Charlie Peace was a Raffles-like character who gained admission to fashionable houses by day and returned at night to burgle them. The violin was an indispensable part of his pretence at culture and sophistication.
But Charlie, for all his charm, was also handy with a pistol. He shot and killed the husband of one of his mistresses and later put lead into two pursuing policemen. He was hanged at Leeds in 1878.
His violin has gone on display in a Crime Uncovered exhibition at the Museum of London.
Ali Rahbari, music director of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, has said there will be no more concerts until the players get paid. He cancelled two performances last week over ‘disorder and mismanagement’.
Rahbari said: ‘Unfortunately many musicians have quit due to disorder in pay over the past few months. He added: ‘I have not resigned because I have promised to stay in Iran to rebuild the orchestra by all means.’
In 1956 Gerhard Kramer founded one of the city’s first early-music groups, the Wiener Barockensemble. He went on to establish the Convivium Musicum Vindobonense, all the while conducting the boys choir at the Piaristenkirche and writing concert reviews for Die Presse and the Wiener Zeitung.
Gerhard died of cancer on Christmas Eve, aged 81.
The last musician to win the prestigious Asahi Award for achievement in the arts was Seiji Ozawa – and that was way back in 1985.
Today, the awards committee have announced Kazushi Ono as Asahi winner for 2015, in recognition of ‘his energetic activities in Japan and abroad as a conductor’.
Ono, 55, has been music director of the Zagreb Philharmonic, the Karlsruhe Opera and La Monnaie (Brussels). He is about to start as music director of the symphony orchestra in Barcelona. He is also music director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor at Lyon Opéra.
When I’m on the West Coast, I always head to In-N-Out; it’s like a ritual. It’s the first thing I do. Even before concerts, I have pulled up in a stretch limo to the drive-through. One time I made the limo driver order the burgers while I ran across the street to get McDonald’s fries.
We feel slightly nauseous.
Natalie Cole, singer-songwriter daughter of Nat King Cole, died last week at 65.
The Guardian’s Mark Brown has spotted that the Morgan Stanley banker Huw van Steenis, recently recruited onto the board of English National Opera, is married to Camilla Cavendish, head of David Cameron’s policy unit at No. 10.
That’s promising in all sorts of ways. ENO has long been seeking to get a political big-hitter on board. Martyn Rose, who resigned as chairman a year ago, was meant to be a man with the right sort of friends but he didn’t last long, or bring any friends on board. An approach to Michael Portillo signally failed.
But a board member married to a Downing St insider could make all the difference, even if (as must be assumed) the couple never discuss their work at home.
The link allows ENO an emergency red telephone for when the Arts Council pulls the plug and – even if the imaginary phone never has to be used – it makes the ACE think three times before further pursuing its long-running vendetta.
It’s a tiny glimmer of hope in a very gloomy situation. Orchestra and chorus cutbacks now loom large.
In today’s Observer, Martin Kettle thinks that British audiences have lost their constraints.
The last time I went to the opera, the audience booed the production – even though they had bought tickets in the full knowledge of what it would be like.
So what should be done – stop the show? eject the audience?
The quote comes from a new book by the Oxford historian Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory, reviewed in the current issue of the TLS.
Glossing swiftly over the misuse of the present tense (what they are told), the statement itself is demonstrably false. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, took orders from no-one. Nor, so far as we know, did their predecessors.
Being a good musician was always a transferrable skill. If a player didn’t like the orders that came down from on high, he did a midnight flit and set up in the next town, province or kingdom. Musicians were ever a discomfort to their patrons. A few, like Haydn, might have bowed the head in the interest of a quiet life. But Bach often bucked the system and Handel set up his own business in London.
On the basis of what we know of the lives of leading musicians they may have pretended sometimes to do as they were told but seldom did. Sandbrook needs to clarify that horrible generalisation.
The Baltimore Symphony music director has run into flak back home for suggesting, in a BBC interview, that violence had been necessary to redress social inequality in the city.
‘It’s heartbreaking that we haven’t dealt with these issues, that it requires violence, which I think it does require, to be honest, to change this equation,’ Alsop told presenter Razia Iqbal. ‘Inequality and injustice is unacceptable. Sadly, this has been the most violent year in Baltimore. We’ve had over 300 people murdered. It’s a cry for help.’
The Baltimore Sun has published a hostile interpretation of her remarks and several readers have contacted Slipped Disc with criticisms. There has been a frosty no-comment from City Hall.
Baltimore erupted in riots last April after a young Afro-American, Freddie Gray, died while in police custody.
When I visited in October, the city was still palpably tense. Read here.
The 1970s French chanteur Michel Delpech has died, aged 69.
The pianist, who has avoided playing in his homeland since 2009, has said he will return in 2017.
Interviewed by a Tass correspondent in New York, he gave no reason either for his absence or for his welcome return.
