Daniel Harding is stepping down as principal guest conductor at the end of this season.
He will be replaced by François-Xavier Roth, who started out with the LSO as an assistant conductor in 2002. Today he is Generalmusikdirektor in Cologne.
Davi Oliveira, 22, was going about his drilling on a Sydney building site when a mate, Patrick Keating, persuaded him last week to take a Nessun Dorma break. Since then, he’s been all over the national news.
Davi, who’s from Brazil, is trying to raise enough cash in Australia so he can study music back home.
Have a listen.
The death is reported of Alberto Zedda, long-standing conductor of the Rossini Festival at Pesaro and an international authority on Handel, Bellini and Donizetti.
As a young man, he was thrown out of La Scala by Herbert von Karajan. He went on to conduct at all the major Italian opera houses, including La Scala, as well as Covent Garden,Vienna, Paris, the Mariinsky, San Francisco and Los Angeles. He was an irrepressible enthusiast for Rossini and worked closely with Claudio Abbado on the new editions.
Alberto Zedda died yesterday in Pesaro.
The title is a tongue-twister – Sardanapalus – based on a Byron play.
Liszt worked on the opera in 1849-5o, after he gave up touring as a piano virtuoso and settled in Weimar.
He finished only one act, which was never performed. A Cambridge academic, David Trippett, has found the manuscript in Weimar and prepared it for a premiere this summer.
You can hear an exclusive aria here.
And watch a background report:
press release:
An Italian opera by Franz Liszt – left incomplete and largely forgotten in a German archive for nearly two centuries – will be given its world premiere this summer after being resurrected by a Cambridge academic.
David Trippett, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, first discovered the opera languishing in an archive in Weimar more than ten years ago. Known only to a handful of Liszt scholars, the manuscript – with much of its music written in shorthand and only one act completed – was assumed to be fragmentary, often illegible and consequently indecipherable.
However, after Trippett spent the last 2 years working critically on the manuscript, a ten-minute preview will now be performed for the first time in public as part of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World contest in June.
“In 1849 Liszt began composing an Italian opera, but he abandoned it halfway through and the music he completed has lain silently in an archive for nearly 170 years,” said Trippett. “This project is about bringing it to life for the very first time.”
“The music that survives is breath-taking – a unique blend of Italianate lyricism and harmonic innovation. There is nothing else quite like it in the operatic world. It is suffused with Liszt’s characteristically mellifluous musical language, but was written at a time that he was first discovering Wagner’s operas.
“The only source for this opera is a single manuscript containing 111 pages of music for piano and voices. It was always assumed to be impossible to piece together, but after examining the notation in detail, it became clear Liszt had notated all the cardinal elements for act 1. You have to think through the artistic decisions traceable in the manuscript and try to reconstruct the creative process, to see how Liszt’s mind went this way and that.”
A critical edition of the music for act 1 will be published by Editio Musica Budapest (Universal Music Publishing) in 2018. Although Trippett has worked alone on rescuing the music Liszt notated, Cambridge’s Francesca Vella has worked on deciphering the Italian text alongside musicologist David Rosen, whose principal role has been to translate the libretto into English.
The libretto, based on Lord Byron’s tragedy Sardanapalus, tells the story of Sardanapalo, King of Assyria, a peace-loving monarch, more interested in revelry and women than politics and war. He deplores violence and brutality, and, perhaps naively, he believes in the innate goodness of humankind, but is overthrown by rebels and burns himself alive with his lover, Mirra, amid scents and spices in a great inferno.
A ten-minute scene from the operawill be performed at the final of the BBC Singer of the World event by Armenian soprano and rising talent Anush Hovhannisyan.
“In effect, the manuscript has been hiding in plain sight for well over 100 years,” added Trippett. “It was written for Liszt’s eyes only, and has various types of musical shorthand, with spatial gaps in the manuscript. A lot of it is very hard to read, but the scruffiness is deceptive. It seems Liszt worked out all the music in his head before he put pen to paper, and to retrieve this music, I’ve had to try and put myself into the mind of a 19th-century composer, a rare challenge and a remarkable opportunity.
“Fortunately, Liszt left just enough information to retrieve what was evidently the continuous musical conception he had at the time. We will never know exactly why he abandoned his work on the opera and I suspect he would have been surprised to learn that it is resurfacing in the 21st century. But I like to think he would have smiled on it.”
Ahead of the BBC event in June, Trippett and his colleagues are putting the finishing touches to a documentary film for the University of Cambridge chronicling the resurrection of Liszt’s forgotten masterpiece, with singers Anush Hovhannisyan (soprano), Samuel Sakker (tenor) and Arshak Kuzikyan (bass-baritone). This will be released on 15 May.
“Who else gets to premiere a new opera by a superstar composer from two centuries ago?” said soprano Hovhannisyan. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and the entire process of making it work – from thinking about the character and what Liszt would want – has been a privilege. We have had a wonderful, deeply creative and imaginative time piecing this together and I feel very blessed to have been a part of it.”
Martin James Bartlett, winner of BBC Young Musician 2014, is the standout name among 30 finalists selected for the Van Cliburn Competition.
Other prizewinners taking part are Yuri Favorin, who came fourth in the Reine Elisabeth, and Ilya Maximov, winner of the Viotti.
Full list:
Martin James Bartlett, United Kingdom, 20
Sergey Belyavskiy, Russia, 23
Alina Bercu, Romania, 27
Kenneth Broberg, United States, 23
Luigi Carroccia, Italy, 25
Han Chen, Taiwan, 25
Rachel Cheung, Hong Kong, 25
Yury Favorin, Russia, 30
Madoka Fukami, Japan, 28
Mehdi Ghazi, Algeria/Canada, 28
Caterina Grewe, Germany, 29
Daniel Hsu, United States, 19
Alyosha Jurinic, Croatia, 28
Nikolay Khozyainov, Russia, 24
Dasol Kim, South Korea, 28
Honggi Kim, South Korea, 25
Su Yeon Kim, South Korea, 23
Julia Kociuban, Poland, 25
Rachel Kudo, United States, 30
EunAe Lee, South Korea, 29
Ilya Maximov, Russia, 30
Sun-A Park, United States, 29
Leonardo Pierdomenico, Italy, 24
Philipp Scheucher, Austria, 24
Ilya Shmukler, Russia, 22
Yutong Sun, China, 21
Yekwon Sunwoo, South Korea, 28
Georgy Tchaidze, Russia, 29
Tristan Teo, Canada, 20
Tony Yike Yang, Canada, 18
The voice teacher Claudia Friedlander attended a 2011 New York masterclass by the German bass, who died yesterday. Here’s what she learned:
At 72, the veteran bass has the most perfectly coordinated, expressive, and economically produced voice I have ever heard at close range. In fact, I’ve never even heard anyone come close to comparing with his ability to project even the softest of utterances so that they fill the hall and make every listener feel as though he were speaking directly to them.
Listening to him expanded my awareness of what it is possible for the human voice to do…
The death has been announced of Kurt Moll, one of the finest German singers of the late 20th century.
He joined Cologne Opera in 1958 and made the city his home. Soon he was appearing in the major international houses. His US debut was in San Francisco in 1974, followed fours years later by the Met.
He sang Baron Ochs in seven commercial recordings of Der Rosenkavalier, practically owning the role.
He gave his final stage performance at Bayreuth on July 31, 2006 and died in Cologne yesterday, March 6.
8.58am from Finchley Rd driver was so incredibly rude that other passengers on this already late service supported me.
We like the sound of the first string quartet biennale in Amsterdam, taking place next January.
Here are the participants:
• Brentano String Quartet (USA)
• Cuarteto Casals (ESP)
• Quartetto di Cremona (IT)
• Quatuor Danel (BE)
• DoelenKwartet (NL)
• Doric String Quartet (UK)
• Dudok Kwartet (NL)
• Emerson String Quartet (USA)
• Hagen Quartett (AT)
• O/Modernt String Quartet (SWE)
• Cuarteto Quiroga (ESP)
• Ragazze Quartet (NL)
• Ruysdael Kwartet (NL)
• Signum Quartett (DE)
The Deutsche Bühnenverein has just announced a pay rise for all employees at state theatres and opera houses, including chorus and orchestra musicians.
The increase, backdated to January 1, 2017, will be two percent – or a minimum of 75 Euros a month for those on the lowest wages.
The organisers of the Eurovision Song Contest have announced a new talent show for amateur choirs, to be known as Eurovision Choir of the Year.
The show will be compered on July 22 by the US composer Eric Whitacre and a Latvian TV presenter Eva Ikstena.
However, only seven Eurovision countries have agreed to take part – Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Germany and Slovenia.
Where’s Noway with its nul points?
Richard K. Smucker succeeds Dennis W. LaBarre today as Board President of the Cleveland Orchestra.
Smucker is Executive Chairman of The J.M. Smucker Company, an $8 billion food and beverage manufacturer and marketer of iconic North American brands including Smucker’s®, Jif®, Folgers®, Pillsbury®, Crisco®, and in pet food and pet snacks, Meow Mix®, Milk Bone®, Kibbles ’n Bits®, 9Lives®, and many more.