The Mozarteum had plenty of time to find  chief conductor to succeed Ivor Bolton, who is leaving after 12 years. But it seems they can’t.

 

ivor bolton

 

They’ll muddle through next year with Giovanni Antonini as principal guest conductor, splitting himself three ways with his own ensemble Il Giardino Armonico and the Basle chamber orchestra.

Ivor, for his part, has been given the title of Honorary Conductor for Life and plans to work with the group several times a year.

She featured twice on Slipped Disc last week, but we accept there may be other reasons that Rachel Barton Pine is now top of the Nielsen Soundscan charts with the complete Bach partitas and sonatas on the Avie label.

On the down side, her top-selling record sold fewer than 250 copies in the US, and the next-best album sold 150.

This week’s classical sales may be the lowest we have ever seen.

rachel barton pine

Contrary to its previous message, ENO has just tweeted:

UPDATE: Glenn Close WILL sing the role of Norma Desmond in tonight’s performance of Sunset Boulevard. (Mon 25 April)

We’re delighted to announce Glenn’s return but also want to send HUGE thanks to for stepping in the role

She must have been under a lot of pressure.

glenn-close-west-end-debut1-800x390

The Hollywood star is still* unwell, ENO have announced.

Ria Jones will sing the lead role in Sunset Boulevard, amid rising demands for refunds from disappointed ticketholders.

ria jones

See comments here.

*One readers has pointed out it’s the fifth show she has missed; there should have been two on Saturday.

The tenor is to be awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz, Germany’s highest civil honour on Wednesday.

The award will be made in Munich by the Bavarian premier, Horst Seehofer.

kaufmann bbc

Graham Spicer has been to visit the Casa Lucia Valentini Terrani in Padua, a subsidised hotel where cancer patients can stay while receiving daily therapies at the nearby hospital. It is a profoundly moving memorial to a much-loved singer, who died of leukaemia, aged 51.

Casa Lucia Valentini Terrani

Alberto Terrani, Valentini’s husband, says: ‘While Lucia Valentini was in America for treatment she was shocked by the fact that relatives of patients who were with her in the hospital, were spending the nights in their cars as they couldn’t afford the cost of renting a room.’ So she asked her husband to pay for a hotel for those who were sleeping in their cars…

Read on here.

Lucia Valentini Terrani

The semi-finalists have been announced for the Kathleen Ferrier Award at the Wigmore Hall on Wednesday.

First to sing among the last 12 will be Grace Durham, 27, a mezzo-soprano member of the Glyndebourne Opera chorus, and daughter of the much-lamented comedian Victoria Wood, who died last week.

Line-up here.

grace durham

The Latvian tenor Aleks­andrs Antonenko has been singing a terrific run of Otellos at the Met but something went awry on Saturday night and by the final act he was running out of voice.

Panic calls to the understudy.

Francesco Anile, 54, was in his dressing room, texting, never expecting to make a Met debut. He was cover. Not much longer before he could go home.

Then the call came. He had five minutes to get on stage. Throwing a cape over his t-shirt and blue jeans, he vocally strangled Desdemona and sang through to the end, earning a rapturous personal ovation.

francesco anile

AP report here.

A twist on The Philadelphia Story, sent to us by Clinton F. Nieweg.

philadelphia hall

 

 

From Carol Westfall, Orchestra Librarian Volunteer:

 

At the morning rehearsal on Tuesday, December 3, 2002, The Philadelphia Orchestra was rehearsing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring with Maestro Eschenbach. They were using Clinton F. Nieweg’s 2000 corrected edition. Clinton suggested I go listen to the rehearsal since I had worked for almost two years with him on the project. No one was at the rehearsal except the musicians on stage, so I stayed out of sight on the Second Tier. This was the final rehearsal so there weren’t very many stops and starts.

 

All of a sudden the lights near the stage started to flash and before anyone could react to why that was happening, the sprinkler system turned on and flooded the stage. Musicians scurried everywhere to get their instruments to dry ground. Some jumped off the front of the stage. Others ran to the side of the stage. Still others dashed to the back of the stage which had remained drier than the front. I don’t recall anyone rescuing their music at that point. The obvious concern was for the instruments.

 

After watching all this in disbelief, I hurried back to The PO Library to see what was being done to save Clinton’s edition. The library staff and stage crew had collected the soggy, dripping parts and delivered them to the Library. We spread them out on the carpet outside the library door and took inventory and did a quick assessment of what could be saved.

 

A few minutes later, Maestro Eschenbach came by to see what we were doing and to add his support. That is the first time I heard the phrase Rite of Sprinklers uttered by the Maestro himself.

 

We got some hair dryers from somewhere, perhaps the guest artists’ dressing room and many sheets of music were hung on lines draped around the library. Every effort was made to salvage each piece of music we could. Some sheets were even ironed to get the wrinkles out. I remember we were not able to save them all. The string parts were the most affected since they were closest to the sprinklers.

 

Fourteen years later, I attended another Philadelphia Orchestra concert to hear The Rite of Spring performed. The Orchestra played a beautiful Symphony #1 by Prokofiev. Then they began Ginastera’s Variaciones Concertantes. The lovely cello and harp section was just concluding when the lights started to flash just as they had done in 2002.

 

Sirens blared and an insistent and very loud recorded voice told us to evacuate immediately due to threat of fire. Thankfully, no sprinklers this time! It was a false alarm and the concert continued about forty minutes later. The Rite of Spring was performed without incident this time. But those flashing lights certainly brought back some vivid memories of the Deluge of 2002.

rite mss

The Turkish state has wheeled out its diplomatic big guns to attack a forthcoming Dresden Symphony concert making the First World War massacre of Christian Armenians by Moslem Turks.

The Turks see red when the word ‘genocide’ is used. The number of Armenians murdered in the state-inspired slaughter varies from 800,000 to 1.5 million.

Turkey has neither admitted nor atoned for the atrocity.

More here.

armenia7

There were extraordinary scene at the Carl Nielsen finals in Odense on Friday night.

The jury president, Nikolai Znajder, having announced that he did not approve of any of the three finalists approved by the rest of the jury, proceeded to add an extra award for Slipped Disc ‘for creative journalism’.

We accept it with pleasure and pride. Every single word in our earlier report was sourced from reputable Danish media and eyewitnesses.

The award ended, as we predicted, in total shambles. Read more here.

znaider

UPDATE: In addition to the three designated prizes, Znaider inserted three more for the eliminated semi-finalists: ‘We have heard many young musicians over the last week who are at different stages of their development. The reality of competitions means there will always be talented violinists who won’t make it through to the next round, even if they show great promise and potential. The jury has therefore decided to create a joint fourth prize which will be awarded to this year’s three semi-finalists each of whom will receive 1000 euros: JI Won Song (23), Karen Kido (21) and Soo-Hyun Park (26).’

First prize was awarded jointly to 23 year old Ji Yoon Lee from South Korea and 25 year old Liya Petrova from Bulgaria and third prize was awarded to 25 year old Luke Hsu from the United States.

Anthea Kreston’s weekly diary on life in the international Artemis Quartet. Compelling, as ever:

anthea kreston

The North America tour is complete. 11 days, 9 concerts, one video session, one photo session, several interviews, two trains, one rental car, one cold, 10 flights, one massage, three HIIT exercise sessions, one visit to Niagara Falls, one Bikram Yoga. Chicago, NYC, Schnectady, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Toronto, Connecticut, NYC, Montreal.  Reviews were great, audiences fantastic, quartet grew in each concert – personalities flourished and group sounds meshed. To be totally honest, it was in some ways much harder than I anticipated. In other ways (such as a quartet flow and group cohesion) it vastly exceeded my expectations.

During tour, the daily schedule (of course every day is different, but this is a general schedule) goes something like this.

6 am wake up, shower and eat

7 am leave for airport (train/car)

2 pm arrive at destination city

3 pm arrive at hotel – options in this two hours and 15 minutes are: eat your most nourishing meal of the day, practice, nap, FaceTime family, exercise

5:15 pm leave for hall

5:30-7 pm Beast building and rehearsal

8 pm concert

10:30 pm break-down stage

11:30 pm back to hotel to pack

The obvious difficulties here are being able to be well-rested, focused for the concert (of which the first several are jet-lagged), and well-nourished. There is often not a good breakfast option (this is a big difference from the European tours), and dinner is not really possible either. Eating after the concert is too late, and before there is not time. Our back-stage rider includes things like fruit, cheese, crackers, nuts, and drinks. This happened more often than not, which is a life-saver. In Chicago, my mother delivered four emergency food bags for us with trail mix, powdered miso soup, and peanut butter and jelly.

I have gotten great advice from teachers over the years – two bits of which I follow religiously. Well, actually three. The first was from Phil Setzer from the Emerson Quartet. He told me to buy a new pack of underwear before every tour, because the endless washing in the sink every night is a real bummer. I can tell you that by the end of the tour I could smell my suitcase when it was zipped up. And I don’t even want to talk about how I smelled personally. Ok – that was gross. Second bit of advice – never get on a plane without an emergency peanut-butter and jelly. My teacher said – “you may not eat one of them for a year’s worth of flights, but one day it will save you like you never thought possible!”.  The third piece of advice was from Ida Kavafian. When I was studying with her I was just beginning to play professional concerts (read:getting paid to play violin). She said to me, “Anthea, you sound great, but from now on you can’t miss any more notes. People won’t pay you if you do”. Tell it like it is! Love that.

So – the hard part of tour. I had experienced, during our first tour in Europe, an interesting swing in the group rehearsal and atmosphere dynamic around concert number 5.  The comments during our dress rehearsal were shorter, more to the point, less finessed and with a frustrated tone of voice. There was even what I would classify as our first fight. I spoke to a quartet member after the rehearsal and they said – “oh – that always happens around concert number 5, I don’t know why”.  Incidentally, my brother-in-law had recently mentioned something like this as well – the 5th concert annoying rehearsal – which he has experienced a lot touring with a quartet. Hmm – I wonder if this is fixable?  I decided to bring fresh strawberries to the next rehearsal. Maybe that helped a little.

So – as we approached concert 5 on the North American tour, I decided to head it off and see if we could just sail through and not get testy. I wrote a Group Sworn Statement and asked everyone to recite it with me. It went over better with some than others, but I think it could certainly be a good thing to read together for any group – could even work for an entire orchestra, I suppose.

Here goes:

5th Concert Group Sworn Statement

Raise your left hand, and place your right on your music.

I, (fill in the blank), so solemnly swear the following:

  • I am tired
  • I am slightly annoyed at everyone
  • I wish my suitcase was better organized, like it used to be at the beginning of this tour
  • I am experiencing some slight digestive problems because of random nutritional inconsistencies beyond my control
  • I wish EVERYONE would FINALLY do my idea at (moment of silence to fill in the spot/spots)

I hereby pledge to

  • try to be positive as much as I possibly can under these extremely annoying circumstances
  • Only say comments that are uplifting and encouraging
  • Realize that we actually sound pretty good
  • Eat some more fruit

Optional group activity

So – this actually worked. We didn’t get annoyed. We stayed nice and generous. Fantastic!

I know that I am usually very optimistic and relentlessly goal-oriented and problem-solving. But this is not to say that I am always happy.  No one is. I had a hard time around concert 8.  I was lonely, overwhelmed, and home-sick. No one answered my calls for two days. I felt isolated.  I cried. The quartet saw me cry. But, this is normal. This is ok. I got hugs, Jason called, I made a list of things that were stressing me out, and gave the list to everyone. Some things can be fixed (Gregor has gone to Ikea and hired someone to begin installing our kitchen, I almost have health insurance, I hired a German tutor).  Some can’t (I miss my family, friends and Oregon).  And some will take time (finding our new family balance and adjusting to our new home). This is not easy at all. But we can do it. I know we can.

I saw so many old friends on this tour – old students, colleagues, family, friends. I even had a friend fly from Oregon to see our Carnegie concert. This was a great boost to me – thank you all for coming!  Sunday I head back to Berlin with Jason and the girls. We are in Oregon for a short vacation and to wrap up the things we didn’t have a chance to finish before- sell the car, etc.Tomorrow we go to the Saturday Market and meet friends at our favorite bakery. Our footprint here is nearly erased, but I have every confidence in the shape of our new family footprint in Germany. With patience, all things will come.