What she prefers is this: ‘Some of those wilder, more interesting individual players, like Roger Bobo or myself … I call them “lopsided players.” Those kind of guys are the ones that perk up your ears but may not do everything great, like my father. He tried out for Otto Klemperer, and there were only two people, him against one other guy. He just played while Klemperer was at the piano, and he just played some Wagner or some solo piece. Klemperer heard him and just hired him. He didn’t play one single excerpt from the orchestral repertoire.’
Those were the days.
Read CK Dexter Haven’s full interview with Michele here.
‘Don’t bother you’re not coming back,’ she told the conductor. Read second instalment here.
Randy Houston Mercer, a makeup artist who worked on The Book of Mormon, Hairspray, The Producers, Cabaret and more, has been sentenced in Augusta, Georgia, for sexual exploitation of a minor in production of child pornography, a charge to which he pleaded guilty.
The teen was one year below the legal age of consent.
The judge told Mercer, 57, that he may never leave jail.
Fleur Pellerin is a classy politician.
She did not need to be told by anyone that Kurt regenerated the national orchestra of France.
She posted this wordless clip on Twitter.
The great Russian baritone will appear in four performances of Eugene Onegin at Covent Garden before resuming treatment for brain cancer in London, where he lives.
Хворостовский, которому диагностировали опухоль мозга, выступит в главной роли в первых четырех представлениях “Евгения Онегина” (19,22, 30 декабря и 2 января), а затем 3 января возобновит в Лондоне лечение”.
The Polish baritone Artur Ruciński will replace him in two subsequent performances.
We wish Dmitry a swift, successful outcome.
The cellist, head of the Birmingham Conservatoire, has published a closely argued op-ed piece in the Times today stating the case against building the City of London’s vanity hall for the incoming LSO conductor, Sir Simon Rattle.
Sample:
This week’s news that a state-of-the-art hall virtually next door to the Barbican Centre is a step closer to fruition must surely be greeted with elation? And what’s more, according to a new (£1 million) “feasibility report”, its £278 million cost is just half of what was being quoted last month. Of course there will be that little £34 million extra to spend on the existing Barbican Hall “so that it can replace classical concerts with more contemporary, jazz and world music performances”. Which is nothing compared with the £111 million spent less than ten years ago on refurbishing the Royal Festival Hall. So big (if contrary) figures regarding bricks and mortar are being bandied about. Yet all this money will fail to address the real malaise in Britain’s classical music scene — the woeful neglect of introducing our children to the music itself.
Conclusion:
We cannot afford — literally or morally — to make yet another multi-million pound mistake. Music is not about bricks and mortar and “legacy” gestures. It is about the music itself and allowing all our children access to it.
I interviewed the late maestro in Paris in February 2013, one of his final media engagements. His speech was slightly slurred by Parkinson’s but his spirit was indomitable and his memory acute.
Listen here. At the end, he speaks of the moral responsibilities of being a conductor.
The death of the German conductor today at the age of 88 is a cause for global sadness.
Kurt was not widely loved until his mid-life. He seemed at first to be a rather rigid disciplinarian and unsmiling representative of the authoritarian East German regime. But those who grew close to him knew a different story and once he met his third wife, Tomoko, playing in a Brazilian orchestra, an altogether warmer man emerged.
I got to know him well in the early 1990s and we bonded over our mutual love for Klaus Tennstedt, whom Kurt had known and loved since he was 19. It was through Slipped Disc that Kurt announced to the world that he was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease and in an interview with me that he (with Tomoko’s support) discussed its intimate effects. His courage and humility in the face of mortal illness was humbling. He would stand in front of an orchestra, no longer able to raise an arm, and still communicate the inner essence of a Beethoven symphony.
He was a great musician and a fine human being. I cherish his memory.
Kurt Masur, born in Silesia, escaped from an American POW camp at the end of the war, made his name with the Leipzig Gewandhaus and his greater fame by defying the Communist regime in Leipzig and facilitating a peaceful transfer of power. Approached to become president of united Germany, Kurt said: ‘I’m a musician. That’s what I know how to do.’
From 1991 to 2002 he was music director of the New York Philharmonic, sharpening its playing responses and instilling a stronger sense of identity. He fell out publicly with its president Deborah Borda, but was later fondly reconciled. He went on to succeed Tennstedt at the LPO and to revitalise the Orchestre National de France.
Never remotely a Nazi, he was proud of his title as honorary guest conductor of the Israel Philharmonic.
The former chief of English National Opera, in a letter to Slipped Disc, urges all sides in the ENO mess to come clean on their true intentions.
Politics is neither as reliable nor honest as performing opera nightly before a paying public.
ENO’s present management, the company itself, the unions involved, the (so far strangely silent) ENO board and the (secretive) Arts Council with its own agenda for the Coliseum (on which they hold a charge should the company cease to be a full-time one) could indeed “listen to each other with mutual respect” (as Richard Jarman suggests) if only the ACE declared its commitment to the company’s use of its greatest financial asset, the building.
In that case the ACE should lobby ministers for the £275/500 million envisaged for a new London concert hall and the ENO board should just say something constructive as they did fortissimo in the days of Harewood, Goodman, Carr, Goodison, Hoffman, Boateng, Unwin and others when they drove us to secure the building for the company’s future in 1993.
Before anyone grumbles about the Coliseum being difficult to fill, let it be said that it can be filled when performances are popular and perceived as successful artistically however adventurous. That this is not always the case lies in the nature of music theatre, the right to experiment, to fail and to try and try again as so many of ENO’s greatest hits have shown Peter Grimes (thrice), Akhnaten, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (twice), Busoni’s Dr. Faust, The Mask of Orpheus, Ariodante to name just a few.
Remember the Arts Council cuts of 1985/6? These resulted in a supper in the Camden Brasserie with a worried ENO General Director (me) and Jonathan Miller who suddenly suggested that he direct the, about to be cancelled, Mikado production on a budget for a single set, to include props and costumes, of £110.00! Few believed it would work, least of all the Arts Council who regarded the project budget as illusory and the run of performances reliant on hope rather than reality. Now, 29 years later, after innumerable performances Mikado still fills the house, its coffers and is loved seemingly by all.
This is what is called “return on investment” and has supported other adventurous projects that will never be evaluated in terms of marginal financial contribution but only in terms of essential artistic value to opera, artists and public alike.
Arts Council: declare your hand and have the courage to deny categorically your intention to enforce the charge on the freehold of the Coliseum.
ENO board: say something meaningful without mincing words.
Only then can all partners seek a solution that compared to the moneys being promised to London’s projected concert hall, laudable though such may be, could, if well managed with vision, produce good financial returns on taxpayer investment and provide an invaluable artistic future for opera.
Sir Peter Jonas
18th December 2015
The times may be a-changing.
The first violin tutti audition this morning was won by Petra Kovacic, from Tolmin, Slovenia. All four candidates to make it to the final round were women.
Petra is the fifth woman to be admitted the Vienna Philharmonic since the start of this month.
Dashing in to Carnegie Hall yesterday to shelter from the rain, I found Joyce DiDonato in a ninth-floor studio rehearsing her set for a jailhouse show.
Carnegie has been running a program at the Sing-Sing correctional facility for the past nine years, encouraging lifers and long-term prisoners to play and compose music. When Joyce heard of it she yelped ‘I’m in’ (that Kansas girl goes places no mezzo’s been before.)
Aside from opera arias, among the numbers she will sing in Sing-Sing is a ballad by Kenyatta Hughes, serving 18 years for serious offences. Hughes will be onstage with Joyce, a string quartet and an improv band.
There will be 350 prisoners in the hall. A captive audience, if you like.
Luc Brewaeys has died, aged 56.
A pupil of Donatoni and Ferneyhough, Luc worked extensively in electronic music. He also composed eight symphonies and a successful orchestration of both books of Preludes by Claude Debussy.
