The classical top 20, that is.
First time since Herbert von Karajan, apparently.
His new Sony album Dolce Vita tops the charts. Nessun dorma – The Puccini Album is 4th. Du bist die Welt für mich is at 14, Aida at 17 and Andrea Chénier at 20.
Kaufmann is due to resume recitals this week after a two-month break with vocal injury.
Harry Grodberg, solo organist of the Moscow Philharmonic for 60 years, has died at 88.
More than anyone, he re-established the art of organ playing in a secular republic.
The Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s 22nd awards for artists and composers, at £50,000 the largest in the UK, go to:
Daniel Kidane (born 1986) is a leading young concert composer from London, whose work ranges from solo pieces to large orchestral works. His work focuses on themes of multi-cultural and multi-linguistic exchanges and how these shape our daily interactions. Among Kidane’s most notable compositions are Foreign Tongues (2015), which re-envisaged the setup of the string quartet, and Pulsing(2016), which explored the idea of migration through it energetic instrumental passages and vocal interludes.
Heather Leigh (born 1976) is a West Virginian, Texas raised composer and singer, based in Glasgow. She is renowned for her spontaneous composition and for redefining the pedal steel guitar. As a solo artist, she explores themes relating to the representation of women, sexuality and vulnerability, as showcased on her internationally acclaimed album, I Abused Animal (2015). She has an extensive catalogue of collaborative work, which in recent years has focused on her duo with German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann as heard on their album, Ears Are Filled With Wonder (2016).
Ailís Ní Ríain (born 1974) is a contemporary classical composer and published stage writer currently based in Yorkshire. From acoustic composition to music installations and music-theatre, her work aims to challenge, provoke and engage with new audiences in diverse spaces. Among Ní Ríain’s most recent compositions is Skloniŝte (2015), a solo accordion and video homage to the people who survived the Siege of Sarajevo 1992-1996. She has also completed notable commissions for the Royal Irish Academy of Music, The Bronte Society and Feelgood Productions with new commissions lined up for Spitalfields Festival and Manchester Opera Project.
I draw your attention to an essay I wrote for the late singer’s 80th birthday in September 2014, underlining the ethical values from which he drew sustenance and art.
Among other things:
Cohen’s lyrics hint forever at alternate meanings. His bird sits on a wire, perhaps the peaceful fence of a domestic property but also a front line, a prison camp, a place of extermination. In conditions of extreme privation and existential threat, Cohen sings of an inner liberation: “I have tried, in my way, to be free.” He described the song with customary duality as “a prayer, and an anthem”.
In “Story of Isaac”, he is nine years old and his father is building an altar, reversing personal history in a transcendent Freudian narrative. When Suzanne “takes you down”, she is performing several acts at the same time, only one of which is sexual.
“I can’t keep track of each fallen robin,” laments Cohen after a lucky episode of oral sex in “Chelsea Hotel #2”, the robin conveying so many things a man must lose, not least his bird on the wire. In these and countless other metaphors and metonyms, he draws strength — takes a yad — from his grandfather’s teachings.
Cohen’s take on sexual liberation has a consistent ethical foundation. The erotic is explicit in Jewish texts, whether in the prophet Hosea’s ragings at his errant wife (“let her put away her whorings from her face and her adulteries from between her breasts”) or the physical duties of husband specified in the Talmudic tractate Ketubot. Cohen sees no puritan partition between sacred and profane. In “Dance Me to the End of Love”, a decorous wedding song, he prays: “Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone/Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon/Show me slowly what I only know the limits of/Dance me to the end of love.” The end of love is, in Cohen’s apparition, God’s ultimate gift to mankind.
Read the full essay here.
It was a death he foretold to a mutual friend, in an email sent 30 days ago, on October 12.
He would have liked to be part of our project, Leonard wrote, but his strength was fading and he was confined to bed. And more, besides.
He did not need to write that letter. We knew he was gravely ill. But Leonard never left his lines unfinished. Seldom have I seen evidence of death faced with greater courage, certainty – and exquisite courtesy.
Aside from being his country’s greatest musician and the poet of our lives, Leonard Cohen was the kindest, most considerate of men. A mensch in a world full of monsters.
‘I am ready, my Lord,’ he whispered in what would be his final song.
Leonard Cohen died last night at the age of 82.
May his precious soul rest in peace.
During the summer, he said this to David Remnick of the New Yorker:
What is on Cohen’s mind now is family, friends, and the work at hand. “I’ve had a family to support, so there’s no sense of virtue attached to it,” he said. “I’ve never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out. Now it’s a habit. And there’s the element of time, which is powerful, with its incentive to finish up. Now I haven’t gotten near finishing up. I’ve finished up a few things. I don’t know how many other things I’ll be able to get to, because at this particular stage I experience deep fatigue. . . . There are times when I just have to lie down. I can’t play anymore, and my back goes fast also. Spiritual things, baruch Hashem”—thank God—“have fallen into place, for which I am deeply grateful.”
And so, everlastingly, are we.
The death has been announced in Regensburg of Bernhard Bosse, a well-known publisher of music education works.
The family firm of Gustav Bosse Verlag, founded by his grandfather, was a notorious sponsor of antisemitic books by the likes of Peter Raabe, president of the Reischsmusikkamer.
Many of these works were kept in print for two decades after the war. Bernhard took over the firm in 1945 and gradually converted the list to works of music education and technical studies.
The young British conductor Duncan Ward is taking over Sunday’s Wien Modern concert at short notice with the Vienna radio symphony orchestra.
Works include Luigi Dallapiccola Three questions with two answers, Georges Lentz’s Jerusalem (after Blake), Friedrich Cerha’s Nacht, and the finale of Mahler’s tenth symphony.
Appointed by Rattle as Conducting Scholar of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchester-Akademie, Duncan has been making debuts this season with major orchs in Munich, Stockholm, Leipzig and Lucerne.
No sooner is Anna Netrebko pouring into porcelain than Scott comes advertising its composer tea-set.
Three types of tea: Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner.
Message from the striking PSO musicians:
It’s PSO week in New York. twelve(!!!) of our current members and two of our former members are performing with the New York Philharmonic this week. Thank you to the Musicians of the New York Philharmonic for hosting us!! Shanshan Yao Erina Laraby Goldwasser Allie Thompson Marylène Gingras RoyRobert Langevin, flutist Joe Campagna Kelsey Blumenthal Susanne Park Andrew Wickesberg Brandon Mclean Mark Huggins Jeremy Black Charlie Powers John Moore
The implication is that some of these players are looking to leave the strikebound PSO.
There’s a revamp on the way at Arts and Leisure.
This Deadline report says it will involve even less coverage of local events that are not of interest to online subscribers.
Critics have been urged to stop covering events least likely to appeal to online subscribers: indie movies having brief runs in art houses; one-night-only concerts, off- and off-off-Broadway shows that aren’t star-driven, cabaret performances, and small art galleries. Many of the Times‘ contingent of freelance contributors, who provide much of that coverage, are likely to meet the same fate as the regional freelancers last summer. But even staff critics have been given the same marching orders, telling Deadline they are being pressured more frequently by editors to focus on higher-profile events.
There is no independent confirmation, but it’s looking like a trend.
The composer was Einojuhani Rautavaara. The review of his opera The Mine is by Vesa Siren:
The music here is dark and heavy, as befits the story. Part of the reason for this darkness may be ascribed to the composer’s life situation. According to the composer’s free-form autobiography Omakuva [Self-portrait] (1989), when he completed the last act of the opera in 1963 his family life was hell. It was around this time that he took an axe and hit his then wife on the head, “in the grip of a Panic terror”…
One of the causes of the furious domestic arguments was the leading female role in Kaivos. Rautavaara wanted a young, girl-like singer, but his first wife Mariaheidi Rautavaara – an excellent singer but substantially different from Rautavaara’s vision for the part – demanded that she be cast in the TV production.
Read the full review here.
A chance discovery by pianist Ivan Ilic:
In Cologne, a neighbour helped an older woman with her groceries. When the woman died at age 102, she left the neighbour two heavy boxes of old scores. The neighbour, who doesn’t read music, put them away.
A few weeks later, she struck up a conversation with my friend Veronika at the supermarket. Veronika, a record label executive, had just moved to Cologne, and was happy to make a new friend. They met for drinks. The following week the neighbour called Veronika with a surprise. She said, “Come over, and bring your car”. She gave her the music, telling her that she would surely find something to do with it…
Veronika called me in France. She said, ‘I don’t know if there’s anything interesting here. But who knows? Maybe it would be fun for you to come to Germany and check?’ It seemed like a good excuse to see a friend, so I found a low-cost flight to Cologne. We opened the crate together and sifted through the scores, covered in thick, black dust.
It was an eccentric collection. Veronika spotted the Haydn Symphony transcriptions, which neither of us had heard of, in an edition from 1830. We located a piano shop, and I sight-read the music. The E minor Symphony, no 44, immediately stuck out: it worked so naturally on the piano. I returned to France with a photocopy of the score, and learned the symphony in a rush of enthusiasm.
The composer is Karl David Stegmann (1751-1826).
I gave the first performance at London’s “Piano Day” Festival in March 2016, the German premiere in August, and the French premiere in September. This new video of the Presto has attracted 20,000 views in two weeks….
