Under the orchestra’s new freedom of information policy, we popped the question.
Guess what? We got a straight answer: 7 are scheduled to perform, out of 13.
Click here for more.
He was the most trusted of Mahler’s conductor assistants, closer to the composer at first than the young Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Alexander Zemlinsky.
What attracted Mahler to Oscar Fried was, aside from his personal devotion, his aspiration to be a great composer.
Fried went on to pursue a successful career as a conductor, making the first recording of Mahler’s second symphony in 1924 and conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in the second performance of Mahler’s ninth.
The first western conductor to work in Soviet Russia, he sought asylum there after Hitler came to power and died in Moscow, of uncertain causes, in 1941.
Fried’s greatest success as a composer came in 1903 with Das trunkene Lied (The Drunken Song) for chorus and orchestra, based on texts by Friedrich Nietzsche with which Mahler was closely familiar. After 1914, the work sank into oblivion.
It was revived earlier this year by a German youth orchestra and will be broadcast by Deutschland Radio on Wednesday at 8 pm. Details here.
Fried (standing left, in 1928) with Ravel at the piano
Prince Mohammed University, one of the largest private colleges in Saudi Arabia, has suspended a foreign teacher after he played the violin in front of a class of young women. The matter came to light when a student posted a video of the performance on Youtube.
Dr Eisa Al Ansari, the rector, said the action was contrary to tradition and Ministry of Education regulations.
Saudi Arabia is an elightened member of the United Nations council for human rights.
It has been a year of steady growth on the world’s most visited classical site. There have been no earth-shattering events and few spectacular exclusives.
We are heading for 14 million visitors through the course of the calendar year. And we’re examining the most-read stories of the year, a piece of analysis that throws up more than a few surprises.
Who do you think got the most hits in 2015?
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11 None of the above?
Work finished last weekend on the new opera house in Harbin, in the northeast of China.
It’s an automatic icon.
Breathtaking in conception and, unlike Sydney, unimpaired by political meddling.
Want to see more? Move your clicking finger here.
Photography by Adam Mørk and Hufton + Crow.
Hilde Zadek is the last survivor of Vienna’s Golden Age post-War cast. A Hitler refugee who fled as a child to Palestine and returned to a hotbed of unreformed Nazis who disparaged her voice, her looks and her lifestyle choices, Hilde at 98 is totally free of rancour.
Asked for her advice to singers today, Hilde says:
‘Ich denke, dass jeder Mensch – es sei denn, er ist krank – zu einer positiven Lebenseinstellung gelangen kann. Ich musste mich in meiner Jugend einer schwierigen Realität stellen. Aber das gab mir letzten Endes auch Kraft.
I think everyone, unless they’re sick, can find a positive otlook. As a very young person I had to deal with a tough reality. But that, in the end, gave me strength.’
Long may she last.
with Christa Ludwig, 2014
They are getting married Tuesday morning.
Collapsed in mid-concert
Beat on to the last.
Remembered on Christmas Eve.
Rose from the Vienna Phil
From Warsaw to St Louis
Indispensable at the Met
Broke through in Chicago
Cut through record crackle
His middle name was Wolfgang
It has been announced that the fashion pair Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana are to be core sponsors of La Scala Milan. They have committed to to donate 600,000 Euros annually until 2021.
The duo have long been regular first-nighters.
The Russian president, in a meeting with his Council for Arts, singled out the Tchaikovsky Competition as a notable achievement and thanked ‘Maestro Gergiev’ for organising it (maybe he’s starting to forget first names).
Putin said: ‘”We can say that this year the Tchaikovsky Competition really returned to its former glory revived. This was a great success.’
The nonpareil Swedish tenor in ‘a gay opera’.
Click here to watch video. You won’t be disappointed.
A new book by Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takacs Quartet, opens with a familiar situation:
No sooner do I play my opening notes in Beethoven’s late string quuartet, opus 131, than a man in the front row of London’s Wigmore Hall coughs ominously.
A teacher once suggested to me that coughing in an audience is inspired only by a boring performance. If that is so, this particular verdict has been reached swiftly. I wonder why the man doesn’t escape from his seat. Perhaps he knows that there are no breaks between the seven movements of opus 131 – if he gets up now the ushers may not allow him to re-enter the hall. Hopefully, both boredom and phlegm will dissipate.
A familiar situation, as we said. What should Edward have done?
1 Stop playing til the man settles down?
2 Glare?
3 Invite the unruly fellow to step outside and settle it with knotted hankies?
4 Collapse in a paroxysm of his own?
5 Ask if there are any BDS in the hall who can outshout the tubercular bugger?
6 Hiss at him, ‘I know where you live’?
7 Offer him a cigarette?
You decide. The author of the most original and practical suggestion will win a copy of Edward’s book, Beethoven for a Later Age: Journey of a String Quartet, published by Faber and University of Chicago Press in January.
