The orchestra is ahead of the world in digitising its archives and making them universally available online.
Archivist Barbara Haws traces the process from small beginnings:
When I was finishing archive school in the 80s, I was reading a magazine that talked about the first PC. That was just mind blowing: it changed completely my understanding of where we were going based on how I had been trained. I could see the possibilities in the future. At the Philharmonic, I was the first staff member to have a PC on my desk. And we started creating the databases of our performance history.
The town of Enniskillen has put up a plaque in memory of a pianist who played at the BBC Proms – and also owned the town newspaper.
Joan Trimble appeared mostly with her sister Valerie, playing four-hand piano and appearing at the 1943 Proms with Sir Adrian Boult. The BBC later commissioned her to write a television opera, Blind Raftery.
Back home, her father owned and edited the Impartial Reporter.
When he died in 1967, Joan took over.
Joan died in 2000. A plaque in her memory was affixed this week to the newspaper’s wall.
The Italian conductor Marzio Conti has told the Oviedo Filarmonía in Spain that he’s giving up in June.
Not just as Oviedo’s music director, which he has been for six years, but conducting altogether. ‘It exhaust you,’ he tells Codalario. ‘I want to do other things.’
From the latest Lebrecht Album of the Week, a 5-star:
In the dying years of the Soviet Union, I became aware of dozens of symphonists who survived on the fringes of musical society, tolerated by the authorities but never given a proper hearing. Once I got past the immense, historic figures of Mieczyslaw Weinberg and Galina Ustvolskaya, both pivotal in the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, I kept discovering other samizdat composers who, for some reason, seemed to speak my language. At a time when western musicians were subjected to a dictatorship of style and serial ideology if they wanted to get on the BBC, these covert Russians were free to write as they pleased….
‘My most unfortunate career-defining moment was when I sang Parsifal in Bayreuth, where I had already made successful appearances as Walther von Stolzing and Erik. I argued with the director, Christoph Schlingensief, who insisted on his own, very peculiar and solipsistic vision of the piece. His production was a mishmash of satanic rituals, orgies, garbage and hundreds of video projections, while I tried as much as I could to keep to Wagner’s intentions. The German media, which solely advocates provocative opera productions, criticised me harshly for arguing with Schlingensief. I was too naïve at the time to calculate what the consequences of disagreeing with him might be.
‘I’m still proud of what I did, and that I stood up for Wagner’s music, but in the end I lost not only the love of my life – Katharina Wagner – but also my conviction of the good in most people, which I assumed prevailing in my early life. Schlingensief died of cancer in 2010. That whole period was very unhappy.’
Erato has signed the up-and-coming Francophone Arod Quartet, multinational protégés of the Berlin-based Artemis Quartet.
That how Europe works, at its best.
The quartet is composed of Jordan Victoria and Alexandre Vu (violin), Corentin Apparailly (viola) and Samy Rachid (cello).
Cast your mind back to a golden era when labels could sell solo and orchestral performances by wind and woodwind virtuoso…. Even then, it’s hard to imagine that one label devoted 40 CDs to a clarinet player.
RCA did.
Richard Stoltzman’s 40 CDs are just about to come together in a boxed set.
We have been sent a funeral director’s notification for Bruce Brewer, a lyric tenor who once lit up the world stage. The critic Bernard Jacobson wrote that he possessed ‘a voice of superfine delicacy and a technique that enabled him to pass from the bottom of his range to stratospheric high notes without any perceptible break between registers.’
Originally from San Antonio, where he made his stage debut in 1970, he went on to sing at Covent Garden, La Scala, Florence, Paris and Boston. He was married for a while to the mezzo Joyce Castle.
Bruce died at the beginning of March, at St. Fraimbault, Lassay-Les-Chateaux, France, aged 75.
Patrick Nolan has been appointed artistic director of the carelessly named Opera Queensland.
He’s the former the former artistic director of Sydney’s Legs on The Wall contemporary dance and theatre company.
Dr David Dao, who has reached a private settlement with United Airlines after being dragged off a plane in Chicago, has been recognised as a prominent musician at the former Saigon National Music School.
The author of two prizewinning songs, “Tat Nuoc Dau Dinh” and “Ta Ve Ta Tam Ao Ta,” he founded a group called Bach Viet.
At the fall of Saigon in 1975 he fled to the US and requalified as a medical doctor.
