Tom Zajac, a member of the Piffaro group who played recorder, bagpipe, sackbut, pipe & tabor, flute and percussion, died in August of brain cancer.

This week, the pipes came out for his memorial service through the streets of New York City from St. John’s Cathedral to a nearby bar. Many early music eminences took part in the parade.

Pat Metheny is a multifarious jazz musician with his own band and a largee global following.

Tim Hazlett sat him down to talk classical. Here’s what emerged:
I read an interview from several years ago where you were asked if you listened to Wagner…to which you replied there was too much modulation going on…you wished he would stay in one place. But you did say you were into the “Russian guys…Stravinsky, Prokofiev, etc…. And the French…Debussy, Ravel and Satie. What classical composers, if any, interest you these days?

I must have meant the Wagner comment as a kind of a joke – actually the more modulations the better for me! While I feel an ongoing attraction to trying to understand all the composers that you listed and many others (Berg, Webern, etc.), I don’t feel like I have ever really had the time to devote to sitting down with scores and spending the months I believe it takes to truly digest that music with the kind of seriousness that I have been compelled to invest in other forms. I keep thinking someday I will. I would love that.

But, I do need to add – as much as I love the musicians on your list there, hands down the most important composer in this general realm for me was J.S. Bach. His music has a place in my life that rivals that of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane in that in addition to loving it as a fan, any time spent under the hood with it also has an instant pragmatic effect on the specifics of what I aspire  to achieve in music myself.

Spot-on. Read the full interview here.

The great composer is in relaxed mood for a Kerri Mason Billboard interview, at home on the East Side.

Like every great artist, he knows where to give a little and where to stand firm.

Here’s Sondheim on  working with Disney:

How did Disney do with Into the Woods?

I thought they did swell; the atmosphere of the movie was fine. Dealing with them and making the script — there are rules that you can’t break. Because “our audience doesn’t like that.” It doesn’t matter whether they’re right or wrong. If you’re going to do a movie for Disney, you know that going in. And if you don’t, you are really dumb. You try to persuade them. You try to be sure that at least the basics you agree on. And the basics, the reason they bought it and the reason we let it be made, were all kosher. But the details?

Read the full interview here.

The Israeli soprano Chen Reiss (pictured) has pulled out of Vienna’s Hänsel und Gretel with an unspecified illness.

She is to be replaced Ileana Tonca, a Romanian singer on the Staatsoper staff.

Christian Thielemann conducts Adrian Noble’s new production.

The obits are starting to flow for Igor Stravinsky’s loyal amanuensis, who died last Tuesday aged 92, and they are uniformly dreary, flat and formulaic. 

What’s missing is Craft’s distinctive voice: furiously polemical when anybody else wrote about Stravinsky, withering in a Gore Vidal kind of way, classical in the Greek sense of the word and lofty as Parnassus with a drink in its hand.

We can do no better than bring you a sample of Craft’s savagery against the meticulous, if remote, Stephen Walsh, author of the current academic life of Igor Stravinsky. Sample:

At times the Stravinsky of Walsh’s book reminds me of the biography of Lycurgus, about whom absolutely nothing is known, but who is nevertheless the subject of one of Plutarch’s Lives. The present case is something like the reverse. “Everything” known about the subject is gathered into a gallimaufry of “oral history” (gossip), apocrypha, clippings from unedifying reviews, scraps of correspondence, unqualified opinions, guesses and suppositions, with the result that nothing new of significance is offered either about the music or the man, who in Walsh’s book is all but unrecognizable from the one I knew.

Read the full blast here. It’s on the Naxos site, where Craft recycled many of his own recordings.

Right or wrong, classical music needs more contrarians like the über-erudite Robert Craft.

The Square was crowded for a spontaneous solidarity rally last night.

The player was an Israeli student at the Royal College of Music, Bar Markovich.

Guillaume B. Decherf, a writer for the cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles, has been confirmed among the victims of Friday night’s Islamist massacre at Bataclan.

Guillaume was 43, the father of two small children.

The pianist who turned up this morning outside the Bataclan concert hall and played John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ on a grand piano that mysteriously materialised was named as Davide Martello from Konstanz, in Germany.

Click here to watch: Pianist performs Imagine

The Metropolitan Opera is handing out leaflets of the Marsellaise to all matinee operagoers today, inviting them to join in the singing of the French national anthem before the performance. Good work, Peter Gelb.

Placido Domingo conducted.

The Atlanta Symphony is dedicating today’s performance of Verdi’s Requiem to the dead and injured in the Paris attacks. Fort Worth Symphony and Colorado Springs Philharmonic are also planning tributes tonight.

In Washington visiting conductor Gianandrea Noseda spoke from the stage to dedicate the National Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Alfredo Casella’s Elegia eroica to the people of France.

Let us know if you hear of more.

Paris is without music tonight and tomorrow. Let us make music for Paris.

UPDATES:

Leipzig Opera dedicated tonight’s Figaro to Paris.

In Ottawa, Canada, the National Arts Centre Orchestra is responding to the terrible attacks on Paris by performing the national anthem of France, La Marseillaise tonight to open the concert.

In Sao Paolo, Brazil, the concert stage was lit up in red, white and blue.

Vienna: Before today’s Beethoven Ninth at the Musikverein, Sir Simon Rattle, the Berlin Philharmonic and Dr. Thomas Angyan, Intendant of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, asked for a moment’s silence:

Rattle said: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we are all of course still deeply shocked at the horror in Paris yesterday. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is essentially a journey from darkness to light. And the light includes Beethoven’s message, a plea for love, tolerance, Menschlichkeit, humour. The words ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’ are the words we need to hear more than ever today, especially when we are faced by people, who do not believe that. What we can do is play and what we would ask you for is a moment of remembrance, silence and love to the people, who lost their lives or their loved ones..

Pascal Nègre, president of Universal Music France, has posted a message of mourning for three young staff members who attented the Bataclan Friday night concert in the line of duty.

The performing band were signed to Universal.

Pascal’s message:

La famille Universal Music est en deuil : Thomas , Marie, Manu . Nos pensées vont à leurs familles et à leurs amis . RIP

UPDATE: One of the victims has been named as Thomas Ayad, 34, of Mercury Records, a Universal affiliate. Marie was Marie Mosser (below).

Thomas was 32, Marie 24. The third Universal loss was Manu Perez (below).

Also among the dead was a British young man, Nick Alexander, who travelled with the band selling merchandise at their venues.

The music critic Guillaume B. Decherf also lost his life.

The Mayor of Lyon has announced five days of mourning for the victims of the Paris terror massacres.

The national orchestra of Lyon were informed of the cancellation of their Saturday concert two hours before it was due to start.

Their music director, Leonard Slatkin, who led the BBC Proms with dignity and calm in the terrible week of 9/11, planned to say a few words to the audience and musicians. He has allowed Slipped Disc to publish his intended speech.

Tonight’s program was intended as a celebration, filled with joy and good feelings. The horrific attacks in Paris have reminded all of us that we live in perilous times. What do we do in the face of senseless violence? How do we explain it to our children and ourselves?

On stage tonight, you see the members of the ONL. They are joined by colleagues from the Opera de Lyon. We come together to help bring a degree of solace and comfort to you. What cannot be said with words is best conveyed by music.

Instead of the announced pieces by Sir William Walton, we will play the Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber. This piece has become the one the world turns to in times of grief and sorrow. It was heard at the funeral of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was played by orchestras around the world after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And it was the work of choice after the atrocities of Sept. 11.

The Adagio has been called, “The Saddest Piece of Music Ever Written.” I do not agree. The aching, long melodic line is a thing of beauty, not tragedy. The crescendo at the works climax is one of the greatest affirmations of music’s power. And the ending, indefinite, reminds us that the world carries on, even at its darkest hours.

Our hearts and prayers go out to the friends and families of those who perished last night. But the resolve of the French people is strong and we will continue to believe in the best elements of our society, not the worst.

Here is a list of events cancelled and venues shut in Paris. The prefecture has ordered the closure of Salle Gaveau, the Philharmonie and other classical venues.

UPDATE: Message from Esa-Pekka Salonen: Work is best therapy on an immensely sad day like this. Our rehearsals for Bluebeard/La voix humaine resume tonight at Opéra national de Paris

The death of Robert Craft, the great composer’s assistant from 1948 to 1971, has been confirmed by his family.

Craft, who died on November 10, aged 92, acted as spokesman and swordsman for Stravinsky during his later years. He published five books of conversations with Stravinsky, asking many leading questions to which his master rose with alacrity. Some challenged certain controversial remarks, saying they did not recognise Stravinsky’s voice in the English transcription. Craft lashed back vehemently at all such criticisms.

In latter years, he floated a mischievous theory that Stravinsky had a homosexual affair with Ravel, apparently basing it on a discredited source.

His relationship with Stravinsky was never dull. A man who sat behind them during an LSO concert at the Royal Albert Hall for the 50th anniversary of the Rite of Spring, conducted by its original maestro, Pierre Monteux, told me he heard Stravinsky disparaging Monteux throughout the performance and Craft adding constant fuel to his fire. That was Craft’s role: maintaining Igor’s menace.

photo: Australian Broadcasting Company