The bold attempt by Putin’s culture minister Vladimir Medinski to repatriate the body from a Valhalla cemetery outside New York was blocked by the composer’s descendants.
A long-running initiative, backed by Putin himself in 2013, to purchase Rachmaninov’s Swiss mansion, Villa Senar, beside Lake Lucerne, has also got nowhere. The estate is still up for sale.
And no more has been heard of a desire to revive the Rachmaninov Competition in Moscow, defunct since 2008.
Like much else in Putin land, it appears the dream has run out of steam.
Slipped Disc was the first to tip Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla as the next music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. We knew what the players wanted and we called it right.
Now, with strong conviction but slightly less confidence in the outcome, we are happy to confide that, as of this moment, the favourite to succeed Jaap van Zweden at the Dallas Symphony is … Karina Canellakis.
This weekend she covered triumphantly for Van Zweden when he was summoned to Holland for a family emergency. Local media attributed her success to Van Zweden’s tutelage; she is in her second year as his assistant conductor. But local musicians tell us she has got what it takes.
For want of compelling international contenders on the Dallas guest list – the top names are James Gaffigan and Joshua Weilerstein – Karina can be considered a front-runner.
And if she doesn’t win Dallas by the summer, she will be head-hunted somewhere else.
Six months after the shock death of its revered music director, Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue has filled his position as organist and music director.
The new director has, like his predecessor, been recruited from England.
Professor Daniel Hyde is Informator Choristarum, Organist, and Tutorial Fellow in Music at Magdalen College, Oxford and a lecturer in the Faculty of Music. He has conducted the Britten Sinfonia, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the City of London Sinfonia, and has made several recordings at Magdalen.
From the press statement: Dan will be moving to New York with his long-term partner, Leticia. Letty has an MA from Trinity College, Cambridge and an MSc from the University of London… she enjoys singing with the BBC Symphony Chorus.
The promising film composer Shan Johnson was found dead in her room in Chennai, India, on Friday.
She was in the middle of recording sessions for a Malayalam film, Vettah, on which she was singing the title song. Shan had given no sign of anything unusual the day before. An autopsy found she had died of cardiac arrest.
Her composer father, Johnson Master, died in 2010.
One swallow does not make springtime, but we’ve received this encouraging report from Fiona Stevens, one of many travellers who are alarmed at Air Berlin’s ban on violins. Fiona writes:
This morning my colleague Daniel Deuter flew from Munich to Berlin with Air Berlin and with a viola.
He wrote to me:
“When I had checked in I asked for the ‘accepted cabin baggage tag’ for my viola case. The check-in agent made a phone call, asked whether this would be possible, and confirmed that I would be able to take the viola on board”.
This is the kind if news we have all been waiting for and I sincerely hope it is the result of Air Berlin’s decision to reconsider their policy regarding violins and violas as hand luggage. Thank you Air Berlin at this point!
In my case for Tuesday I still require written confirmation that I will be able to board with a violin as I am directing a rehearsal immediately after I land (literally – taxi from the airport, it starts when I get there) and cannot afford to miss the flight.
I do hope I will receive this, or that Air Berlin will issue a general statement revising their hand luggage policy for musical instruments.
Some of the best-known names in British opera have joined a petition, launched last night, to save English National Opera from death by 1,000 cuts.
Susan Bullock: Wake up ENO Board before it is too late and fight for the company you are supposed to represent.
Anne Evans: Why are there now no longer any artistic people with clout on the board?
Sarah Connolly: I’m signing because you cannot rip the heart out of an already wounded company and expect it to somehow provide successful productions where everyone knows what to do. You can’t ask department heads to give orders to strangers or vice versa. Cressida you have to stop this splintering now and focus on cohesiveness, clever production planning, persuading some Arts Council members, who seem reluctant, to help ENO.
Sir David McVicar: London is one of the world’s biggest cities. It needs more than one full-time opera house.
Stuart Skelton: I do not believe you make the audience more engaged with ENO and its productions by reducing the chorus contracts.
Nicholas Braithwaite: Any decent club side will beat a Rest of the World team. Excellence is not achieved by hiring a group of talented people and throwing them together, it is built up by years of working together to develop that sixth sense relationship between all the team members that makes for truly significant performance.
Steven Isserlis, cellist: ENO is as essential a component of British life as an opposition party in parliament!
Gerard McBurney: There are two reasons to sign this petition: one, to preserve a great cultural force in the shape of this mighty chorus; second, to oppose by every means the dismantling of the institutions of culture in our country by barbarians and functionaries.
Michel Var der Aa, Dutch composer: By crippling this company you’ll force it to play safe. And this is a very bad thing. We already have enough opera houses in the world playing safe.
Jane Eaglen: ENO changed my life.
Sir Peter Jonas: ENO’s values of adventure, integrity and accessibility are too valuable for society or the present weak board or an Arts Council with its own agenda to throw away.
The Konzerthaus has just published an intercut video of the match-day routines of conductor Ivan Fischer and Herta Berlin chief trainer Dárdai Pál. Both work in neighbouring facilities and both are Hungarian, which is to say they appreciate the finer things in life without condescension.
Would never happen in Manchester.
Dudamel and his Yola kids are turned into Coldplay fans.
We hear from cast members in Klagenfurt that the opening night of a new production of Butterfly was abandoned at the end of “un bel di” as the result of a bomb threat. The theatre was evacuated and the show was called off.
The threat was a hoax.
A cast member tells us: ‘After the aria the curtains closed and the intendant informed all that the police had been notified that a bomb would go off in ten minutes time. We quickly exited the theatre, leaving all our belongings behind and the opera house was blocked off and searched by dogs for 2 hours. Nothing was found, but of course the performance couldn’t go on.’
Anastasia & Tais are opera students, aged 23, who met while working at the gift shop of the Metropolitan Opera. They’ve recorded their own take on The Flower Duet from Lakme, based on vibes from the Brooklyn indie scene.
