This comes to you from the heat-seeking Taiwan/Australian violinist, Ray Chen.
Click here (it’s the second post down). Like, who takes a banana to rehearsal?
The Tennessee city that served as a launchpad for Elvis, Aretha Franklin and a host of rock legends is having trouble sustaining an orchestra on a population base of 1.3 million. The musicians have taken a 38% pay cut.
Music director Mei-Ann Chen has been told to look elsewhere next year.
We hear that the San José Mercury News has killed all classical music coverage as of next week, reassigning feature writer and reviewer Richard Scheinin to cover real estate.
San José has an excellent opera and chamber orchestra.
Do you know the way to San José?
South of the border, tequila time.
From an interview today in London wth Jessica Duchen:
Sellars: ‘You can’t sell out a season any more, in the concert hall, opera house or theatre, because the discretionary money that the middle class used to have has been eliminated and middle-class people are struggling.
‘I think it’s a very specific situation that only has to make us bolder – because, guess what, our survival is at stake. So the arts need to stand for something, at a time when we all need to stand for something; and the arts should be in the lead, not in the back.’
A website, actually.
It’s called icareifyoulisten.tv and it launched this morning from Texas.
Sample content below.
Reinhardt Elster, who retired as the Metropolitan Opera’s principal harpist in 1986, was back in rehearsal today, checking out the management.
Full story here.
As of this morning, 68,000 people had watched a set of three master-classes that Joyce DiDonato gave this week at Carnegie Hall. At her insistence, they are staying online for a year. It’s not a performance, she says: it’s a process.
Watch here. Set aside some time. You are likely to get hooked.
The holy warrior of modernism, seriously ill, was today awarded in absentia the Bach Prize of the city of Hamburg. It’s worth 10,000 Euros. He needs it like we need two breakfasts.
Lucina Amara, a soprano who sang 56 solo roles at the Met over 41 consecutive years, will be 90 on Sunday. Abroad, she appeared at Vienna, Glyndebourne and the Edinburgh Festival. At 51, she successfully sued the Met for age discrimination. She’s not done yet.
Regina Han, appointed only last month as general director of Korea National Opera, has resigned under pressure of a hostile media campaign.
A coalition of musical organisations claimed she lacked experience for the job. Regina, 44, had an international career as a singer in Europe and Japan before turning to scholarship and administration.
She said: My family was hurt by the way I was portrayed in the media without being given any opportunity to test my qualifications through the job.’
It appears she suffered the same kind of media lynch mob that was directed earlier at Myung Whun Chung, music director of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.
Memo to those considering a music admin career in Korea: Don’t.
Wonderful clip from Karl Ritter’s Stukas (1941) just posted on www.wagneropera.net. A sick Luftwaffe pilot is cured of his depression by listening to Götterdämmerung at Bayreuth. The music revives him to climb back into the cockpit and bomb civilians in England.
You see where all this Wagner leads?