On a caravan holiday with friends in the northeast of England, James Hockey rose at 4.30 to watch the sun rise over the North Sea. He strayed too close to the edge of a cliff and plunged more than 15 metres, shattering a leg and an arm. He is being treated at the university hospital in Middlesborough, from where he tweeted ‘I fell off a cliff’.
James, educated at Birmingham Conservatoire, has performed with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He is scheduled to play in two BBC Proms this summer.
We wish him a full and swift recovery.
Alexander Harrild, 29, was arrested for drug trafficking in Santiago and is reported to have pleaded guilty. He faces a possible five-year sentence.
Alexander, a graduate of the National Youth Orchestra, plays in the Santiago Philharmonic.
His father, LSO principal tuba and ex-chairman Patrick Harrild, few out to Chile after his arrest and has since returned.
Anja Kampe has cancelled this summer’s appearances as Isolde after a reported row with Christian Thielemann.
She is to be replaced by Evelyn Herlitzius. Kampe will, however, sing Sieglinde in the Ring, conducted by Kirill Petrenko.
Bayreuth press statement:
The direction of the Bayreuther Festspiele notes with great regret that Anja Kampe returned the part of Isolde for this year´s new production of “Tristan und Isolde”. The termination of the contract was mutually agreed. The direction of the Bayreuth Festival is very happy to announce that Anja Kampe will none the less sing the part of Sieglinde under the musical direction of Kyrill Petrenko.
German media have identified Kampe as the companion of Kirill Petrenko.
The disaffection between Thielemann and Petrenko may lie behind these late changes.
Krzysztof Kaczka was on stage in Moscow, taking a deep breath before his next piece, when the pianist decided to rearrange the programme without telling him.
Watch the page-turner. She’s struggling to hold it together.
The excellent Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Katowice has been reduced to playing hip-hop classics in a concert hall in the city of Katowice.
The conductor is a composer and producer, Radzimir Dębski, whose online moniker is JIMEK.
The video has earned nearly two million hits, but the concert leaves a bad taste.
The Vienna Phil have upgraded their website with features about ‘social responsibility’ and other diversions.
What’s really interesting is an archive feature that enables you to search every concert the orch has given, all the way back to 1842.
The strangest things turn up. On Saturday December 2, 1948, Furtwängler programmed the William Walton symphony between Weber’s Freischütz overture and Tchaikovsky’s fifth.
The concert was repeated twice.
In May 1951, Furtwängler programmed Walton’s overture, Scapino.
Another 17 years passed before the Vienna Phil played another note by the Lancastrian composer.
A no-punches-pulled piece by Ian Penman in the London Review of Books:
As with Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker, you feel Destiny’s real leg-up was provided by the ferocious will of Sinatra’s mother. Most people seem to have regarded Dolly as the real man about the house: Sinatra’s father, Marty, an easy-going ghost, barely registers in most biographies. As an Italian-Catholic working-class woman, Dolly Sinatra née Natalina Garaventa had innumerable counts against her. Yet by fair means or foul, she charmed and blustered and backhanded her way through until she was as near to a female version of a ‘man of honour’ as made no difference. Dissatisfied with the doll’s house limitations of conventional wifely behaviour, she successfully hijacked the rough, violent and Irish-dominated world of local Democratic politics. She also dabbled on the side as the local Hoboken abortionist….
… With bittersweet songs like these, Sinatra never drags you down and empties you out. It’s only in the closing years of his career that he brushes against a deeper sadness; there are moments on later albums such as A Man Alone (1969), Watertown (1970) and She Shot Me Down (1981) that do skirt some kind of awful resignation. But if Sinatra can deliver a suicidal lyric without making you feel at all suicidal, it was something he first learned at the feet of his idol among vocalists, Billie Holiday. From Holiday, Sinatra learned a whole new grammar of pause and air: singing aimed not at the big empty auditorium of old but a hypothetical low-lit 3 a.m. room. They were both drawn in song to a certain borderline mood or place: dusk and dawn, beaches and docks, empty streets, lonely horizons. The falling dark, and the becoming light. Songs that map some in-between state close to sleep but wide awake.
It says: ‘There are no more tickets for Tchaikovsky Competition. None at all”
Drew McManus has come out with his annual lost of US music director earnings, drawn from IRS Form 90s. There is always a delay in the system, so the wages below apply to the 2012/13 season.
Three music directors made more than $2 million. You may well wonder why.
Two maestros took a significant pay cut, reflecting recessionary woes.
After you study the list, do read Drew’s commentary on the lengths some orchestras and agents go to keep maestro pay under wraps.
1 National Symphony: $2,728,671 (41.02 percent increase)
2 Chicago Symphony: $2,504,336 (15.65 percent increase)
3 San Francisco Symphony: $2,364,775 (16.64 percent increase)
4 New York Philharmonic: $1,717,814 (28 percent increase)
5 Dallas Symphony: $1,505,052 (82.57 percent increase, but previous season compensation was only for partial season)
6 Los Angeles Philharmonic: $1,447,049 (1.54 percent increase)
7 Saint Louis Symphony: $1,012,158 (5.51 percent increase)
In a desperate attempt to drum up business – or an act of ironic self-deprecation, according to your point of view – the Hyperion label has posted a list of the albums that have not sold a single copy for the longest time.
Several have received accolades from reviewers. One is by the Dallas Symphony with star pianist, Stephen Hough.
Two responses in German media to the election of Kirill Petrenko as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic have been decidedly hostile, verging on racist.
Sabine Lange on NDR Kultur drew an unfavourable comparison between the rejected candidate Christian Thielemann, ‘a world acclaimed expert in the German sound’, and the Russian-born Petrenko, ‘ the tiny gnome, the Jewish caricature of Alberich’ who threatens to seize power.
If that’s not bad enough, Manuel Brug in Die Welt points out that three leading conductors in Berlin are now Jews – Barenboim and Ivan Fischer are the others. Unhelpful and unnecessary, the more so since the three are so different in almost every aspect of character.
Both are castigated by the magisterial Eleanora Brüning in the Faz for disseminating racist clickbait, but the damage has been done. Lange on NDR has appended a semi-apology to her post, saying she was using Wagnerian rather than racist imagery when comparing Petrenko to Alberich. She misses the point entirely.
Two German publications find fault with Kirill Pentreko being a Jew, one of them likening him to an offensive character. This is, as Ms Büning rightly says, unacceptable conduct. Lange and Brug should be ashamed.
UPDATE: In a page 3 feature for the JC today, I noted that Petrenko’s origins counted for nothing these days in an enlightened, multicultural Berlin. Specifically: Among the precedents that tumbled when Kirill Petrenko was elected chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra this week, the Jewish element was the least remarked upon.
It now seems that outside Berlin the enlightenment has been slow to dawn.
