The writer, promoter and musicologist Philippe Beaussant has died at the age of 86.

Founder of the  Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, he wrote important biographies of Lully and Rameau.

Mark Steven Vandendool, 24, took to robbing banks in order to raise funds to get into McGill University’s Schulich School of Music in Canada.

He got caught before he got accepted. Read here.

The Scottish composer James MacMillan has released the text of a speech he is giving next week, recasting organised religion as a radical element in art rather than, as widely seen, a conservative one.

He says: ‘From Elgar to Messiaen, from Stravinsky to Schnittke, from Schoenberg to Jonathan Harvey one constantly hears talk of transcendence, mystery and vision.’

Macmillan, a devout Catholic, argues that ‘despite the retreat of faith in our society, composers over the last century or so have never given up on their search for the sacred…’

He adds: ‘Perhaps that search now, as it is for any artist who stands out against transient fashions of the cultural bien pensant, is the bravest, most radical and counter-cultural vision a creative person can have, in the attempt to re-sacralise the world around us.’

Discuss.

The death has been reported of  Tadatsugu Sasaki, Executive Director of the Japan Performing Arts Foundation (NBS) and General Director of The Tokyo Ballet. He was 83.

In terms of ballet development, he was known as the Japanese Diaghilev. With his NBS hat on, he was an important opera and concerts impresario, importing European ensembles on a regular basis.

There were three woman candidates in the last 14.

Now they are down to seven in the quarter-finals:

Kah Chun Wong, Keitaro Harada, Sergey Neller, Paolo Bortolameolli, Valentin Uryupin, Gemma New (pictured), Gabriel Bebeselea.

Off-topic, except for Londoners, for whom this picture may prove iconic.

The first Moslem Mayor of London chose as his first official engagement a Holocaust commemoration ceremony.

He promised a policy of ‘zero tolerance towards antisemitism’ and posed for photos with Chief Rabbi Mirvis and the new Israeli ambassador, Mark Regev.

More here.

photo: JC/John Rifkin

Hours after Ali Rahbari’s departure, the Roudaki Foundation that runs the Tehran Symphony Orchestra named a new chief conductor, Shahrdad Rohani.

The name is unfamiliar to us.

According to the Roudaki Foundation, Rohani has previously conducted the RPO in London, the Minnesota Orchestra, Colorado Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony and the American Youth Philharmonic.

Renowned for his synthesizer versions of classical works,  Isao Tomita died on May 5, aged 84.

Tomita earned his greatest success with a 1974 album, Snowflakes Are Dancing. Samples below.

The Tehran Symphony Orchestra’s contract talks with its employer, the Roudaki Foundation, have now collapsed altogether and its music director Ali Alexander Rahbari is leaving the country.

Rahbari had hoped to transfer the management of the orchestra to the Ministry of Culture, but that scheme has failed. Players have not been paid for up to eight months.

Plans to perform at the Shanghai Music Festival have been cancelled. The Iranian government lack the political will to maintain the orchestra, despite its prestige value.

Members of the Budapest Festival Orchestra gave a free downtown concert to protest at the city’s decimation of the group’s subsidy. Cuts, announced last week, amount to 80% of the previous grant.

Concertmaster Holly Mulcahy is having spring worries about her working kit.

A few months back I unthinkingly tried playing a $4 million violin along with a $100,000 bow. Nearly everything about the pair made me feel like I could play anything. I sounded amazing and the lack of effort to produce such a wonderful sound made playing joyous. My professional self esteem went through the roof but playing on that fantastic duo instantly made me see flaws in my own violin and bow, perhaps much more than really existed. It became very difficult to enjoy my own instruments and that is what started my violinist’s version of “does this make me look fat?”

Read on here.

There is a concert of Carmina Burana tonight at Kuala Lumpur but it may not take place.

A group of five international schools under British principal Andrew Auster had hired the DFP (Dewan Filharmonik Petronas) hall for a 250 voice student choir and a professional orchestra, made up of National Symphony players and freelancers.

But when the hall management saw the list of players they objected to the concertmaster Brian Larson and principal viola Toko Inomoto, two musicians who are suing the Malaysian Philharmonic for unfair dismissal. The hall said the presence of these musicians would damage its brand and demanded their removal.

Since the event is a commercial booking and not a hall promotion this is discriminatory. The two banned players have notified Musician’s Unions in the UK, USA, Canada, and Europe with a request to intensify sanctions.