5Dec

The weekend read: Why do we want genius to be mad?

Dr Judith Schlesinger asks: What useful purpose does it serve to insist that our greatest creative minds must be somehow damaged and disturbed, particularly when there is no real evidence for it? Read the full article here.

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5Dec

Cameron Carpenter at the comedy store (and not in a nice way)

They wouldn’t have done this to Albert Schweizer. Would they?

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5Dec

Petition raised for 55 orch players being kicked out of Switzerland

We’ve reported the immigration crackdown in Basle. More than 50 foreign musicians are going to be put on a train out of the country. If enough people sign this petition – here – we might prevent that. Andreas Scholl, Emma Kirkby and Evelyn Tubb are among the foreign signatories. (The form is in German. You need […]

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5Dec

Shostakovich at a soccer match

Not a Chelski supporter. Taken in the 1940s. h/t DSCH Shostakovich Journal Name five composers who were fanatical soccer fans. Go on.

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5Dec

Russian piano prizewinner dies

The Central Music School of the Moscow Conservatory has announced the death of Professor Alexei Nasedkin. He was 72. A Neuhaus student, Nasedkin came sixth at the second Tchaikovsky competition in 1962 and won third place at the 1966 Leeds Competition, behind Rafael Orozco (1st) and Viktoria Postnikova and Semyon Kruchin (joint 2nd). He was […]

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5Dec

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on a Caribbean steel band – unimaginably beautiful

h/t: Mark Stephenson and Zoe Martlew for the discovery We need to hear more from Dr Dawn Batson

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5Dec

Vanessa-Mae: I never fiddled the results

The last-placed Olympic violinist is appealing against her four-year ban from competitive skiing. She had nothing to do, she claims, with fixing the results of qualifying rounds.  

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5Dec

Violin peace child is making her mark on Ferguson

    Seven year-old Leah Flynn’s people inform us that her appearance on Slipped Disc earlier this week led to an invitation to Chicago, to play on Fox News. Her message has drawn tremendous response from the troubled community in Ferguson.

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5Dec

Marin Alsop teaches after-school classes

You’ll never see this sort of film on network US network television any more. It comes from Al-Jazeera America and it shed the spotlight on the conductor’s efforts to teach ‘all 83,000 children in Baltimore public schools’, not to mention conducting students at Peabody and a new program for aspiring women conductors. Watch. More here.

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5Dec

Low rumblings about Domingo’s baritone

John Allison, in the December issue of Opera magazine (quoted in Der Neue Merker): Our reviewer of Covent Garden’s I Due Foscari, is measured when writing about Placido Domingo, but he does make it clear that the baritone’s Francesco Foscari was a disappointment. In the Sunday Times, Hugh Canning was more direct. Observing that this […]

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5Dec

Not sure about the pose, darling

This is the American mezzo, Elizabeth DeShong, at a photoshoot for her Vienna Opera debut in Cenerentola. She’s either massaging an injured shoulder or adjusting some faulty tailoring. Stanislavsky always said: stand up straight. photo (c) Dario Acosta

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