Dafydd Burne-Jones, a staff director at Scottish Opera for 37 years, has died of cancer, the company has announced.
Known to everyone as Robert, he said the highlight of his career was working with Leonard Bernstein on Candide in 1988.
Asked what he loved best about the job, he said: ‘Every day I am surrounded by people who are passionate about what they do and are at the very top of their game. I spend most days listening to beautiful music played and sung by highly talented artists, and seeing that work coming to fruition through the efforts of enormously skilled and enthusiastic craftspeople. No one could fail to be uplifted working among such extraordinary colleagues.’
The death has been reported* of Duncan Robertson, a splendid tenor and pillar of Scottish Opera, who enjoyed a far-flung international career. Duncan was 91. He recorded with Callas, Giulini and other giants of his era.
A sound artist named Brendan Landis, who records as Hey Exit, has created a fascinating piece by combing every known recording of Satie’s Gymnopedie 1. As each plays at the same time, the attention shifts to the variations in tempo and phrasing, and creates a dense sound with rounded edges. Wild stuff!
It must be something in the plum juice that produces, generation after generation, a cluster of distinctive string quartets from the country now constituted as the Czech Republic. There is nothing like a Czech string quartet. It’s a generic school of ensemble playing that aligns all the right accents to a witty, virile expressiveness and an almost effortless panache.
Count the present contenders on the world stage: the Panocha, the Pavel Haas, the Pražák, the Stamic, the Vlach, the Wihan, and the daddy of them all, the Talich. There are presently seven or eight Czech quartets of the highest quality out there. No other nation of ten million can match that.
This is Aleksey Igudesman’s delightful new act with Manaho Shimokawa.
And this is, er, not.
Things you no longer have to do once you’re music director of the New Philharmonic.
Peter Hall, the architect who took over the unfinished building after the resignation of its visionary designer Jorn Utzon, received so much abuse that he retreated into a bottle and died a broken man at 64.
Now, it’s being acknowledged that Hall made the best of a very bad job. If anyone buggered up the opera house, it as the Sydney politicians who could not stop meddling. ‘Why was my father treated so badly?’ his son wants to know.
There’s a new documentary about Hall on the ABC. Unfortunately, you can only watch it in Australia. (UPDATE: Or try this link, which may work in the US and UK).
The music director of the Metropolitan Opera keeps much of his life under wraps, including the fairly open secret that he has been suffering for several years from Parkinson’s Disease. The tremors have been noticeable.
But when Peter Gelb suggested that now was the time to make way for a younger man Levine, 72, took the New York Times to see his doctor in a bid to prove that, with an adjustment of medication, he was still up to the job.
Michael Cooper describes a desperate and peculiar situation in today’s Times:
Mr. Levine said he had feared his Parkinson’s was getting worse. “I was surprised, and I was worried,” he said, noting that for a while he played “telephone tag” with his doctor and was not seen. “I didn’t want to be doing substandard performances and stay working too long, but I felt so good about the way I was able to work — other than this gestural thing.”
Dr. Fahn, who is an expert on Parkinson’s, said in an interview with Mr. Levine present that Mr. Levine had Parkinson’s disease, but that it did not seem to be progressing and that his involuntary movements, or dyskinesia, seemed to result from too high a dose of the medication L-dopa…
We could see that the Staatsoper in Munich was packed on the opening night of South Pole. What we learned later was that the entire run of the opera has been pre-booked. Not one seat left to be sold.
Without having heard a note of the music – or indeed of the composer, Miroslav Srnka – the people of Munich took it on trust that their next opera was simply a must-see.
But you would never get that audience response in London and New York, and probably not in Vienna or Berlin, either. It’s to do with belief in the brand, and in the future of opera.
photo: Wilfried Hösl
All the fizz has gone out of the relationship. It used to go down to the wire, with the VPO demanding more money and Salzburg threatening to replace them with a radio orchestra – from Slovakia, if necessary.
Yesterday, Vienna Phil renewed the deal without a whimper. (It’s not like they have anything better to do in summer.)
all suits, all smiles
Die Wiener Philharmoniker und Salzburg, das ist eine tiefe Beziehung. Hier trat das Ensemble im Juli 1877 erstmals außerhalb Wiens auf. Hierhin führte die Wiener Philharmoniker die letzte Reise während des zweiten Weltkrieges und die erste Tournee nach Kriegsende. Ab 1925 wurde unsere Stadt zur Sommerheimat des Orchesters. Man kann ohne Übertreibung behaupten, ohne die Wiener Philharmoniker gäbe es zwar Festspiele in Salzburg, aber es wären nicht die Salzburger Festspiele“, betont Festspielpräsidentin Helga Rabl-Stadler anlässlich der Verabschiedung der neuen Rahmenvereinbarung über die Mitwirkung der Wiener Philharmoniker bei den Salzburger Festspielen 2017 – 2021.
Dieser heute unterzeichnete Vertrag ist ein neuerlicher Ausdruck des Treueverhältnisses zwischen den beiden Partnern. Unterschrieben wurde er von Seiten der Salzburger Festspiele durch den designierten Intendanten Markus Hinterhäuser und Präsidentin Helga Rabl-Stadler. Die Wiener Philharmoniker unterzeichneten den Vertrag vertreten durch ihren Vorstand Andreas Großbauer und Geschäftsführer Harald Krumpöck. Andreas Großbauer: „Die Wiener Philharmoniker sind Partner und somit ein Teil der Identität der Salzburger Festspiele und die Festspiele sind ein Teil unserer Identität. Wir freuen uns nicht nur, eine wertvolle Tradition weiterführen zu können, sondern auch im Hier und Jetzt gemeinsam neue Impulse zu setzen.“
The Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee spares no one in its report on the collapse of Kids Company: Camila Batmanghelidjh, the trustees, government ministers, the auditors and regulators. However, the heaviest criticism is for the charity trustees led by the BBC’s Alan Yentob.
Yentob is described as someone who condoned excessive spending and lacked proper attention to his duties. The Corporation is also accused of poor leadership for failing to take action against him when he tried to make suggestions about the BBC’s reporting of Kids Company:
67.Mr Yentob was Chair of Trustees for 12 years. His actions in the weeks surrounding the charity’s collapse have received significant media attention, with allegations that he displayed a conflict of interest in his role at the BBC. Mr Yentob admitted that he stood behind the glass with the producer during a BBC interview with Ms Batmanghelidjh about the charity’s difficulties, and also made a phone call to another BBC journalist who was due to make a broadcast about the charity.127 Mr Yentob said that he was “emotionally upset and engaged” by the coverage, and regrets this action “if it was intimidating”.128 He has since resigned from his position as Creative Director at the BBC. Lord Hall of Birkenhead, BBC director general, said that Mr Yentob’s conduct was “improper” but had not affected BBC coverage of Kids Company.129
68.A charity of Kids Company’s size and complexity requires a Board of Trustees that will demonstrate leadership, judgement and a willingness to challenge assumptions. There was a lack of relevant Trustee expertise in the field of youth services or psychotherapy, although we understand that attempts, albeit belated, were underway to recruit a Trustee with such experience in the run up to the charity’s collapse. The admiration that Kids Company’s Trustees had for Ms Batmanghelidjh’s apparent vision and fundraising capabilities led to a false confidence about other areas of the organisation. The Charity Commission’s guidance to Trustees warns that Trustees should not allow their judgement to be swayed by personal prejudices or dominant personalities, but this is what occurred in Kids Company. This resulted in Trustees suspending their usual critical faculties – particularly over Ms Batmanghelidjh’s insistence on the demand-led business model, her exercise of substantial discretionary spending powers, the effectiveness of internal controls, and the quality of clinical judgements and safeguarding procedures. The length of the Chief Executive and Chair’s tenures were not conducive to challenging the Chief Executive herself. There was a clear link between the failure to correct serious weaknesses in the organisation, and the failure to refresh its leadership.
69.Mr Yentob denied historic failures in financial management and insisted that there were no questions about the financial resilience of Kids Company until 2014. Given the charity’s historic hand-to-mouth existence, its continual failure to build up reserves, significant periods on the brink of insolvency and its inability to meet its obligations to HMRC, this is an inaccurate and alarming interpretation. The evidence Mr Yentob gave to the Committee suggests a lack of proper attention to his duties as Chair of Trustees and a continuing inability to recognise those failures. With his fellow Trustees he was unwilling or unable to impose sufficient control. Together, they failed to exercise their proper function as Trustees.
70.Mr Yentob acknowledges his poor judgement in respect of his position at the BBC during the summer of 2015. His actions were unwise at best, and deliberately intimidating at worst. He has since resigned his main position at the BBC but he still retains substantial responsibilities within the organisation and oversees substantial budgets. It is not within the remit of this Committee to comment on the governance of the BBC, but the proper governance of conflicts of interest and standards of behaviour – particularly amongst its senior executives – is a very serious matter for any reputable organisation. That a senior figure could act in this way and it could take so long for action to be taken reflects poorly on the BBC’s leadership.
Our BBC swing-door correspondent adds:
When Yentob finally “resigned” as Creative Director, Tony Hall and James Purnell no doubt hoped a line had been drawn under the affair. Not so. The Committee rightly question how long it took for action to be taken. In addition, by pointedly abstaining; “it’s not within the remit of the Committee to comment on the governance of the BBC”, Committee Chairman Bernard Jenkin hammers another nail in the coffin in the BBC Trust…
The conductor Christoph Eschenbach has urged the German government not to set a limit on the number of refugees it admits. In an interview with DPA ahead of a Europe tour with the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC, Eschenbach recalled his flight as a child from East Prussia, ahead of the Russian army. His grandmother would die in a refugee camp.
‘In the deep snow of 1945, one searched for a crust of bread,’ he recalled. ‘And the person in front, or behind you, would just die. I can understand this (refuugee) phenomenon very, very well.’
Seong-Jin Cho, the first Korean to win the Chopin Competition, has signed a contract with Deutsche Grammophon, which surprises no-one since the label sold over 100,000 copies of his winning performance.
But here’s the surprise: Seong-Jin has agreed to make his debut studio recording in Dresden. The conductor will be Myung Whun Chung, who was forced to leave the Seoul Philharmonic after a campaign of vilification by its former chief executive.
Under normal circumstances, the Korean winner would have played to his home crowd. But he has decided instead to show solidarity with the ousted maestro.
Seoul Philharmonic also lost its DG deal when Chung departed.
