A phone went off in Vienna’s Musikvereinsaal during the quiet opening passage of the first Shostakovich violin concerto.

No-one moved, least of all its owner.

So the Philadelphia critic David Patrick Stearns (he was there with his home orchestra) reached over and confiscated the ringing thing.

Could he have been arrested for it?

Here‘s what happened.

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In the aftermath of what is known locally as the Berliner Failharmoniker (tweet (c) Johannes Kreidler), Der Tagespiegel points out today that the city is actually in the market for no fewer than three chief conductors.

The Philharmonic appears to be no closer to making up its collective mind about Simon Rattle’s successor, perhaps because it refuses to address exactly what it expects from a music director. I discuss the situation in an essay for the new issue of Standpoint magazine here.

The other vacancies are more straightforward. The Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester needs to replace the over-busy Tugan Sokhiev (music director at the Bolshoi and Toulouse) and the radio orchestra is losing the veteran Marek Janowski.

Both of those positions are in the gift of the organisations’ managements. The DSO has set up a search committee composed of three musicians and three members of the management. The radio orchestra is rather more top-down in its search. These two appointments may well be made before the Berlin Phil finally gets over its anarchic spasm.

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Many musicians are passionate about football. Some are quite good players. Two have drifted dangerously close to that international cesspit of iniquity known as Fifa.

domingo football

Placido Domingo has a long-standing involvement with Fifa and its retiring president Sepp Blatter. He has boasted of attending  almost every World Cup since 1970 – you only do that if you are on an elite Fifa list. In June 2011 he was invited by Blatter, after a corruption scandal, to join a clean-up committee. The following month Domingo declared: ‘I would love to be more involved in FIFA.’

 

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Valery Gergiev was in the Russian group that leaped to its feet when Blatter awarded their country the 2018 World Cup. Before that, he appears to have cultivated a friendship with the Fifa bribetaker-turned-whistleblower Chuck Blazer, who pictures them together at dinner on his website. Blazer later congratulated Gergiev on being a flag-carrier at the Sochi Olympics.

The gregarious Blazer claims many friends, Nelson Mandela among them. There is no reason to suspect that Gergiev did anything wrong by having dinner with such a friendly fellow, and Domingo was surely given his World Cup final tickets with no strings attached. The musicians had no reason to be aware of the depths of Fifa’s corruption.

However, a man is known by his friends. Neither Domingo nor Gergiev will be bragging much today of their privileged access to the Fifa elite.

All that is wrong with modern stardom in one short answer.

Once upon a time singers created an interpretation by examining the score for insights and direction, studying with a teacher and consulting senior colleagues.

Now they buy an armful of records and imitate the effects they like best.

Netrebko, as it happens, works hard at her art and attends many performances. She is not, by nature, a copycat. Her glibness in this stand-up interview has let her down.

But the impression she leaves is by no means false. Too many singers and instrumental soloists copy and paste their stage performances from recorded archives. Listening to records is what they should do only after creating a role.

anna netrebko bed

Malcolm Layfield, former violin teacher at Chethams School and head of strings at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) has testified at his rape trial at Manchester Crown Court.

He admitted having relationships in the 1980s with students, one as young as 17, and agreed they were highly inappropriate. Asked why, he said: ‘Because the student-teacher relationship should not cross that area, and looking back I feel remorseful and very regretful about them.’

Earlier, the pianist Martin Roscoe, former head of keyboards at the Royal Northern College of Music, testified for the prosecution. Read Helen Pidd’s courtroom report here.

malcolm layfield

The latest Nielsen Soundscan data are as depressing as ever, with the top classical record clearing just 300 US sales in the past week and the next just 270. For the record, they are Andrea Bocelli and Andre Rieu. More gloom.

But coming up behind, in third and fourth place, are the Detroit Symphony’s self-issued Tchaikovsky cycle and – a new face in the charts – the DG harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani with Time Present and Time Past.

That’s promising, for all sorts of reasons.

mahan album

We are very sorry to report the death, from ovarian cancer, of the vastly popular Margaret Juntwait, presenter of the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday Afternoon Radio Broadcasts for the past decade.

Margaret sounded the same, whether on air or off. She was charming, personable, knowledgeable, unpretentious. A former opera singer, she knew her subject inside out and was unfailingly enthusiastic.

She will be very widely missed and hard to replace. Our sympathies to her family. First appreciation here.

margaret juntwait

Breaking months of media silence, Myung Whun Chung has told Korean journalists that he intends to file law suits against those who accused him of cheating on his expenses at the Seoul Philharmonic.

Yesterday, an auditor who investigated ten years of the conductor’s expenses cleared him of any wrongdoing. The charge was laid by supporters of a disaffected former manager of the orch.

chung

After his 2015 Edward W. Said London lecture at the Southbank Centre, Daniel Barenboim was asked whether he supported the BDS campaign to boycott and isolate the state of Israel. His reply, which you can watch on video (click here at 19:00), begins with outright support for a boycott, only to equivocate as he develops his position.

 

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Barenboim said: ‘I think the boycott movement BDS is absolutely correct, its perfectly right and necessary with one limitation, one criticism – that it refuses any contact with anything that has to do with Israel. In other words, there is not enough differentiation. I think there are enough people in Israel who think very different from the government. Artists and other people. Writers, certainly. Musicians, certainly. And by making a blind boycott, you deprive yourself of the possibility of making contact with people who disagree with you – a member of the boycott – as much as, equally about the policies of the government.

‘And let us not forget one thing: The Israelis and the Palestinians are blessed or cursed to live either together or side by side, but certainly not back-to-back. And therefore, a boycott that is completely generalised and has no feeling for nuances takes away the possibility of ever imagining a future that will be different from what it is now. It only encourages policies, as we have read in recent days from the foreign minister f Israel, where it is clear that the present government in Israel is not interested in a two-state solution, it is not interested in a one-state solution. It is interested in an exclusively Jewish solution for all the territories, and that is unacceptable.’

In response to a clarifying question, he added: ‘It is very short-term and not positive for any future for the Palestinians to boycott anything that has anything to do with Israel. Anything to do with government policies, yes.’

 

We reported some weeks back that a music director/accompanist had offered to resign from two choral groups in south-east England after being found guilty of soliciting a nine year-old boy at a swimming pool in Amersham.

The man, 63, was tried under a different name from the one he uses in the music world. (Do not mistake the man named in the trial for any other choral musician of that name.)

He has been placed onto the Sex Offenders’ Register and will be sentenced on June 29. We called one of the choral societies and received a ‘no comment’ response.

You can read the trial report here. Some may find the details distressing.

swimming boy

UPDATE: Robin Bowman, 63, has been jailed for 12 months. Reports here and here.

His name has been removed from the websites of the English Baroque Choir and Epsom Choral Society.

 

Public schools in the home of Coca-Cola and CNN have been ordered to stop teaching music from August. Music teachers have been sacked. Students in elementary schools will grow up without access to culture.

A petition has been launched to reverse the decision. Here‘s a clarification from the band-slashers.

A better idea: let’s all boycott Coca-Cola and CNN until they put some culture back into their home town.

No Coke without C-major.

 

atlanta youth

The increasingly politicised pianist has told a Russian broadcaster that she will play an open-air recital on June 22 in Donetsk, capital of the Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic in a former part of Ukraine. ‘I think that’s the best kind of service I can possibly do for the people of Donbass,’ she said. ‘They want to have peace.’

The date is significant: the 74th anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

You can hear her announcement in English here. It has been disseminated by the Russian Embassy in Canada.

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