The soprano Clare Norburn, co-founder of the Brighton Early Music Festival, will leave her post as joint artistic director in November.

Fifteen years, she says, is enough. She wants to write plays.

 

Days after choosing a French principal oboe, the IPO has named Dmitry Malkin as his partner on cor anglais.

Dmitry is presently with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. The move takes effect at the start of the new season.

The Canadian soloist Yi-Jia Susanne Hou has said her 300 year-old violin was maltreated by security agents at Pearson airport. ‘They basically attacked my violin before I had a chance to do anything about it,’ she says.

The violinist, 39, was flying to Brazil via Miami on a day when new US security measures came into force. She is looking at filing an official complaint against the Toronto security officials.

All artists travelling to or via the US need to make themselves aware of this week’s security enhancements.

 

 

The video artist Shirin Neshat, who is directing the new Verdi Aida in Salzburg with Anna Netrebko in the title role, has been reflecting on its personal significance.

‘Both in my work and in my private life, there is this dichotomy between being a woman and political tyranny and oppression,’ she told a Salzburg audience yesterday. ‘I identify with Aida… I know how Aida must feel; you undergo a process (of exile), you realise you can go on, that you can fall in love again, adapt to the circumstances.’

Aida is a survivor, she adds, experiencing phases of nostalgia, of rage, of hope for a return – all the while accepting that there is no way back. ‘Sometimes the boundaries between Aida and myself are blurred.’

 

 

The chanteuse Barbara Weldens, a singer-songwriter in the traditions of Barbara and Jacques Brel, has collapsed and died during a church concert in the southwestern village of Goudron.

Local reports suggest she may have been electrocuted by touching a live wire. The cause of death was cardiac arrest.

This is a tremendous loss for French chanson.

Kasper Holten’s Carmen production at the Bregenz Festival opened last night under heavy clouds.

At the first kiss on stage, there was a flash of lightning.

Then the heavens opened.

On went the raincoats. On went the opera.

Condolences to Wynton and Branford Marsalis, whose mother Dolores died on Tuesday of pancreatic cancer, aged 80.

She is survived by her husband, New Orleans jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis, and six sons, four of whom became jazz professionals.

The Telegraph’s Ivan Hewett tweets:

 

 

The Boston Flute Academy has announced the death of Fenwick Smith, long-serving second flute of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and principal of the Boston Pops. He was 69.

Fenwick resigned from the orchestras in 2005 to pursue a diverse chamber music and teaching career.

Passionate about modern music he played in recordings of premiere recordings of Copland, Foote, Gaubert, Ginastera, Koechlin, Dahl, Harbison, Cage, Pinkham, Schulhoff, Schuller, Schoenberg, Rorem, and Reinecke.

The LA Phil music director calls on the Maduro regime to stop tinkering with the constitution and do something to halt the bloodshed in the streets. His final par is probably too diplomatic to have much impact.

As a conductor, I have learned that our society, like an orchestra, is formed by a large number of people, all of them different and unique, each with his or her own ideas, personal convictions and visions of the world. This wonderful diversity means that in politics, as in music, no absolute truths exist. In order to thrive as a society (as well as to achieve musical excellence), we must create a common frame of reference in which all individuals feel included despite their differences, one that minimizes the noise and cacophony of disagreement and allows us to fine-tune, through plurality and diverging points of view.

Full op-ed here. There is an on-page button you can click to read the article in the original Spanish.

 

The Italian-born Argentine cellist José Bragato has bowed his last at a phenomenal age and after a life of intense activity. He died on July 18 in Buenos Aires.

Arriving in Buenos Aires at age 13, he was named principal cellist of the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946, moving two years later to the Colon orchestra, where he played for two decades. Most famously, he played in the Buenos Aires Octet with Astor Piazzola.

During the 1970s military dictatorship he migrated to Brazil, playing in the Orquestra Sinfonica de Porto Alegre until 1982, when he returned home.

Bragato was also a composer of 50 published scores.

A December 1940 New York performance of the Paganini Rhapsody by Gitta Gradova has been put up today on Youtube. She’s quite a powerhouse.

Gradova stopped playing in public two years later under spousal pressure, vanishing from the musical scene.

Beware the cut and breaks in this recording, but the performance is formidable, at times overwhelming.