The death has been announced of Christoph Schmökel, legal adviser to the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras and to many leading musicians and music companies. Most recently he advised the top-selling German-American violinist, David Garrett.

Christoph died suddenly on April 4, his Berlin law firm has announced.

In 1998, when the record industry was in deep trouble, he was made executive vice-president of Deutsche Grammophon.

His name was on innumerable contracts.

Ten months ago, we directed you to a beautiful article by Katie McAdam, explaining how she coped with being forced  to give up her singing career.

I miss it every day. The joy that comes from expressing yourself by letting that sound out I so often crave for. Still wanting to support my wonderful friends, I attend their performances and silently sigh inside. I don’t even listen to opera in my spare time anymore; when I hear it, I feel betrayed.

 In the grand scheme of things, it’s no big deal and I do know that. People start new careers every day, but I still feel hard done by. I never really acknowledged it as being akin to a pro footballer breaking his leg and never being able to play his beloved game again but I guess it’s pretty much the same. So now I teach singing, because I’ve done it on the side for years anyway, but it doesn’t satiate my love for performing. I’m also retraining to be an interior designer because I love the creativity side of things, but it doesn’t yet quench my thirst for expressing myself in the visceral way that singing that money note did. In my own eyes, I’ll always be the one that failed; didn’t make it; fell by the wayside. I do, though –  despite my ramblings here –  have perspective on it all and am forever grateful for all the wonderful things I do have in my life, and the fact that I even got to live my dream for a relatively short while was a blessing.

Katie’s blogpost was read by more than 10,000 people in a matter of days.

She has gone on to record a late-night, 15-minute radio talk on the BBC about what singing meant to her and how hard it was to give up. The talk is even more moving than the blog.

You can listen to it here.

This weekend’s orchestral talking point appears anonymously on the Guardian website. We cannot vouch for its authenticity or which orchestra is involved, but the general tone of the piece sounds fairly London-typical:

I work most weekends and holidays, then have random weekdays off. The freelance pay structure and low fees keep my nose glued to the grindstone, with almost zero opportunities to develop broader interests or a social life outside. People fraternise exclusively according to instrument, reinforcing the incestuous lifestyle…

Read on here.

The Russian-based Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis has picked up another award – 75,000 Euros from the Kairos Prize of the highly controversial Alfred Toepfer Stiftung.

Currentzis, 44, was honoured as a ‘thinker and creator’.

There was doubt whether performances of Macmillan’s Manon would go ahead in Bucharest after the peremptory dismissal of the company’s artistic director, Johan Kobborg.

But there have been developments.

Here’s a message from Johan:

I am so grateful to all of you who supported in past few days and to those who kept asking questions today, I thank you for your patience.

It has today been a priority from the moment I entered the theatre to make sure tonights performance would take place, for our audiences and for the artists, and tonight I think anyone watching the performance enjoyed it as much as I did.
Congrats Dancers/Musicians and Technical crews.
You showed me again the very reason, why I have chosen and always will continue to chose, to never allow myself to be intimidated or manipulated as an artist.

I do due to the massive amount of questions, send to me today, feel I need to clarify the situation as it stands at this very moment.

After the Minister of Culture made the proposal for me to return to the Bucharest National Opera House as the institution’s Artistic Director of the Ballet Company, I have this morning met with the interim General Manager, Mr. Vlad Conta, and discussed how we can further look into the possibilities related to this proposal.

Given my only focus is on maintaining activity standards, as I have believed in for the last couple of years, we will meet again next week to see if the exact specifications of such a collaboration can be found in this new set up, and my function within the institution can be continued as has previously been. And as such, I am open to the negotiations needed and to see if mutual ground can be found.
So to clarify, I have at this time not signed any contract, nor seen or accepted a proposal, but only theoretically approved the idea of becoming the Artistic Director of the Company.

The theater will perform its scheduled Manon performance tomorrow, even if unfortunate cast changes have occurred, due to the recent events causing stoppage of rehearsal time for the two lead dancers involved.

Best regards,
Johan Kobborg

We hear that Lucas Macias Navarro has been named assistant conductor of the Orchestre de Paris, part of Daniel Harding’s new team. The appointment has yet to be officially announced.

Lucas used to be principal oboe for Claudio Abbado in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, before joining the Concertgebouw orchestra in Amsterdam.

With the Arena suspended in bankruptcy, the fight has begun over its future. Our correspondent writes:

The political battle in Verona has just started and will soon turn national. The local PD (Democratic Party) is calling for an extraordinary city council session, accusing Mayor Flavio Tosi of killing the Arena.

Other political parties are calling for minister Dario Franceschini to appoint a new intendant, independent of the Mayor. Some political forces have a hidden agenda of transforming Arena di Verona into a venue for pop events.

All this takes place during an electoral campaign with a referendum in two Sundays and municipal elections in several large cities in June.

Svetlana Savenko and Elena Sorokina have received notices of dismissal. Both are renowned historians of Russian music. No reason has been given.

h/t: classicalmusicnews.ru

Tiberiu-Ionuț Soare, named interim director general of Bucharest Opera this week, has been removed from the post.

He had plunged the ballet in turmoil by sacking its renowned Danish director Johan Kobborg.

The conductor Vlad Conta was named by the Culture Minister as the new interim director general of ONB, with Tiberiu Soare serving as his deputy.

There has been no response to Kobborg. This political intervention appears to solve nothing.

Kobborg’s wife Anlina Cojocaru is due to dance Macmillan’s Manon on Sunday. She had threatened to boycott the company unless her husband was reinstated.

For the past quarter of a century, Michael Haas has been trying to persuade the Austrian authorities to accept responsibility for the musical lives their country destroyed during and after the Hitler era.

Michael, producer of Decca’s breakthrough Entartete Musik series, has finally won hs case. Here’s what he tells us:

In 2006, Prof. Gerold Gruber of Vienna’s University for Music and Performing Arts (MDW) founded exil.alrte, a society which I co-chair, and is dedicated to the restitution of Europe’s lost musical legacy from the Hitler years.

After some ten years of successful projects, awards and commendations, the in-coming MDW chancellor, Ms Ulrike Sych has allowed us to proceed with plans to establish Europe’s most comprehensive Exile Music, and Performing Arts Centre to be based in the premises of the former Music Academy (the predecessor of the present MDW, most of which is located on a campus some 3 blocks behind the Music Academy Building).

The Centre will called ‘exilarte’ and will offer, among other things, archives and housing for composer estates. We shall be digitising and uploading material, both print and audio, and making it available within the restrictions and wishes of the executors. We intend our centre to be a partner for scholarship and not merely a repository of documentation. The MDW was recently ranked second in the list of performing arts colleges and universities, and with some 4,000 students, we have every motivation of making works available to Europe’s future generation of musicians. We also intend for the Centre to be international and not focussed solely on Austria-Hungary.

The musical legacies of these composers is very much a European artistic legacy and we see exilarte as engaged in an act of cultural restitution. We hope exilarte will facilitate the return of these musical estates and bridge the gap that was left by Hitler’s 12 years of power. The MDW will pay for transport, insurance and incumbent costs in restoration, digitisation and archiving.
The Centre has been given generous space – some 700 sq. metres including climate and humidity controlled storage facilities: reading room; lecture facilities; performance venues etc. It will be located on the ‘beletage’, or principal floor of the historic Music Academy, located in the ‘Academy Wing’ of Vienna’s Konzerthaus. The photo shows the wing adjacent to the Konzerthaus.
This centre should finally takes Austria’s head out of the musical sand (It must be recalled that I could find no partners in Austria for Decca’s “Entartete Musik” series, despite the predominance of Austrian composers covered) and will hopefully place Vienna in the forefront of restoring Europe’s lost musical legacy.

Our Chicago psychoanalyst Dr Gerald Stein has been thinking deeply about what psychoanalysts think about.

Rachmaninov, of course.

My earliest recollection of any connection between sex and music was the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch, with Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe. The former imagined seducing the latter when a combination of circumstances fueled his fantasy: a stale, seven-year-old marriage; his wife’s temporary absence; and the availability of Ms. Monroe, his smoldering new neighbor. Ewell’s plan was to use Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2 to win her ardor. The scene above depicts his strategy.

Read on here.