In his first discussion of the incident since he took down an audience shouter at the Schubertiade at Schwarzenberg, the British tenor has told a German newspaper that the same man had disrupted a Matthias Goerne recital the previous night.
If that was so, why did the festival not take measures to exclude him? The more so when the elderly gentleman appeared to be disturbed. It’s all very well having a relaxed atmosphere, but the first duty of a festival is to protect its artists.
The director of Netherlands Touring Opera Nicolas Mansfield today became a Dutch citizen, giving up his British passport.
Nicolas, like many Brits abroad, recoiled from the Brexit referendum. He has lived in Holland for 28 years.
‘I’m a man of principle,’ he says. ‘If my homeland takes a different path, I must cease to belong to it’.
The Austrian authorities have confirmed that a former chief executive and technical manager of the Salzburg Easter festival will begin jail sentences of four and four and a half years this week.
Both were convicted of embezzlement.
Under Austrian law, a new prisoner cannot be named. Details can be found in past Slipped Disc reports.
A saxophonist, Łukasz Dyczko, 19, was crowned European Young Musician in Cologne last night. He wins 10,000 Euros and a broadcast concert with WDR.
Second was a Czech pianist, Robert Billy, also 19.
The instrumental contest is run every other year by the European Broadcasting Union, which somehow fails to drum up the noise it creates each year for the Eurovision finals.
News from Alexandria, Va:
Around 9:45 pm Krista Monique Clouse was getting ready to sing Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria, a classical music favorite that she normally sang to a recorded orchestral accompaniment playing out of a small Bluetooth speaker. A small group of police officers approached, informed her that her singing was in violation of City Ordinance Sec. 11-5-4b.
Clouse responded that her singing with the recorded accompaniment was a protected constitutional right, referencing Davenport vs. City of AlexandriaVirginia. One of the officers responded that he would arrest Clouse if she did not cease her singing.
William Cheng, who seems to think musicology is a branch of social welfare, has taken issue with the lashing his profession has got from Slipped Disc readers in an interview with a regional magazine.
Sample:
Responses on public forums have been a different beast. There’s been clamor on Norman Lebrecht’s classical music blog Slippedisc. Lebrecht’s readers take issue with the book on multiple fronts, though most of them claim—quite proudly—that they haven’t read the book and never intend to, which I guess is their prerogative. So first, they have a problem with the trailblazing feminist musicologist Susan McClary, who wrote the foreword for Just Vibrations. Second, some commenters keep complaining that the book is “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern.” I admit I had to look “neo-Marxism” up on Wikipedia. As for “postmodern,” that’s a weird accusation. There are several parts of Just Vibrations that explicitly advocate for accessible writing and critique the opacity of certain styles of academic rhetoric. I increasingly find that some people today say “postmodern” to mean “whatever I don’t agree with” or “whatever I won’t deign to read.” Or as Inigo Montoya tells Vizzini in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means!”
And lastly, the Lebrecht commenters seem to think I’m proposing a competitive model of “intellectually rigorous scholarship” versus “care-oriented scholarship.” That’s the farthest thing from what I wish. One can care about music and people, about professional advancement andcompassionate conduct. These practices are complementary and mutually accountable. So consider this comment on the Lebrecht blog, someone who asked (in response to an excerpt from the book regarding the responsibility of professors to address how, for example, their female students might not be able to work late in a library because they don’t feel safe walking back home at night): “If you’re so concerned about the safety of female students, then why are you a musicologist? Why aren’t you a policeman or a rape counselor?” The if-then here is dangerous beyond belief. Its fallacious logic sums up why greater theorization and practices of care are sorely needed in the academy and beyond. I mean, what is this person implying? And what does this say about what people think musicologists do and don’t do?
But England captain David Stark, principal double bass of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (and thus of doubtful qualification) is claiming that an extra London goal crossed the line and was not seen by the referee. It should have been England 2-1.
Now where have we heard that before?
This is the shocking new Wells Fargo ad.
There is another on the same theme: A ballerina yesterday, an engineer today.
The bank is trying to reinforce a stereotype that the arts are a waste of life, not to mention crushing the dreams of young customers.
Mayu Kishima, 30, of Japan won the $100,000 Stern prize with final round performances of Chausson’s Poeme and Shostakovich’s 1st Violin Concerto.
Second was the Joachim winner Sergei Dogadin. Third was an American, Sirena Huang.
At the end of a long day at the Venice Biennale last year, I stumbled upon the Polish pavilion in one of the furthest corners of the Giardini: the park where the art festival is presented. The brief statement posted at the entrance to the pavilion explained that it contained an artwork calledHalka/Haiti 18°48´05˝N 72°23´01˝W, by C. T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska. This consisted of a video of a performance of the Polish national opera Halka in a village in Haiti where a significant number of people are descended from early 19th-century Polish settlers. (The figures in the title are the map coordinates for the village.)
Inside the darkened pavilion was a video projection on to a screen that curved around the space like a 19th-century diorama. The images showed the centre of a clearly very poor village. Plastic chairs had been placed under trees in a semicircle to mark a performance space that mirrored the semicircle of seats in the pavilion. Amid this setting, Polish opera singers in 19th-century costume were enacting Stanisław Moniuszko’s 1848 romantic village melodrama, accompanied by an electric keyboard.
Groups of villagers clustered to watch, some chatting with each other, many absorbed, or perhaps just politely pretending to be. Other people came and went. Children played in the dust, which they shared with pecking chickens and a tethered goat stoically ignoring the maelstrom of sound and action that was whirling around it. Every now and then a moped would roar noisily through the performance area and disappear down the road out of the village. Spurned by her aristocratic lover, the opera’s heroine, Halka, threw herself to her death. Something about the sheer incongruity of this juxtaposition of overblown European opera and everyday life on a Caribbean island, and the sense of immersion created by the installation, ambushed my normal defences and, no doubt facilitated by a bit too much of the hospitality prosecco, tears started rolling down my face.
