The Boston Symphony is inviting the city to spend a spring Sunday with the new music director – free of charge, first come, first in. Cool idea.

press release:

Symphony Hall will open its doors for a free day of musical activities for the community on Sunday, April 12, from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., in celebration of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s new music director, Andris Nelsons. In his first public appearances since taking on the role of BSO music director this past September, Mr. Nelsons will lead a performance featuring the B[Symphony Hall (photo by Stu Rosner)]oston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus and spend some time interacting with visitors and taking audience questions from the stage. The Symphony Hall Open House will also provide visitors with an opportunity to explore historic Symphony Hall and enjoy fun family activities and a wide variety of performances by the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, alumni of the Tanglewood Music Center, and student ensembles from Berklee College of Music, Boston Conservatory, and New England Conservatory. Emmy Award-winning arts and entertainment critic Joyce Kulhawik (JoycesChoices.com) will host the event as the Open House master of ceremonies.

[Andris Nelsons (photo by Marco Borggreve)]

In what is sure to be the center point of the day, BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons will lead the orchestra at 2 p.m. in a program including the magnificent Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the third and fourth movements from Haydn’s Symphony No. 90, and the Overture to Bernstein’sCandide. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus will join Mr. Nelsons and the BSO for performances of Verdi’s “Va, pensiero” from Nabu[Tanglewood Festival Chorus (photo by Stu Rosner)]ccoand Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds’ Lakes Awake at Dawn. Following the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus performance, Andris Nelsons will participate in an on-stage interview with BSO Managing Director Mark Volpe at 3 p.m.

[Federico Cortese (Stu Rosner)]The Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, led byFederico Cortese, and the New England Conservatory Brass and Percussion Ensemble, led by BSO principal horn James Sommerville and featuring soprano Meredith Hansen, will give performances on the Symphony Hall stage during the Open House. A string ensemble made up of alumni of the Tanglewood Music Center; a chamber ensemble from the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra; Mixcla, a Latin jazz ensemble from Berklee College of Music, and members of Boston Conservatory Theater Division will perform in Higginson Hall throughout the day.Project STEP will also host a master class, open for attendees to observe the student string players working with BSO cellist Owen Young. A full schedule of events is available below.

[Instrument Playground (photo by Stu Rosner)]Family-friendly activities taking place at Symphony Hall throughout the day will include an Instrument Playground, where children have a chance to try out a variety of musical instruments; craft activities; a station for children to gettemporary tattoos; a composer scavenger hunt throughout the hall; and tours of the Boston Symphony’s new Archives facilities.

The board of La Scala has confirmed a new 5-year contract for sovrintendente Alexander Pereira, starting February 2016. He will be paid up to 240,000 Euros per annum, which is said to be the current legal maximum for the head of an Italian opera house.

It is about one-seventh of Peter Gelb’s package at the Met, one-quarter of what they paid his predecessor Stéphane Lissner, or equivalent to what a top conductor can earn in eight nights at La Scala.

pereira girl

James B. Stewart, author of a generally supportive article on Peter Gelb in the New Yorker, adds some edge to his investigation in an interview on NPR. He observes that the Met is presently selling 70 percent of its seats, as against 90 percent before Gelb, and that the audience is just getting plain… older.

Listen here.

CarmenScalpSign1

A plaque commemorating Joseph Haydn’s residency in London – yes, those 12 London symphonies – was unveiled by Sir Neville Marriner at 18 Great Pulteney Street this morning.

video and photo: Frances Wilson

Her report:

At midday on 24th March 2015, to the cheers of the assembled crowd, Sir Neville Marriner unveiled a commemorative blue plaque in central London to celebrate the work of the composer Joseph Haydn. Sir Neville was joined by Denis McCaldin, director of the Haydn Society of Great Britain, and the Austrian ambassador, who both spoke ahead of the unveiling.

The plaque is the first dedicated to Haydn in London. When he visited for the first time in 1791, the composer was at least as popular as his contemporary, Mozart. Though Mozart has three plaques in London, until today Haydn had none, despite fifty years of attempts to establish one.

Taking inspiration from the successful subscription concerts of his day, the Haydn Society of Great Britain ran a lively and successful crowdfunding campaign to commission and install the plaque.

The Haydn plaque can be seen at 18 Great Pulteney Street, Soho, London W1F 9NE.

Frances Wilson
AKA The Cross-Eyed Pianist
www.crosseyedpianist.com

Norman Scribner, founder of the Washington Choral Arts Society in 1965 and its conductor for 47 years, has died at 79. Read his achievements here.

bernstein_scribner

Peter Dobrin reports from Philadelphia the passing of Harvey D. Wedeen, 87, head of keyboard at Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance for almost five decades and teacher of dozens of fine professionals.

His star pupils include Marc-André Hamelin and Charles Abramovic.

Full obituary here.

harvey wedeen24z-a

Rosanna Purchia has been brought back as sovrintendente of San Carlo Opera, over the heated objections of the Mayor of Naples.

rosanna purchia

There is a Facebook page, demanding her dismissal.

Anybody know what she has done wrong?

UPDATE: Our ragazzo in the loggia reports:  ‘Nothing is wrong with Ms. Purchia, she is not the best intendant in the world, but in the end of the day she is not too bad, and she is kind of experienced… except that the Naples mayor De Magistris is against her, and wanted her out, calling for a new era of more ‘transparency…  Ms. Purchia had accepted an offer to be intendant at Teatro Bellini of Catania, but now she is turning Catania down and she wants to stay at San Carlo… The first three months of this year are counting as the start of “annus horribilis” for the way the decisions are taken about many top jobs in Italian opera houses.’

The picture we published yesterday of the great composer at (or shortly after) the funeral of Clara Schumann in May 1896 has provoked a plethora of information from scholars and afficionados alike.

First we can identify the gentlemen standing with Johannes Brahms in the picture (thanks, Eleanor Hope). They are: Heinz and Erich von Beckerath, Gustav Ophüls, Brahms, Bram Eldering, Alwin von Beckerath.

A fine copy of the original picture can be found in the Henryk Szeryng collection at the Library of Congress. A further set is located at the university music library in Buffalo, NY. Its rarity is well-attested.

brahms birdshit

In the above shot from the same set, Brahms appears to be cleaning his friend’s jacket of bird droppings. The matter is comprehensively clarified in an essay by Ilias Chrissochoidis of Stanford University, who writes as follows:

Brahms’ last visit to the Rheinland in May 1896 is well documented. The death of Clara Schumann, the great love of his life, threw him into a railway adventure in search of her final resting place in Bonn, where he arrived just in time to attend the funeral procession. Emotionally devastated, he then sought refuge at a private music festival at Hagerhof, Walther Weyermann’s estate at Bad Honnef. Brahms’ strong links to the Mennonite community in the area went back as far as 1880…

Obvious as is their historical value, the photographs remain practically unknown to the public and have been only vaguely recalled by Brahms experts….

In contrast to the image of a master that we have long been accustomed to, von Beckerath’s photos capture only Brahms the man and, even worse, his unimpressive stature. Indeed, Gustav Ophüls singled out the first one as evidence of Brahms’ height. He being 1.82 cm tall and both men standing on the same line,  he estimated his friend to be around 1.70 cm. Surrounded by people considerably taller (and leaner) than himself, Brahms’ image suffers and what remains clearly visible of his monumental head is the long white beard. Equally alienating is his apparently flirtatious posture next to hostess Emmie Weyermann only a few days after Frau Schumann’s funeral, an image clashing with existing reports of a mourning Brahms.

Brahms and Emmy Weyermann

You can download Professor Chrissochoidis’s full essay here.

h/t: Roberta Cooper

We have reported over several months the disintegration of music structures at Radio France, leading to the present state of chaos where the head of music is believed to have been fired and an orchestra was obliged to play before an empty hall. Several top administrators have gone, one fleeing as far as Chicago.

An accurate summary of recent events appears today in Le Point under the headline quoted above. Le Point predicts a forced merger between the Orchestre Nationale de France (md: Daniele Gatti) and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France (md: Myung Whun Chung). Together, the two orchestras employ 250 musicians. This looks like a disaster movie with no-one in the director’s seat.

Is Paris burning?

radio france fire2

Large claims keep getting made for past composers who never fulfilled their early promise. Perhaps that’s all it was – early promise that lacked development potential, or an individual who lacked the edge of individuality.

My album of the week on sinfinimusic.com may have been one such case (though his current performers play with passionate conviction). Click here to read.

tansman stravinsky

Paul Baxter (Pal Steaphan Baxter) owns and operates a beautiful niche label in Scotland. Delphian Records, which regularly appears on my review list, rejoices in its difference. Paul has now decided to buck industry trends and take his recordings off streaming devices such as Spotify, and freeviews such as Youtube.

Paul explains why, exclusively on Slipped Disc:

purcell's revenge

A few months ago Delphian’s releases mysteriously started to appear on a very well-known video streaming site, available to stream at no cost and accompanied by arbitrary visuals – most commonly representations of the title’s cover image, or atmospheric images of the musicians.

I wasn’t knowingly contacted for permission in advance of this rollout. Artists began to contact me in panic – were their discs being ripped and hosted on the net, free for all, illegally? “How can I encourage listeners of my music to buy from iTunes, when they can listen for free?” one artist asked me. “Surely this is a con?” asked another. “People can listen without even paying a subscription?” chimed a younger artist. Yes, and No.

Yes, our catalogue is – for the moment – available to be heard, limitlessly, and no, there’s not even a subscription involved. This new availability of our catalogue was ‘progress’ that had been anticipated in our agreement with our aggregator (the industry’s term for the broker organisations that license content to individual sites). Some of my colleague label owners immediately opted out of this rollout, and took down all their content. Others regard it as good publicity, and even some artists want their content to be available as widely as possible with no view to remunerating themselves for their creative output. I decided to run with it for a couple of months, to see for myself what the results would be.

This morning I had a chance to go through the sales information. On the basis of many tens of thousands of streams of individual tracks, my income from ad based streaming services has been 0.002 of a cent per stream. Some listeners argue that they go on to service providers such as iTunes to buy something they’ve sampled on streaming services – I can discern no obvious uplift in Delphian’s paid download income. On this basis, I have asked my aggregator with immediate effect to remove my catalogue from all ad based streaming sites.

The way we consume music is changing, and it’s changing ferociously fast, but a model that pays 0.002 cent per stream can’t possibly be progress. The relationship between artists and labels can be an incredibly fruitful and symbiotic one. The prevailing notion of the commercial value of music amongst young people threatens that, and it threatens everything else. I want to support my artists’ future endeavours. I have a team of first rate creative and administrative individuals to pay as well as a program of print advertising and PR to fund. I cannot do that if the value of listening to one of my tracks is perceived to be 0.002 of a cent. Just because something’s new, doesn’t mean it’s better; this needs to stop, and it needs to stop now.

PSB

(Not for the squeamish.)

A Hong Kong musician, Henry Chau Hoi-leung, killed, chopped, salted and microwaved his mother and father, all the while listening repeatedly for 30 days to Alexander Scriabin’s peculiar, phone-ring piano suite, Vers la Flamme.

Chau, 31, was handed a life sentence. The judge said: ‘You fail in everything but the piano.’

Henry_Chau_3242052b

Let’s not blame Scriabin, right?

 

scriabin