This is Georg Friedrich Haas, the contemporary Austrian composer, who has talked volubly of his sexual preferences within his marriage in recent months.

It has been quite a media campaign: starting with the New York Times, on to the London Times and today in the Daily Mail (below).

 

georg-friedrich-hass

Perhaps it’s time to let the music speak for itself?

Helga Rabl-Stadler, 68, has been prolonged as Festival President for three more years, until end-September 2020.

But the wording of the announcement suggests it may be her last term.

Rabl-Stadler, a member of an influential media family, has been in charge since January 1995.

 

helga rabl-stadler

press release:

In its meeting today, the Supervisory Board of the Salzburg Festival made an important decision regarding the institution’s future.

“Helga Rabl-Stadler will remain Festival President for another three years; her contract was extended until September 30, 2020,” Wilfried Haslauer announced as the legal representative of the Salzburg Festival Fund on December 2, 2016. Raimund Steiner of Egon Zehnder had presented the results of the selection process to the Supervisory Board.  “With Helga Rabl-Stadler as President, Markus Hinterhäuser as Artistic Director and the new Business Director Lukas Crepaz, the Festival has an outstanding team leading it into the future,” said Hans Scharfetter, Member of the Salzburg State Parliament and currently Chairman of the Festival’s Supervisory Board.

“I am delighted that the Supervisory Board has expressed its continued trust in me to lead the Festival in the run-up to the anniversary year of 2020. Together with my colleagues in the directorate, I want to broaden and secure the Festival’s organizational and financial basis, which Markus Hinterhäuser needs for his extremely interesting programmes,” said Helga Rabl-Stadler.

“The fact that Helga Rabl-Stadler, with all her experience, loyalty, her wisdom and her keen eye, has been confirmed in her office for another three years is a great stroke of fortune, not just for me, but most importantly for the Salzburg Festival,” declared Artistic Director Markus Hinterhäuser.

 

A Utah Symphony cellist John Eckstein has persuaded 14 colleagues and a music director, Thierry Fischer, to join him next spring in desperately impoverished Haiti, creating a national institute for young musicians.

All it takes is one musician and a dream.

Read more here and here.

utah-symphony-haiti

photo: John Marquis Cahill

Tanya Remenikova, Professor of Cello at University of Minnesota, has posted an appeal for her former student Hong Wang, who ‘was recently diagnosed with stage 4 malignant stomach cancer…Much of his cancer treatment is not covered by his health insurance.’

Hong Wang teaches at Concordia University, St. Paul, Hamline University and Bethel University.

Please help if you can. Click here.

hong-wang

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

If there was an award for surprise of the year, this unpretentious release would win both the jury and the public vote. (NN) born 1814, was written off by music history as an also-ran, one of those stern faces in the back row of romantic group portraits, somewhere behind Chopin and Liszt.

Read on here and here.

henselt-group

And here.

The chief conductor of the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz has handed in his notice, effective 2018.

Karl-Heinz Steffens, 55, says ‘there are many personal reasons for my decision (Es sind viele persönliche Gründe, die mich zu meinem Entschluss bewogen haben)’.

He has been doing some good last-minute jump-ins and he became chief conductor at Norwegian Opera four months ago.

karl-heinz-steffens

Steffens is a CAMI artist.

Last night at the Berlin Konzerthaus, the violinist Daniel Hope was conducting a public interview with Menahem Pressler when, guess what –

menahem-pressler-surprise

– on walks Antonio Meneses, the last cellist of the Beaux Arts Trio. The three had not been together on stage together since the Beaux Arts’ farewell performance at the Gewandhaus seven years ago.

Daniel says: ‘Menahem was my guest at Berlin’s Konzerthaus, where I host a series combining live music and discussion. As a surprise, I invited Antonio Meneses to join us: this took months of secret planning and even involved engaging a young cellist to rehearse with us, so that Menahem had no idea. Menahem only found out on stage – his face was an absolute picture. We performed the slow movement of Beethoven Opus 11, one of our signature tunes. . It was a beautiful, emotional evening.’

beaux-arts-trio-reunited
photos (c) Uwe Arens / Konzerthaus Berlin

We may have video for you later.

Lionel Stoléru, a minister under the rival regimes of Giscard d’Estaing and Francois Mitterand, has died at 79.

An economist by profession, he also taught mathematics at university and edited a newspaper, The European, for Robert Maxwell. As a sideline, he conducted orchestras in France and Ukraine.

He founded the Orchestre romantique européen, which disbanded in 2013, and composed a symphony.

lionel-stoleru

Bethan Doci, 38, a violinist with the Royal Shakespeare Company orchestra and other groups, was jailed yesterday for 32 months for extorting £357,000 by telling people she needed money to fight cancer.

Doci, also known as Bethan Morgan, started in 2010 by telling orchestral colleagues she could not work because of cancer. They raised £1,900 to help her.

She then advertised her fake plight on Craigslist and went on to target middle-aged men, depriving one of them of his life’s savings.

At Swansea Crown Court she admitted 11 counts of fraud. The court was told she earned £24,000 a year from playing the violin.

bethan-doci
photo: Wales News Service

On ZealNYC, first out of the traps:

Have you ever seen a really, really cute puppy sitting in a tiny, tiny crate? All full of trapped youthful life, love, joy and potential? All ready to just pop out? To be just, really fantastic?

And have you ever watched this fantastic joyful trapped puppy in this tiny, tiny crate for two and a half hours?

Well I took in Robert Lepage’s new Metropolitan Opera production of Kaija Saariaho’s haunting L’Amour de Loin tonight…. 

lamour-de-loin-met-howard
Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

More here.

And more reviews to follow.

UPDATE: The parish rag.

And New York Classical Review.

Our review pair found it ‘glorious’.

 

You cannot love both Deller and Oberlin – at least not at the same time. That’s Joel Cohen’s conclusion in this tribute to the first American countertenor, who died this week:

russell-oberlin

 

Way back in my student days, his beautiful, otherwordly, almost inhuman voice was co-equivalent in my mind with the early music movement as a whole. This was my sophomore or junior year at Brown, and the Chamber Music series down at the School of Design auditorium was bringing in Noah Greenberg’s New York Pro Musica for a double bill:  Flemish Renaissance music on the first half, Spanish Renaissance on the second.  Although I had sung Renaissance partsongs in high school choir, and played a few lute transcriptions on my classical guitar, this was my first experience hearing an entire program of early music. By the end of the concert, I knew that performing this stuff was what I wanted to do. A vocation was born.

And that sense of being called had quite a bit to do with Oberlin’s voice that evening. Was it a man’s sound, or a woman’s?  It was supported all the way up, without a break, and without resorting to falsetto. Magical, compelling. It was full, with continuous vibrato.  Dead accurate as to pitch and rhythm. There was something sexless or androgynous in the timbre, verging on metallic, as though an angel were singing from on high, in some celestial tongue unknown to man.  Oberlin’s voice did not make you feel warm and cuddly; rather, it gave you some sort of cosmic, strangely delightful chill.

As I discovered later, listening to his other recordings, across several repertoires, it really did not matter much what language he was singing in, nor what style. If memory serves me,  Oberlin made solo recordings of medieval English monodies, of thirteenth century Spanish Cantigas, of English consort songs, of Buxtehude. He sang Oberlin in Britten’s opera of Midsummer Night’s Dream (a career-ending overstretch of his instrument, as rumor had it). Leonard Bernstein hired him and NYPM colleague, tenor Charles Bressler, to sing the “Et misericordia” duet from the Bach Magnificat on network TV.  Was he also the Evangelist in a Bernstein TV special about the Bach St. Matthew Passion?  I believe so. None of those performances, as I recall, had much in the way of style-specific nuance, or text-inflected phrasing, or localised, in-the-moment emotional commitment.  It was, always, about that incredible sound.

Oberlin’s way was my gold standard. Still an undergrad student, I recall meeting an Alfred Deller maven at a Manhattan bohemian party circa 1962.  The Dellerite praised his countertenor hero’s nuance, delicacy, and infinite sensitivity to text.  I crticised Deller’s falsetto technique, his preciosity, his lack of power and punch compared to the supernal Oberlin. I guess that it was, in a nutshell,  a debate between old Europe versus young America.  And I suppose we debaters were both right, in our way. But, at the time, I had trouble recognising the legitimacy of my opponent’s  viewpoint and musical values.  Things change. Now, several lifetimes later, I still listen with pleasure to Deller’s old recordings; only rarely do I choose to hear something with Oberlin.

Yet that first shock of encounter with Oberlin’s artistry remains, and I am grateful for that experience, and for the ensuing vocation that it triggered. I wrote about that moment for a magazine about a decade ago, and, after the article had appeared in print,  was surprised to receive a handwritten, carefully calligraphed note from Oberlin in acknowledgement.  I’m quite sorry now that we did not communicate further at that point ten years back, and only wish that there was more to this memoir of sound than a final, irrevocable silence. Well, perhaps there is, as we all, each in succession, stumble ascending to Helicon,  bearing our humble, imperfect offerings to the Muse.

Amesbury, 11/30/2016


Leonard Bernstein’s Candide opened on December 1, 1956 and the overture brought the house down.

ZealNYC have put together a pack of interviews with surviving participants, starting with Barbara Cook, who played the role of Cunegonde. She says:

I am extremely proud to have been part of the original cast of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. I have two distinct memories of opening night in New York, December 1, 1956 at the Martin Beck Theatre. First is that the overture stopped the show — people loved it, and to this day it’s one of the most frequently played pieces by symphony orchestras around the world. My second big memory from opening night was Lenny coming backstage to wish me luck. He was just about to leave when he added, “Oh yes, Maria Callas is out front.” I said, “Oh my God, I could have done without knowing that.” Lenny laughed and said “Don’t be ridiculous. She’d kill for your high E-Flats.”

Read the full article here.

 

barbara-cook-cunegonde