary Finch, reports today that he’s conducting the Ring ‘on auto-pilot’.

All of this is bad news for Brand Gergiev. If the Mariinsky is no longer a box-office draw, his tour plans will be confined to Russia and the Far East. If oligarchs won’t fund him, who will? Munich, his next orchestra, will keep a stringent eye on his close relations with the Putin regime.

The most gifted conductor of his generation, and its most interesting personality, is heading for tailspin.

What Gergiev needs right now is fresh strategy. He’s a shrewd businessman. He knows who to consult when his meat concession in Russia fails to sell enough turkeys for Christmas. He knows what to do when a soloist has peaked and requires a different career.

Gergiev is at a crossroads. Between business meetings and balance sheets, he should be urgently canvassing options. He needs, for once in his life, to obtain an objective assessment of his worsening musical situation. He needs, for once, to listen.

gergiev worry

Isn’t it lovely?

Stevie Wonder, 64, has gone 10 years without an album.

All his life, he walked the line  between blues and smooch in his orchestral accompaniments, finding cross-generational appeal in a distinctive sound. Now, he’s gone blue-rinse and booked a symphony orchestra. He’s also wooing Andrea Bocelli as a cake-topper to his career.

Not sure who’s the loser here. It might be all of us.

Stevie Wonder Honored With ASCAP American Troubadour Award

Michael Fremer reports the death of Harry Pearson, founder of The Absolute Sound magazine, who invented the term ‘high-end audio’. He was 77.

Pearson … venerated the RCA “Living Stereo” and Mercury “Living Presence” records. (He)… elevated the status of certain recording studios and venues like Kingsway Hall as well as legendary recording engineers like Kenneth Wilkinson, Robert Fine and Lewis Layton and producers like Jack Pfeiffer and Wilma Cozart Fine.

As Wilma Cozart-Fine’s son Tom related to me in an email upon learning of HP’s passing: “I can tell you for a fact that Harry’s articles and commentaries about Mercury Living Presence were read by and had influence on decision makers at Polygram, and the same was true at RCA/BMG. At Polygram, the methods employed to make the Mercury CDs, and their success in the marketplace, were widely adopted throughout the company. Competitors at Sony and BMG started digging in the vaults to find real-deal master tapes and started caring about analog playback, simple signal chains and state of the art analog-to-digital conversion, raising the bar on quality for all classical CDs. I’m not saying it was just Harry, but Harry’s voice was important.”

Full eulogy here.

harry pearson

For about 48 hours earlier this year, the music world was amused by the sight of Khatia Buniatishvili at a public entertainment in her home country, Georgia. All good clean fun, but the vid got swiftly taken down by spoilsports in the  music biz.

News is, it’s back. Censorship never works.

khatia2

The Beethoven Orchestra in Bonn has removed from its site the name and picture of its second principal cello, who has been arrested for questioning about the murder of his wife, the pianist Kate de Marcken.

The cellist, a Russian, may under German sub judice law be referred to only as Sergey K. He is 54 and his picture has been published in local media.

sergey k

 

 

The orchestra has also removed from its website the dates that Kate was expected to perform in the coming season. Her murder has left the musical community of Bonn in a state of shock. Kate was an outgoing person with an extended group of friends and family in Belgium and the US. They are trying to discover more about the circumstances of her death and have requested that comments on this site be confined to personal memories of her. Kate leaves a 12 year-old son.

A wonderful reminiscence of Arnold Schoenberg in Boston by concertmaster Richard Burgin has been sent our way.

Read. Ruminate. (h/t: Professor Robert Eshbach).

Arnold Schoenberg conducting

 

 

It is well known of course that Schoenberg had to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power. In fact, he was lucky to have been able to escape. And everybody I knew in the musical world in the United States felt an obligation to invite him to conduct their orchestra, as did Koussevitzky. That was the least they felt they could do because they themselves did not do anything to perform his work, or very little, except for “Transfigured Night.” Koussevitzky was aware that Schoenberg was a personality, that he had done something important in music. Perhaps we did not quite understand what his innovation was but we felt instinctively that something had happened. So Schoenberg was invited to come and conduct the BSO. I was somewhat familiar with Schoenberg though at that time I will admit he was an enigma. Still, I felt that he was also something that only happens once in a lifetime.

I myself had already conducted his Pierrot Lunaire.[3] That was in 1928 in Boston. There was an organization of rather snobbish members of the Boston elite who supported private performances of interesting, worthwhile new works and chamber music. And I talked them into sponsoring a concert for Pierrot Lunaire. I also convinced them it was a piece that was not suitable for playing in a room and it would also be nice to give a wider audience of listeners a chance to hear it. They agreed, and supported the concert financially. We rehearsed that every day for three weeks. But that was several years before Schoenberg came to conduct the BSO.

When Schoenberg came, from the very first rehearsal, there was something about his personality, at least to me, that put one in awe of him. I looked upon him as if he were a person who had come from another world. And when he conducted, he conducted not like a professional conductor but like a composer conducts his own work. Every remark he made was so to the point and nothing was unnecessary, no stories, no affectations, nothing but purely technical remarks about the music. However, his selection of works for his program was a disappointment to me—they were: an arrangement of a Bach piece for organ,Verklärte Nacht, and Opus 5, Pelleas und Melisande. Still the old type of music but when he did that, his remarks were very interesting. I had no opportunity to speak to him during the rehearsals, I just watched him, took in everything he said. Everything went pretty well, we had our regular four rehearsals and then came the concert.

That first of his concerts took place in Cambridge, in Sanders Theater. We were already warming up when I was told Schoenberg would like to speak with me. I thought that he probably wanted to make some last-minute comments for me to tell my colleagues, to remind them of certain things. I took my violin and went downstairs to the conductor’s room. And I started to speak—the conversation was in German—“Is there something you would like me to say?” “No, no,” he cut me off, “It has nothing to do with today’s program at all. I just heard that you did my Pierrot Lunaire some time ago.” “Yes, I did,” I replied. “Well, did you find it a difficult piece to put together?” “Yes,” I said, “as you know, it is a difficult piece. And it was new to us.” “Well, how many rehearsals did you have?” “We had seventeen with the players alone and then we had five more with the singer—we got her from New York.” “Well,” he said, “that is very nice to hear. But I hope you did not perform that in Symphony Hall?” “No, no, we didn’t.” “Where did you perform it?” he asked, and I replied, “In the hall of the New England Conservatory, Jordan Hall.” “And how large a hall is that?” he asked. I said, “It has a capacity of 1200 seats.” “Oh,” he sounded disappointed, “that was much too big a hall.” And then I made a repartee which I consider to be one of the most stupid of the century, so to speak, probably because I was in such awe of him. I said, “Maestro, es war nur halb voll, it was only half full!” Which in fact was the case.

It was the most idiotic thing to say but he was such a wonderful person, he simply ignored my gaffe and fell in with my unintentional witticism, saying, “Thank goodness!” That immediately put me at ease. So I said, “Maestro, why are you so happy that the hall was only half full?” He then became quite serious: “I’ll tell you, and I’m speaking from my own experience. You know, I understand that Boston is considered one of the really musical cities in this country and I have no doubt it is so. But I do doubt that you could find more than 600 people in this city who would enjoy and be interested in listening to a work like Pierrot Lunaire. I say that from my own experience. Therefore, if you had more than that, or if you had a full house, you would have 600 people who would hate this piece. And let me tell you, there’s nothing more terrible than to sit next to a person who hates the piece that you’re interested in. I myself have been present at concerts of my work where people next to me hated my music, and we almost got into a fight!” Which was actually true.

I realized quickly that what he was really trying to say was that Pierrot Lunaire is a chamber piece and is not ideally suited to a large hall. But his attempt to put me at my ease with his wonderful wit and self-irony was so typical of him. Then, I had the courage to say, “You know, Maestro, allow me to tell you that I was a little bit disappointed that you didn’t select for your program a more recent composition than ones you wrote at the time you wrote Verklärte Nacht.” And he said, “Well, I don’t see why I should carry on my shoulders the responsibility of atoning for all the sins conductors have committed by not playing my music. Just because you people don’t play my recent works, why should I be the one to bore my audience with them?” Schoenberg was really a unique person.

The diva, 81, has done a deal with the Spanish taxman to settle a tax evasion charge. It’s costing her half a million Euros in fines alone, but she gets to sleep in her own bed. Full report here. Apparently, they’re going after Rafa Nadal next.

Montserrat-Caballe-soprano

The Mariinsky Opera has announced the death of Victor Chernomortsev, one of its leading baritones.

Chernomorcev_viktor

Born in Krasnodar, he joined the Kuibyshev Opera in 1974 and was headhunted by the Vienna State Opera in 1992. Two years later he joined Gergiev’s ensemble, making his debut as Scarpia in Tosca. He was a formidable Alberich in Wagner’s Ring and a first-choice Verdi Falstaff.

It’s Moscow’s new Scriabin pop-up, an initiative of the city’s culture department.

scriabin

Portrait of the composer Alexander Skryabin has appeared on House on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street in the framework of the project “heritage” of the Department of culture of Moscow.