Two years ago, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was given six weeks to live after leukaemia was diagnosed. The former Master of the Queens Musick overcame that bout and went on to work on a 10th symphony and new opera. Now, he tells the Times, the illness has returned and he is back in chemo.

We send Max all good wishes.

Musicians in Croatia are in mourning for Sasa Britvic, an enterprising conductor whose life is reported to have ended under severe financial pressures.

Making his name as conductor of the Ivan Goran Kovacic Academy choir, Britvic founded the Croatian Baroque Ensemble before going into the music business to become director of the Zagreb Concert Management.

But a 2006 tour cancellation by the Rolling Stones, which he apparently failed to insure, left Britvic facing huge costs and a forthcoming trial.

Britvic was a champion of living composers and a successful opera conductor.

photo: Marko Jurinec/Pixsell

A New Zealand organist, Thomas Gaynor, took first prize – 12,000 Euros – at the third international Bach/Liszt-organ competition in Erfurt und Weimar.

Second was a German, Anna-Victoria Baltrusch, third an American, Chelsea Barton.

It appears that Sergey Dogadin, winner of the richly endowed Joseph Joachim competition, is a student of Boris Kushner, one of the judges. The relationship was not declared on the competition website.

It is made clear in Dogadin’s biography here: In March 2013, Sergei was adopted in solo graduate of the University of Arts in Graz (Austria), Professor – Boris Kushnir.

So did Kushnir vote for his own student to win? And did the other judges know?

Photographer unknown.

Taken at Luton Airport, awaiting arrivals from Tel Aviv.

Add your own caption.

Washington National Opera has been scouring the world for a conductor after Dennis Russell Davies underwent knee surgery and pulled out of next month’s production of Philip Glass’s opera, Appomattox.

The score is now in the hands of the Italian conductor and composer, Dante Santiago Anzolini, who recently led a production of Akhnaten in Turin.

This was something of an anomaly for Dante, who has a healthy interest in Schoenberg and atonality.

But his first reading of the opera suggests (he tells us) that Glass has moved away from repetitive minimalism into a more complex tonal idiom.

photo: Susan Wilson 

Washington could be in for an interesting experience.

Congratulations to two Philadelphia players – first violinist Rachael Matthey and Philly Pops concertmaster Michael Ludwig – who put the intermission of their Saturday afternoon concert at Kimmel Center to good use by getting the mayor to marry them in front of an audience of 2,000. More here.

Watch.

Slipped Disc’s scout at the Chopin Competition reports that after a five-day absence to attend a friend’s wedding in Shanghai, Yundi Li clocked in this morning to resume his jury service in Warsaw.

He’ll need a good night’s sleep to overcome jetlag and the wedding hangover.

A fun duet, newly uploaded, by Jonas Kaufmann and Placido Domingo.

h/t: Basia Jaworski

Now the ratpack is upon him for smearing the dying and the dead, let these things be remembered:

1 Tom Watson MP was the only person in authority who listened to victims of child abuse at a time when no newspaper could be bothered to give them time of day.

2 Tom Watson MP cared for the victims and made the connection between them and an initially sceptical police force.

3 His involvement resulted in increased police activity which led, in turn, to numerous successful prosecutions.

4 Tom Watson was also a leader of the inquiry into phone-hacking and other abuses by the press, which is why they are hounding him now.

5 Tom Watson MP went way over the top in smearing the late Leon Brittan and others as paedophiles on the basis of unchecked testimony. He needs to apologise for the suffering he caused to the innocent and their families.

6 But – the big but – Tom Watson MP has made it harder for paedophiles to prey on British schoolchildren and his actions have forced many academies, including music colleges, to improve child protection.

For this, he deserves a public vote of thanks.

Declaration of interest: I have met Tom Watson only once, when being cross-examined by him before the House of Commons culture committee. He, together with Louise Mensch on the Tory side, were keenly interested in tackling maladministration and injustice wherever it occurred, something that cannot be said for many politicians.

Ray Robinson, who headed the Peabody conservatory from 1963 to 1969 and later served as music director of the Palm Beach Symphony, has died at 82.

He was a prolific author of composer guides.

In a blog that the Guardian has not seen fit to print, veteran music critic Andrew Clements nails Gergiev’s eight years at the London Symphony Orchestra – a partnership that ends this week with not much more than a whimper.

Gergiev’s interests range far and wide, from Fifa ((pictured) to turkey farms. He never seemed fully engaged.

As Clements points out, few outstanding performances spring readily to mind:

The fact remains that the LSO has had Gergiev as its figurehead for eight years, and in that period it has very rarely experienced the inspirational best of him on the podium, or received the close attention, what you might call the pastoral care, that a really diligent chief conductor can bring to an orchestra’s culture of concert-giving. At times during that period, the sound of the orchestra, in its home at the Barbican especially, was coarse and unpleasant.

Read the full blog here.