This is the more advanced version.

Virtuosic stuff.

(You may prefer this version).

This is a not a new video, but it contains many helpful tips for those of us who rely on multi-tasking to get us through a busy weekend.

And here‘s how not to do it.

A bill placed before the US Congress will give producers and sound engineers a statutory right to earn royalties from digital downloads of recordings they make.

Artists are guaranteed 45 percent under current law. The aim is to set aside 2 percent for the studio team. Details here.

Tinnitracks, a new device from Hamburg company Sonormed, uses filtered audio therapy to treat ringing in the ears. It helps tinnitus sufferers retrain their brains by listening to music that filters out case-specific frequencies.

Sonormed’s MD, Jörg Land (centre), won a major prize this week at the Austin, Texas, South by Southwest technology festival.

Look carefully at the Abbey Road cover.

In the upper right-hand corner, between John and Ringo, you will see a man standing beside a police van.

Turns out he was a tourist from Florida, named Paul Cole.

Paul dined out on the coincidence for the next 45 years. ‘”I had a new sportcoat on, and I had just gotten new shell-rimmed glasses before I left,’ he’d say. He thought the Beatls were ‘a bunch of kooks’.

Paul Cole died this week in Pensacola, aged 96.

h/t: The Obit Patrol

Our chers amis at resmusica.com report that the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France played in an empty Paris Philharmonie on Friday night as a result of the various strikes called at the crisis-ridden broadcaster.

Radio France had cancelled the concert, but the musicians – and their conductor Myung Whun Chung – insisted on going ahead with the programme they had prepared.

Why the hall had to be empty is an unfathomable mystery of French industrial relations.

UPDATE: Entering  musical folklore as ‘Le Concert Interdit’ (the forbidden concert), the programme will be replayed tonight at the Musikverein in Vienna and on Tuesday in Cologne.

We are saddened to report the passing of Peter Katin, aged 84.

After a brilliant start and a flurry of recordings in the early stereo era, mostly on Decca, Katin suffered a dip in mid-career. In 1978 he migrated to Canada, returning to Britain in 1984 but finding himself even more out of touch.  ‘I picked up a copy of the Gramophone [magazine] and found naked ladies draped over the cellos,’ he lamented.

The vicissitudes of his career are documented in an excellent first obituary here.

Further to the stage accident suffered by Vladimir Ashkenazy on Thursday night, Derek Gleeson submits this evidence of some distress he suffered last year.

(c) Derek Gleeson/Slipped Disc; no reproduction without permission

Happily, says Derek, this was not during a concert. Derek is music director of the Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Barry Wordsworth has announced his retirement as music director from the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra, after 26 years. His will become conductor laureate.

Barry remains music director of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden.

By Sudic Bose, Managing Editor of the American Scholar:

Increasingly melancholy and reclusive in the last decade or so of his life, the composer only rarely ventured beyond his home overlooking the broad Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. Relations with his second wife, Emma, had long been strained, and he suffered almost constantly from hemorrhages and hemorrhoids, symptoms of the rectal cancer that had yet to be diagnosed. Always something of a penniless bohemian with wildly expensive tastes, he had been sinking even further into debt. He was also finding it difficult to compose—burdened not only by the weight of his past success but also by concerns of his place in a musical world upended by the emergence of Igor Stravinsky. Germany’s declaration of war on France in August 1914 brought greater hardships.

And then the offer of a summer home in 1915 yielded that phenomenal set of piano études. Read on here.

photo: Lebrecht Music&Arts

The world of music knows that Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, murdered his wife and her lover on the night of  16 October 1590. The murder was premeditated and very well-organised. Gesualdo was generally a cold fish. But in the act of murder he deliberately chopped his wife to pieces. Why would a man do something like that?

I Fagiolini, the vocal ensemble, called in a forensic psychiatrist to assist with their forthcoming Gesualdo project. Read her clinical assessment here.

We’ve just come across this summary by Graham Spicer of a survey by Classical Voice of the fees paid to top conductors, singers and instrumental soloists at the leading Italian opera houses.

The 30,000-Euro fee for international conductors is some way above the European norm.

The rest are pretty average.

When they remember to pay.

Read Graham here.