As foreseen, the Salem Chamber Orchestra has been unable to cover a $100,000 shortfall and will go out of business today after 31 years.

The composer John Corigiliano was due to visit this month.

It’s a sad day for Oregon.

Bombed out at the end of the War, the house reopened in November 1955.

The following month Christa Ludwig made her role debut as Octavian in Der Rosekavalier.

‘I remember it so well,’ she told a Vienna audience this morning. ‘I went down a couple of steps in my white-pink dress and everything was white and bright. In that moment, I thought: “Hold it right there. You are so beautiful.’

‘Ich kann mich noch sehr gut erinnern. Ich ging mit meinem weiß-rosa Kleid die paar Stufen hinunter und alles war weiß und hell erleuchtet. Da dachte ich in dem Augenblick nur: *Verweile doch, du bist so schön!‘’.

l-r: Ludwig, concertmaster Walter Barylli, repetiteur Hubert Deutsch

Not an obvious choice.

Gustav Kuhn’s 24-hour version of Wagner’s Ring in Shanghai, borrowed from the Tyrol Festival, won a 40-minute ovation from a huge audience that managed to stay awake. Kuhn, 70, has also conducted Parsifal and Meistersinger in China in the past couple of years.

Yu Long, director of the Beijing Music Festival, said on presenting the award: ‘Kuhn’s name, here in China, will always be spoken in the same breath as Richard Wagner’s.’

Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, who at 92 is the oldest conductor still working, will be named today ‘Ehrendirigent’ (honorary conductor) of the German Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern.

Stan has been conducting them since 1978.

press release:

UPDATE: And here’s some video:

Theophilis ‘Mike’ Burroughs, a sometime music teacher at Stuyvesant High School, has been sentenced to 15 years after being caught selling a stash of weapons to people he thought were from Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group. They turned out to be cops.

At the trial Burroughs, 54, proclaimed himself a Hamas supporter.

They rolled out the menu today and tickets are immediately available.

The highlights are a new opera by the English composer Thomas Adès based on a surrealist film, The Exterminating Angel, by Luis Buñuel. There will also be a Gounod Faust – a first for Salzburg, with Piotr Beczala in the title role – and Richard Strauss Die Liebe der Danae, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst.

The Vienna Philharmonic will play concerts with Daniel Harding, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti and Mariss Jansons.

This is an interregnum summer artistically. Markus Hinterhäuser takes over as artistic director from 2017.

Tickets here.

From Alisa Weilerstein:

My husband Rafael Payare‬ and I want to share some very exciting news: we’re expecting a baby next spring! We couldn’t be more thrilled about starting a family together. In the meantime, I’m keeping very active and healthy and am feeling wonderful. My schedule is as full as always, and I’m enjoying performing and recording as never before!

Our warmest good wishes to them both.

The Western Daily Press was disturbed when it unwrapped its Nestlé Father Christmas.

So cunning those Swiss.

The rich just go on getting richer.

The Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University is generally thought to be the best endowed in America, if not the world. But there’s always competition.

So the Jacobs family, who have already donated $40.6 million, just gave another $20m.

Read how it’s done here.

Graham Johns, principal percussion of the Royal Liverpool Phil has been trying out his new Hammerschlag, the box he whacks in Mahler’s sixth symphony for the ‘Knocks of Fate’, using a huge wooden hammer.

Graham made his box from a log found in Sefton Park. It’s based on speaker technology: the diaphragm moves on springs and makes a more resonant ‘thud’ than by hitting an old orange crate as in the past.

I shall look forward to testing it a week from today when I give the pre-concert talk at the Phil.

Come along, details here.

It has been announced that Melbourne will host ‘the exclusive Australian season’ of the BBC Proms, over four days in April 2016.

The Proms are a unique British and BBC institution, taking place over seven weeks in London every summer and broadcast free the world over.

To sell a spin-off Proms to Australia not only dilutes the brand. It opens the floodgates to any number of cheap imitations and depletes a core national asset, which is owned and paid for by the British people.

Last summer, under new management, the BBC dumbed down the Proms as never before. We warned that there was worse to come.

Here we go, here we go, here we go.

Charles de Ramus of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra has arranged Sibelius’s trademark encore for six double-basses (and three obligatory handkerchiefs).

You see it here first.  Prepare to shed them now….

Sibelius conducted the Gothenburg Symphony in the Valse triste on 6th February 1911.

The orch will perform all seven symphonies on December 2-4 with principal guest conductor Kent Nagano.