The art of treating dying patients is being lost in an era of factory hospitals. The brain surgeon Henry Marsh discusses the doctor’s dilemma with pain-filled perception in his extraordinary book, Do No Harm.

At a lower, entry level,  Carwyn Hooper discusses how he utilises music and poetry to engage future doctors in the moral dimensions of life and death.

Read here.

The big composer anniversaries of 2015 will be Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius, both born in 1865. Nielsen, I write in the new Standpoint, flickers in the shadow of Sibelius. Comparison is inherently unfair since the Finn enjoyed much greater success than the Dane.

However….

That said — and I’m about to outrage five million Finns — Nielsen is, as a man and a composer, more interesting than Sibelius. He is more authentic, more expressive, easier to approach and appreciate.

Read the full essay here.

This just in from our London neighbour, the wonderful accordion virtuoso Ksenija Sidorova:

Dear audience in Erfurt! Thanks for being understanding and sorry for wearing glasses tonight. I usually never do that, so I feel like dropping a little note…

If you heard sirens of ambulance today it was me being driven to the hospital where moments before the show I got treatment from a massive allergy which resulted in my eyes being almost completely closed.

Luckily the wondeful Katie Melua had a pair of shades and saved me for tonight! (She is so super lovely, you’ve no idea!!)

Thanks again for the warm applause! Off i go to put ice patches in hope to get rid of it asap.

Press release just in:

PETER KONWITSCHNY to direct Die Eroberung von Mexico, replacing LUC BONDY

(December 18, 2014, SF) The Salzburg Festival regrets to announce that Luc Bondy finds himself unable to direct the production of Wolfgang Rihm’s Die Eroberung von Mexico for reasons of scheduling as well as personal ones. With him, his team (Johannes Schütz, set design, and Moidele Bickel, costumes) has also resigned from this task.

At the same time, we are happy to announce that we have been able to convince Peter Konwitschny to take on this production as director. With Die Eroberung von Mexico, this great artist also makes his Salzburg Festival debut.

The Festival remains confident that the world premiere of the opera Fin de partie by György Kurtág, originally planned for 2015, will be directed by Luc Bondy and staged by his team in 2016 as previously envisioned.

Wolfgang Rihm, Die Eroberung von Mexico
Musical theatre based on texts by Antonin Artaud, libretto by Wolfgang Rihm
Music Director: Ingo Metzmacher
Stage Director: Peter Konwitschny
Soloists: Angela Denoke, Bo Skovhus et al.
ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna
Premiere of the new production: July 26, 2015, 8:00 pm, Felsenreitschule
Additional performances on July 29 and August 1, 4 and 10

The annual Welcome Yule concerts, a big-budget production by the Chicago Symphony and Chorus, are to end this year.

Cost too much, apparently. Read here.

They don’t realise how much of the culture will change when a man from the commercial sector takes the helm of our nanny state in miniature.

Click here for a commentary I have written for the Spectator.

Henley is different from any Arts Council boss I have known over four decades. He was born in Tunbridge Wells, studied at the University of Hull and cut his radio teeth in the deadlands of Kent. He has no truck with metropolitan elites or on-message mantras. He will apply a sound business sense to the ACE structure and a shrewd eye for cost/benefit ratios to the priorities for subsidy.

Running through the files of musicians we have lost this year, we fell to wondering which giants from the past would we bring back from the other side, if such encounters were permitted.

Would it be…

Or

Perhaps

Or (our choice)?

Your call?

…. and more

Lilian Fayer’s father had a photo studio opposite the Vienna State Opera. She began taking portraits of singers in 1942 and stopped only for the couple of years when performances ceased towards the end of the war.

Lilian married the Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster Walter Barylli and had the run of the house. Herbert von Karajan, ever aware of his image, was a particular admirer of her work.

The Fayer Archive consists of some 30,000 photographs, taken at Vienna and at the Salzburg festival.

Long Yu, music director of the China Philharmonic and the Shanghai and Guangzhou symphony orchestras, was awarded the Legion of Honour today by Emmanuel Lenain, Consul General of France in Shanghai. Long Yu has forged close relations with the Orchestre de Paris.

The company may have revived after its last manager, Ian Campbell, declared it dead, but troubles persist.

Karen Keltner, appointed resident conductor Campbell in 1983, is leaving the job. A company lynchpin, she has conducted more than 150 performances of 40 operas over 30 years.

This has the makings of a diplomatic incident in Islamist Turkey.

Charles F. Hunter, US Consul General in Istanbul, has announced he will marry Turkish musician Ramadan Çaysever in a US civil ceremony later this month. Turkish media are awaiting an official response.