From our colleague Vesa Siren in Helsinki:
Valery Gergiev held a masterclass at Turku Music Festival yesterday. Two minutes before the concert he asked talented young Eero Lehtimäki to conduct the first piece in the concert, Mother Goose by Maurice Ravel.
“Sure”, Lehtimäki agreed. Managing Director Liisa Ketomäki asked artistic director, conductor VIlle Matvejeff to double-check this with Gergiev. “I know he can do it. He has good hands and he knows the piece”, said Gergiev.
One minute before the concert, the orchestra didn’t know. Lehtimäki walked on stage and conducted well, with Gergiev in the audience. “I told you”, Gergiev grinned and conducted the rest of the concert himself.
Later Gergiev raised a toast “to my new colleague Eero”. Previously, Eero was the “artistic misleader” of well known humour band Retuperän WPK but also a conducting student in Vienna and Helsinki and the winner of international NWBC conducting competition.
The following video has been posted today on Youtube by ‘AV Daniel Violin’, who has posted other videos about Daniel Olsen Violins. We are trying to establish if there is a connection.
The accompanying message reads: ‘SOS HELP. コメントを残して、広げてください。
日本でのマイホーム元奥さんにやらねだ
House demage by ex-wife
ショック！日本の皆さん見てください！！Shock, must see.’
It was decided today to convert the Old Royal High School building in Edinburgh, vacant since 1968, into new premises for St Mary’s Music School, the only independent music school in Scotland.
The building dates from 1825 and was once considered as a site for the Scottish Parliament.
The Bach-Archiv is planning to buy the original score of the cantata ‘O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort’, composed in 1724 and first sung on June 11 that year.
The manuscript, twelve sheets long, is being sold by the Paul Sacher Foundation, which specialises in 20th century music, and Leipzig has been given first refusal on the acquisition until the end of this year.
The asking price is just under two million Euros and it is reported that the archive has already organised the money from public and private funds.
There has been general consternation abroad at the decision by Zurich’s Tonhalle orchestra to sack its young music director, Lionel Bringuier, after just one four-year term.
Musicians tell us they found his rehearsals boring and unstructured and decided it was time for him to go.
Is that so? The most boring rehearsal conductor in recent memory was Claudio Abbado, who drove most of the London Symphony Orchestra and some in the Berlin Philharmonic to despair. But the players persisted until they got used to his methods and eventually they reaped great rewards.
Bringuier has been assistant to Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel, both of whom vouch for his talent. What he didn’t learn from them should have been augmented by experienced musicians in the Tonhalle orchestra. But they showed no patience or sympathy for a conductor on a learning curve and let it be known that they’d had enough.
A weak manager and a dumb board of bankers and local worthies simply did their bidding.
That’s how the Swiss run their orchestras.
In Geneva, where two managers walked out of the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande, they still don’t know if Jonathan Nott will sign his contract as music director. If he sees what’s happening in Zurich, he should decline.
Zurich and Geneva are the two premier orchestras in Switzerland and their clockwork has broken down.
Happily, the Lucerne Festival has saved the nations reputation. Its new music director Riccardo Chailly has begun with a Mahler Eighth blast and the orchestra is the envy of the continent.
Bringuier, meanwhile, made his Salzburg Festival debut this week.
The soprano put out an international call for illustrations to express the spirit of her new DG album, Verismo.
She picked an Argentine entrant as the winner.
Her name is Luz Diaz.
The biographer, opera librettist and novelist, one of the co-founders of the Salzburg Festival, has been finally commemorated in the town with a Stolperstein outside his former house, marking him as one of Hitler’s victims.
Zweig and his second wife, Lotte, committed suicide in Brazilian exile in February 1942.
7 Philip Willcher (Australian children’s composer and pianist) – 234
8 Valentina Lisitsa – 231
9 Khatia Buniatishvili – 223
10 Evgeny Kissin – 180
We have been sent a list of the 100 most searched classical pianists on Wikipedia, the global reference site. Since the site lists every musician who ever touched a keyboard as a pianist, it’s not suprising that Mozart comes first with an average 5,631 searches a day, Beethoven second with 4,668 and Chopin third with about half as many.
The big eye-opener is who comes fourth. It’s John Cale, one of the founders of Velvet Underground and about as classical as Johnny Rotten.
5 Gershwin
6 Liszt
7 Stravinsky
8 Ludovico Einaudi, the icy Italian minimalist
9 Herbie Hancock
10 Leonard Bernstein, averaging 1,077 searches a day
11 Rachmaninov
12 Shostakovich.
No one else tops 1,000 searches a day.
The findings, collated over viewings in the past two weeks, suggest that Wikipedia needs to tighten up its search criteria to define what is classical and what is a pianist. Among other personalities listed are Samantha Bentley, an English porn star (421 views) and Mark Rutte, Dutch prime minister (338). It may be safely assumed that those searching their names on Wikipedia are not planning to book them for a Liszt concerto.
From the above data, we have compiled a mini list of professional concert pianists still alive and playing. Click here for thrills and spills.
Musicians of the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra in upstate New York have authorised a strike if they don’t get a pay rise before the year is out. It would be the first work stoppage in the history of the orchestra, founded in 1929.
Buffalo News reports that the 74 musicians are paid $9,230 for the nine-week season, with a housing allowance of about $6,000.
The music director is Rossen Milanov.
The Brazilian composer Sergio Roberto de Oliveira has started a video diary about his life with pancreatic cancer. His first entries were in Portuguese, but he has just posted a frank, moving conversation in fluent English about music, cancer and losing the woman he was about to marry. ‘That was harder for me than the cancer news,’ he reflects.
Sergio, who is 46, is unflinching, honest and wonderfully positive. ‘The cancer is a blessing for me,’ he says. ‘It teaches me to respect myself, to slow down.’
Watch.
‘I am just a Brazilian artist. With cancer.’
Send Sergio a message. He will appreciate your response.
The Scotsman has news of a ground-breaking deal between Edinburgh and Adelaide that may set a trend for 21st century festival management:
The Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe (will) collaborate with their equivalent events in Adelaide on everything from box office systems and promotional campaigns to bringing down the costs for performers. New shows will be premiered in either Edinburgh or Adelaide and then go on tour to the other city…
EIF director Fergus Linehan said: “Other than Adelaide, there are very few events with the structure of a formal festival at the centre of it and the Fringe around it…. A bit of this is about developing shows together, but it’s also about looking at the way things are funded in future.’
