It has been a matter of pride for years at the BBC Proms that every major composer centenary and jubilee would be marked with at least one performance. It used to be the duty of the Controller’s assistant to supply a list, four years in advance, of all good composers to be celebrated in this way.
Which makes it all the most distressing that this year’s season omits one of the most significant European composers of the past two centuries. I’m not pointing fingers at any individual or demanding official excuses. Call the omisson for what it is: a major shortcoming in this year’s Proms, an embarrassment for the BBC.
Ferruccio Busoni, born 150 years ago last month, (was) one of the most famous faces of his time. His leonine head led to him being often mistaken for Beethoven, while his hands made light work of Liszt. Busoni was a fearless pianist, a formidable thinker and a composer overstocked with good ideas. His character was so fascinating that Gustav Mahler, never a man to waste time on soloists, craved his rare visits to Vienna. Arnold Schoenberg (no fan of anyone but Mahler) craved his personal approval. Busoni was the teacher and mentor of Kurt Weill. In the early Weimar Republic, he moulded its culture.
The 150th anniversary should have been a golden opportunity for the Proms to stage Busoni’s piano concerto, a behemoth with chorus. It’s a terrifying piece, but the British pianist Peter Donohoe has made it his own, as has the Canadian Marc-André Hamelin. If someone had offered it to Daniil Trifonov, he would have bitten their hand off.
The Busoni concerto is made for the Proms, but not under present management.
Failing that, they could have included the Berceuse élégiaque, a short work premiered by Gustav Mahler in the last concert of his life. But present management are dull to such sensitivities, deaf to Busoni.
press release: With unprecedented demand for tickets for this year’s Wexford Festival Opera, the board of Wexford Festival Trust have announced that they will expand the 2017 Festival from 12 to 18 days, running across three weekends, for the first time since 2008, with next year’s 66th Festival opening on Thursday 19 October and closing on Sunday 5 November. Full details of the daytime and evening performance schedule for the 2017 Festival will be announced later this year.
Followers of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra are entitled to feel confused.
Last season it increased box-office sales and made internal economies, cutting ten admin jobs, yet still wound up with a A$577,653 deficit.
The orch has a new Canadian chief exec coming in – Sophie Galaise, lately of the Brisbane Symph.
Her predecessors have gone on from Melbourne to run the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orch.
Sophie will need to find a new formula. Details here.
The capable and popular Minister of Culture Vlad Alexandrescu, has been sacked by the prime minister over the ongoing battle between xenophobes and foreigners at Bucharest National Opera.
‘The best Minister of Culture Romania has been blessed with in decades,’ according to one close observer, Vlad had been carving throught legacies of favouritism and corruption in the arts and has paid the price for his diligence.
The president of Romania, Klaus Iohanis, said: ‘There are only few imaginable mistakes that were not made yet by the minister of culture in the ONB scandal.’
Vlad’s supporters are out on the streets.
Meanwhile, 450 anti-foreigner members of ONB have issued the following release:
The press campaign which denigrates NOB employees, accusing them of xenophobia is a campaign that distorts the truth.
Following research carried out among employees NOB demonstrated with audio-video evidence and witnesses, the cry considered xenophobic belonged to one person, male. The remaining employees declare that strongly distance ourselves from this unique person.
Media scandal created around the couple-Johan Kobborg Alina Cojocaru is a diversion intended to mislead public opinion and distract attention from the serious problems existing in Opera: abuses, discrimination, illegal activity, fraud.
NOB employees are attacked in the press precisely because they want to bring to light the truth and return the institution to legality and morality.
Please note that no operating system NOB brought our institution in this impossible situation, but disastrous management team’s Răzvan-Ioan Dincă, currently under criminal trial.
We ask insistently DNA (national anti-coruption agency – p.n.) to investigate urgently the economic and financial situation of the Bucharest National Opera.
We also believe that the statements of Mr. Ioan Holender is a defamation of employees NOB and an attempt to destabilize the national culture. We call on all operas and philharmonic orchestras of Romania to join our campaign to preserve tradition and national value and eradicate abuse and fraud in the current cultural system.
Specify in this way, we grieve the resignation of Mr Vlad Alexandrescu from the Minister of Culture. We believe that His Excellency has done a tremendously important and correct move when he called the Masters Vlad Conta and Tiberiu Soare to lead NOB. Moreover, under the leadership of this team of professionals, we are convinced that the Bucharest National Opera would have benefited from a functioning modern, European, which we have never opposed.
We oppose only the illegality, fraud and abuse!
It’s an unusually long tenure in any London orchestra, but Bob Hill has finally decided that now’s the time. He will give his last concert on Saturday with the orchestra he joined as principal clarinet back in 1972, when players were still paid in pounds, shillings and pence.
He played for music directors Bernard Haitink, Georg Solti, Klaus Tennstedt, Franz Welser-Most, Kurt Masur and Vladimir Jurowski.
We wish Bob and long and happy retirement.
To withdraw from one role is unfortunate. Two starts to look like contempt (pace O. Wilde).
The double-whammy that Anna Netrebko has inflicted on the Royal Opera House and the Met – agreeing at the first to sing Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust and at both to sing Bellini’s Norma – would not have been tolerated in former times.
Rudolf Bing fired Maria Callas from the Met for capriciousness.
Joe Volpe evicted Kathleen Battle from the Met for anti-social conduct.
The house, and the art, was always deemed to be greater than the whims of a singer, no matter how popular or epochal.
That rule no longer applies.
Anna Netrebko has not been banned from the ROH or the Met for leading them deliriously into planning productions that she would never fulfil. She has not been reprimanded, either. She can do this because she is the only living soprano with the power to command top prices in London and (almost) to fill a New York opera house that plays half-empty the rest of the year. She can do, in effect, as she pleases.
So can Jonas Kaufmann, the allround German tenor, who has cut his appearance at both houses to once a season – and has latterly cancelled both.
Both singers are now unassailable. They wield more clout than Peter Gelb and the next intendant put together.
Thankfully, neither is ego-crazed nor misanthropic. Both are courteous to a fault. But when push comes to shove, they push and the best-laid plans of the opera world fall down.
That is not a healthy situation.
The Vienna State Opera has announced the death of former ensemble member Gabriele Sima.
Winner of the 1979 Maria Callas Prize, Gabriele made her debut that year as Barbarina in Marriage of Figaro. She was an ensemble member from 1982 to 1999, singing 53 roles in 599 performances.
She also sang regularly at the Salzburg Festival and Hamburg State Opera.
Just tweeted: Are you an avid opera-tweeter or blogger? Would you like to cover #ENO1617 season launch next Thurs? DM us & we’ll send u an invite!
That looks like an excuse for the pros to stay away.
From a correspondent:
Royal Danish Opera just announced its next season.<
The homepage of the Royal Theatre has been hugely criticized for not being up to date since it was launched last year.
If you look into the content of next season not one single singer is mentioned. They are delayed! Now I haven’t seen the printed program but obviously it remains a secret which singers will perform next season.
The names at the foot of the page are company singers, not cast in Fairy Queen.
UPDATE: The singers’ names have now been issued on a separate online programme, but not on the main website which is clearly a disaster.
This still is from the new X-Men trailer.
The tenor and stage director Lincoln Clark, who looked after Seattle’s legendary first Ring for a decade after George London’s departure, has died.
A student of Lotte Lehmann, Lincoln sang in European opera houses in the 1960s.
A passing video picks out a piano at a Tyneside landfill site in the north east of England. Beside it, a clearance worker called Glenn Akenclose plays its last farewell.
