The annual survey of conductor salaries compiled by Drew McManus on Adaptistration is about to blow the socks off the music industry. Drew’s pay list for 2013/14, which goes live in the next hour, will reveal that compensation at the Dallas Symphony that year went way off the scale.

The music director Jaap Van Zweden, little known at the time beyond Dallas, was paid $5,110,538.

That’s five million bucks in plain English, paid via his company, Bajada Productions LLC.

There are more details on Adaptistration.

Five million is miles off the grid.

It is almost double the squeeze that Christoph Eschenbach puts on the National Symphony and it beats by a clear two million the $3,291,791 paid to Lorin Maazel in his final year as music director at the New York Philharmonic, which was the previous all-time high.

It is also more than three times what Jaap Van Zweden was paid the year before.

And it’s not just Dallas that has questions to answer.

There will be demands to know what the New York Phil is planning to pay Van Zweden, 55, when he becomes its music director in 2018. Is this unremarkable Dutchman worth more than any conductor alive or dead?

van zweden lebrecht

All the other million-earners here.

Who’d pay a maestro a loyalty bonus?

More signs of nervous crackdown in Russia.

A cellist, Semyon Lashkin, was sitting on a street bench practising a few summer riffs with a couple of pals when police seized him and his cello and swept them off to the cells.

Semyon has been charged with organising a public rally (Art. 20.2.2, p. Ako 1) and could be hit with a hefty fine.

He was released after midnight but his cello has been kept as evidence.

Semyon, 27, has gone on Facebook to protest his arrest.

There is video showing the street was empty at the time.

Please share this information widely to help Semyon regain his cello and his clean police record.

 

semyon lakshin

 

 

The following notice went out today to all UK members:

Musicians are better off in a Britain that is part of the European Union (EU).  That’s why we’re calling on all Musician Union members to vote to remain in the EU.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve had debates, flotillas and angry jibes traded over what makes Britain stronger and safer. For us, as the Musicians’ Union, it’s about what protects you as musicians and the life you work hard to make.

 

Thanks to the EU:

– European Copyright Directives protect your intellectual property rights, and your income

– Open borders make touring easier and cheaper

– Health and safety legislation keeps you safe wherever you work

– The Working Time Directive means part-time instrumental teachers can get holiday pay and sick pay.

 

The European Union also allows us to work on transnational issues that affect you.

Together, we’re fighting for legislation to make it easier for you to travel with instruments on planes. We’re working with other musicians’ unions across Europe to get legislation implemented at the European level that would force airlines to act.

 

We do not believe the EU is perfect.

We still lobby hard to make copyrights stronger, touring easier, and health and safety work better for you. But without the EU we have to question whether these rights would be protected at all and, if so, how strong those rights and protections would be.

 

That’s why we’re calling on all musicians to vote for Britain to remain in the European Union.

This is Carmen, currently at Opera Australia.

The role is sung by the French mezzo Clementine Margaine, reckoned to be one of the most seductive interpreters of the moment.

So why kit her out in a full-length overcoat?

Correction: It is Natalie Aroyan as Micaëla. The point still stands.

carmen coat

The director is John Bell, the designer Michael Scott-Mitchell.

The ticket-sales page bears no visual relation to the production.

Drew McManus has produced his indispensable annual account of orchestral salaries, based on IRS returns.

The 2013/14 list has more coherence than some past charts in which orchs tried to bury the cash by means of creative accounting and privacy claims. Some hidden benefits may still be excluded.

The top pay chart looks like this:

1 Deborah Borda, Los Angeles Philharmonic   $1,586,820*

borda dudamel

 

(*includes presidency of Hollywood Bowl)

2 Mark Volpe, Boston Symphony                        $852,607

3 Allison Vulgamore, Philadelphia O.                 $733,242

4 Gary Hanson, Cleveland O.                               $646,813

5 Deborah Rutter, Chicago Symphony               $633,619

6 Matthew Van Besien, NY Phil                           $626,489

7 Brent Assink San Francisco Sym                      $557,312

No-one else breaks half a million.

Good to see three women in the top five.

Full report here.

 

 

This we like:

James Nicolson wins Scottish Orchestra’s national competition for composers aged 12-18 years.

Fellow competitor Tom Aitken’s work to be performed at the opening of Scottish Parliament in July.

Would never happen at Westminster.

 

scottish parliament

Dallas Opera is setting the pace for young women conductors. Out of 156 applicants for the next course, six have been selected. They are:

ELIZABETH ASKREN (USA)

Elizabeth Askren has worked as Assistant Music Director in leading European venues (Théâtre des Champs Elysées, The Concertgebouw, etc.) and has guest conducted orchestras such as the London Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.  Débuts for the 2015-16 season include concerts with the Romanian National Opera in Cluj and the Opera Orchestra of Toulon.  Ms. Askren is a laureate of France’s ADAMI, and has received fellowships from the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Royaumont Foundation, and the Aldeburgh Festival.  A finalist candidate for the Mahler Competition, she was invited by Lorin Maazel as “Apprentice Conductor” for the inaugural season of the Castleton Festival in Virginia. She is the subject of several radio and press interviews, and is currently a Young Leader of the French American Foundation.  Ms. Askren holds diplomas in piano and conducting from the Juilliard School, Oberlin Conservatory, and the Conducting Institute of Bard in the United States, and the Schola Cantorum and the Ecole Normale de Musique in France.

 

MIHAELA CESA-GOJE (ROMANIA)

Mihaela Cesa-Goje gained widespread attention in 2009 as the winner of the Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship founded by Marin Alsop and in 2010, a Conducting Grant from the League of American Orchestras.  In 2011, she was awarded the Dudamel Fellowship from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and later that same year, was selected from a field of 160 candidates for a masterclass with Bernard Haitink and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.  Earlier in her career, Ms. Cesa-Goje received the “Sandor Vegh Prize” from the Romanian Mozart Society for an outstanding performance of Mozart’s “Der Schauspiele Direktor” at the Cluj National Opera, Romania.  In 2005, she completed her Conducting Diploma at the Royal Academy of Music in London and was awarded the Irene Burcher Prize.  In 2013, she earned a graduate degree in conducting from Gh Dima Music Academy in Cluj, Romania, where she studied with Florentin Mihaescu. She also studied with Harold Farberman, Gustav Meier, Patrick Russill and Roland Börger.  Ms. Cesa-Goje is regularly invited to Cluj National Opera. In her first season (2014) she conducted eight different titles.

 

mihaela cesa

ALEXANDRA CRAVERO (FRANCE)

As a musician of many talents with a charismatic personality and artistic sensibility, Alexandra Cravero has quickly earned the reputation of being one of this generation’s conductors to watch.  With a National Diploma and Masters in viola and conducting from the National French Conservatory, Alexandra was also finalist at the Besancon, Pedrotti, and Cadaques competitions.  She has assisted Pierre Boulez, Kurt Masur, Tito Ceccherini, Patrick Davin and directed the BBC, the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic, the Sofia Radio, the Theatre de La Monnaie and the Opera National du Rhin Orchestras.  On the operatic stage, she has directed, among others, Annick Massis, Michael Spyres, Magdalena Kožená, and Etienne Dupuis.  Her vast operatic repertoire spans many centuries: Carmen, The Pearl Fishers, Norma, Faust, Porgy and Bess, The Cunning LittleVixen, Reigen, and Doctor Atomic, to name a few.  Upcoming engagements will see Alexandra Cravero direct The Tales of Hoffmann, Tosca, La traviata, and the Orchestre National de Lille at the Paris Philharmonic Hall.
TIANYI LU (NEW ZEALAND)

Now based in the United Kingdom, Tianyi Liu is the Junior Fellow in Conducting at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and Music Director Designate of the Bristol Metropolitan Orchestra. She has been assistant conductor toThomas Søndergård with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Sir Mark Elder with the Hallé, Alice Farnham with the Welsh National Youth Opera and Carlo Rizzi at the RWMCD.  She is regularly engaged by orchestras throughout Wales and New Zealand and was Music Director of The Magic Flute with Opera Otago.  Ms. Liu has studied with David Jones, John Hopkins and Uwe Grodd and has attended masterclasses with Bernard Haitink, Neemi Järvi, Sian Edwards, Alexander Polynichko, Marin Alsop and Kenneth Kiesler.  She was voted as a finalist at the twelfth ‘Interaktion’ conducting workshop by players of the Berlin Philharmonic and professional players in Germany.

 

CHAOWEN TING (Taiwan)

Winner of the 2009 International Conductors’ Workshop and Competition, Chaowen Ting currently serves as Conductor of the Georgia Tech Symphony Orchestra. A protégé of Bernard Haitink, Ting studied with the maestro at Lucerne Festival and was later invited by Haitink to observe his work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  Outside of the U.S., she has conducted the Lucerne Festival Strings (Switzerland), Mihail Jora Bacău Philharmonic (Romania), Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra (Croatia), St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic (Russia), and Orquesta Filarmónica de Honduras (Honduras).  She won the 2013 Bruno Walter Memorial Scholarship and was a Conducting Fellow at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.  In addition to her symphonic repertoire, opera productions she directed received honors from National Opera Association’s Opera Production Competitions for two consecutive years.

 

ZOE ZENIODI (GREECE)

Zoe Zeniodi has conducted productions at the Florida Grand Opera, Greek National Opera, the Onassis Cultural Center and guest conducted all the major Greek orchestras as well as Tatarstan National Symphony Orchestra, the Brno Philharmonic, Palm Beach Symphony, New Florida Philhamornic, and JONDE, among others.  She is currently the Music Director of Broward Symphony Orchestra, Momentum Athens Chamber Orchestra and the Associate Music Director of the Festival of the Aegean.  Previous positions include: Chief Conductor of MOYSA, Assistant/Cover Conductor for Florida Grand Opera, Music Director of Alhambra Orchestra and Associate Conductor of Frost Symphony Orchestra. She has released five CD recordings of contemporary music.  Ms. Zeniodi holds a DMA in Orchestral Conducting from the University of Miami and also studied at the Royal College of Music and the Mozarteum, Salzburg.

 

zoe zeniodi

A must-read critique by Andrew Grossman in, inexplicably, a site called Pop Matters. The headline is: Why is Opera so Derided in America?

Sample:

The very existence of opera in 21st century America seems a defiant anachronism, a magnificent corpse that, inexplicably, still breathes. Whatever cultural capital opera retains in Europe or Russia is nowhere to be found in America. What fills opera houses is an overgrown swamp of verismo, a “cinematic” mode that sweetly colonized the operatic imagination long ago. There are bold new opera productions, of course, but the wild machinations of avant-garde directors only expose an old repertoire needing far more than sexy revisionism.

A desiccated bel canto score will thwart attempted (post-)modernizations as a moribund body rejects a transplanted heart with too fast a beat. An all-nude production of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots relocated to a ‘80s-era Caribbean cruise ship will still sound like Meyerbeer, even if appendages swing with abandon and the director splays the bodies of Huguenots slain in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre throughout the ship’s late-night comedy club. Likewise, a sanguine director can relocate Bellini’s Norma to an outer-space brothel and invest the action with robot sex and multi-breasted aliens, but you’ll still have to listen to Bellini for three hours. 

Read on here.

Wagners Das Rheingold Metropolitan Opera 2010

This is the new Alban Berg monument in front of the Vienna Opera.

 

berg denkmal

photo (c) lukas beck

Doesn’t get much uglier, but maybe that’s the message they want to convey.

First review of last night’s Manon Lescaut, set by director Robert Carsen in a shopping mall, depicts Anna as a dedicated Shopping Queen.

Don’t they know she never shops in malls?

She does her shopping at Chopard.

netrebko chopard

 

Review here.

 

The soprano Julia Kogan has filed Defence and Counterclaim at the High Court in London, asserting her rights to be credited as a co-author of the Florence Foster Jenkins film, starring Meryl Streep. Her claim is strongly contested by her former boyfriend, Nicholas Martin, who is credited as the sole scriptwriter. Mr Martin’s defence team maintains that any contrary claim may be considered defamatory.

Meryl Streep is tipped for an Oscar for her portrayal of the title role.

We asked Ms Kogan for her side of the story, based on her court submissions.

Julia Kogan, Opera Singer, 2014, Credit: Johan Persson

Slipped Disc: Where did you come across Florence Foster Jenkins? 
I came across FFJ in my sophomore year of university as a classical Vocal Performance and English Literature major in the US.

What was your reaction?
I laughed till I cried.  I was just starting to learn the great coloratura arias myself and was finding them fiendishly difficult.  FFJ became a permanent source of comfort and relief for me as I struggled to improve.  “Inspiration” is definitely the wrong word.

Had you written a film script before?
I was obsessed with writing (and reading, I hasten to add) since I was a child.  My mother tells me she and my father came into the living room one day when I was three and found me reading a newspaper.  At university, it became increasingly obvious that I had to choose either music or literature as my focus, since both demanded an all-out commitment of time, energy and resources.  I decided that I could and would write later when I had more to say.  I wrote three children’s books when my own sons were young, which are hopefully about to be published by Parragon, and I managed to combine my literary tendencies with my singing work.  My second recording, “Troika: Russia’s westerly poetry in three orchestral song cycles “,  is almost a cross-over album in an untypical sense of the word.  It combines music and literature and examines them as reflectors of cultural identity.  I then adapted and translated a work by Marina Tsvetaeva to create “The Lad”, an opera-ballet that was to premier at English National Ballet (before the then director Wayne Eagling left) and had started researching “The Lost Songs of Hollywood”, a fascinating story that I wrote up and presented as a documentary on BBC Radio 4 (with Nicholas Martin’s input at the early development phase and Chris Elcombe and Dave King’s wonderful work as producers).  In other words, writing and the creation of literary content, in both documentary and fiction, was very much part of my life.  Then, things took an unexpected, and possibly even cinematic, turn.

Within four days of meeting Nicholas Martin in September of 2011, I was nearly killed in a car crash while on my way to record another CD at Champs Hill with my pianist friend Marc Verter.  Nicholas, who had recently lost his job writing for Midsomer Murders, began talking to me about his work, which I found both riveting and entirely up my street.  The development of screenplays quickly became our relationship, or vice versa, as I tried to recover from my injuries.

I started out by giving Nicholas feedback on his previous projects, then by pitching in to help with new ideas he was developing, and finally by suggesting new projects to him and collaborating on every aspect of the writing and development of our creations for film and television.  The lines between our private and professional lives were completely blurred. We wound up working on many projects together, four of which I consider to be “co-creations” because they didn’t and couldn’t have existed without me.  I’ve continued to write and am now working on three new screenplays.
 
What was your response when Mr Martin told you he had sold the script?
Well, I was thrilled.  I had asked to be considered his official co-author from the start, but Nicholas refused, citing the potential for conflict and his history as a screenwriter as reasons to be the only publicly credited writer.  I accepted his reasoning largely because he was so openly acknowledging of my work in private – I have letters and chats where he gushes about how much he loves working with me.  I also accepted it because I was in the most vulnerable state of my life at the time.  Lost story short, I continued to work with him while he put his name alone on the scripts.  Contracts were the last thing on my mind, as was the possibility that he would rewrite history in its entirety and take all credit and money. Why do women (mostly) get themselves into these sorts of situations?  The explanation would be long, personal and ridden with psycho-babble.

Did you meet the production team?
I met Michael Kuhn when he came to an Ariadne auf Naxos performance in which I sang Zerbinetta in May of 2014 and Stephen Frears in October of 2014.  Stephen opened the conversation by saying “And I suppose that this all came from you?”, before I launched into my background with FFJ’s story with Nicholas sitting next to me.  I worked with the production team on various musical issues in the script, for which I was also never paid or credited.  After my relationship with Nick ended, no one thought to invite me to a single day’s filming, the premier, or anything else.  They had no further use for me.

A great deal of effort is now being expended on calling me a singer and singing teacher, lest anyone should think I might have other marketable skills.  Apologies for the sarcasm.  But actually and factually, being a writer is neither a diploma nor a paycheck.  It is a skill, one that enables a person to voice thoughts and emotions in a way that touches others.  The proof is in the pudding (or rather the virtual ink) with writers, and I don’t think anyone can take my love of writing or my ability to do it away from me.

A word about why we are talking about this now:  I’ve kept quiet about this conflict for years because I didn’t want to cause trouble for anyone.  I had hoped we could come to some sort of agreement privately.  When Nicholas Martin issued legal proceedings against me in April, it brought his Particulars of Claim into the public domain and the whole case into the public eye.  I now feel obliged to try and correct some of the inaccuracies that were reported in the press.  People love a good, simple story about a dagger-wielding opera singer taking her revenge on her ex-partner (The Times, in true tabloid fashion, published a photo of one of my “Queen of the Night” performances to ensure I looked appropriately furious).  That simply isn’t the reality of it.

Was this a factor in your breakup?
We argued increasingly about the film once the project began taking off.  It started with his rewriting of the narrative surrounding the idea – something Nicholas had always readily credited me with.  In fact, I had spoken to a friend about the possibility of working on a French adaptation of a play about FFJ, which is why FFJ’s story was on my mind at that time.  I knew we had to hurry if we were to beat everyone else to the punch.  It is the most colourful story in all of classical singing, in my opinion.  But in Nicholas’ new narrative, the idea suddenly became his and something he stumbled across accidentally.  I objected vehemently to this.

The week Meryl Streep joined the project, Nicholas became visibly miserable at my presence in our home. When I questioned him, he told me that he felt like no part of his life belonged to him anymore.  I moved out that day, though the relationship continued on and off until October 2014, while our friendship and much-reduced collaboration continued until he broke off all contact with me in March of 2015.  I had asked about my share of the film money – a share which he himself had suggested.  By then, he was denying that I should be paid or credited for anything at all.

Have you seen the finished film?
I saw the film several days ago.  It was surreal for me to be sitting there in the audience watching it.  I amused my fiancé by speaking the lines along with the characters.

Anyone who has ever been interviewed by Israeli media will flinch at the directness of the question, Itzhak takes it with practised equanimity.

What kind of a teacher are you? “I think an okay one,” he laughed a sonorous, free laugh, and not for the last time in our conversation. “I’m not old fashioned; I don’t believe in forcing students, and I remember how much I hated practicing myself. My first teacher would blame my parents if I didn’t play well, ‘You don’t make him practice!’ Even today, I hate practicing, but at least I understand that it’s important.”

perlman juilliard

 

 

How do you identify talent? “Sometimes it’s enough to look them in the eye. Once a child understands what he’s playing, I can identify that in his playing. The really talented have special instincts and an ear that reacts in a way that others don’t.”

 

Can anybody learn to play? If I practice 12 hours a day, will my zero talent turn into something? “Maybe. They say that a good teacher is measured by what he manages to get out of average talent, not out of geniuses. Sometimes, you teach someone for two years, and suddenly, during a lesson, something happens, this thing that you’ve been waiting for breaks out. It can bring me to tears. But zero talent is maybe a bit of a problem,” he laughs aloud again.

More here on Ynet.