In Shanghai a music director on a bicycle chased down a woman on a scooter who had knocked down a cyclist and was fleeing the scene.

The public-spirited citizen has been named as Liu Jian. A former conductor with the Shanghai orchestra, he now teaches at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, CUNY, is chairman of Eastwest Institute New York and professor at China’s Central Conservatory of Music.

Full story here.

 

The family has posted:

David Maslanka died during the night of August 6th, 2017 at home. He had been diagnosed with a severe form of colon cancer in June. His wife, Alison, died on July 3rd of this year. He declined rapidly following her passing. He is survived by his children, Stephen, Matthew, and Kathryn.

David Maslanka, born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, wrote more than 150 works including eight symphonies, seventeen concertos, a Mass, and much music for wind ensemble.

 

Leonard Slatkin has posted a list of major works by US composers that were cheered on debut and subsequently left to grow mould.

Readers are swelling Leonard’s ten with lost masterpieces of their own.

I would add any symphony by Benjamin Lees, the cello concerto of Victor Herbert, William Grant Still’s first symphony, Eric Zeisl’s piano concerto and pretty much anything by Conlon Nancarrow.

Your list?

photo: Betty Freeman/Lebrecht Music&Arts

There’s a huge buzz about the Edinburgh Festival’s production of Mark Anthony Turnage’s opera, Greek, with critics lavishing five stars on the show and one of them saying it has raised Edinburgh to long-lost glories.

What they fail to mention is that the team behind the production are John Berry and Loretta Tomasi, whom the same critics kicked to death when they were running English National Opera.

Funny old world.

Ana-Maria Avram, whose death on August 1 has been posted online by her close collaborators, came out of the Romanian avant-garde to become a leading figure in the spectral music movement.

She composed both for traditional ensembles and electronic media.

A regular conductor of Ensemble Hyperion International, she was married to the composer Iancu Dumitrescu.

The musicians in Buenos Aires have not been paid for over seven months.

For shame, for shame.

Sign their petition here.

Britten’s Rape of Lucretia will play this weekend in Tianjin, China, in what the organisers believe will be the work’s Asian premiere.

Nigel Robson plays Male Chorus, Sarah Castle is Lucretia and Madeleine Pierard is Female Chorus. The rest of the cast are Chinese. The Tianjin Symphony orchestra is conducted by Muhai Tang. The director is Niv Hoffman.

 

More laid back Down Under than he can afford to be back home, Jonas Kaufmann began talking at a press conference about the roles he is learning for future performance.

Among them are Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Pelléas in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Samson in the Saint-Saens opera and Paul in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt.

This is revealing for all sorts of reasons, not least that Kaufmann is concerned to leave an individual footprint on the opera repertoire. Pelléas and Paul are two roles that do not appear among Placido Domingo’s record 147 career roles.

Kaufmann would have the opportunity to own them.

We are indebted to Limelight’s close reporting of Kaufmann in Australia.

photo: Opera Australia

The Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award was won today by Kerem Hasan from Great Britain.

He has the necessary self-confidence, he knows what he wants and he has the talent required – in other words, the best prerequisites for an international career,’ said Jury Chairman Dennis Russell Davies.

Keren wins € 15,000 and a Salzburg Festival concert at the Felsenreitschule in August 2018.

Past winners are  Aziz Shokhakimov (2016), Lorenzo Viotti (2015), Maxime Pascal (2014), Ben Gernon (2013), Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (2012), Ainārs Rubikis (2011) and David Afkham (2010).

This is a big one.

Franck Chevalier of the Diotima Quartet reports the death of his teacher Walter Levin, founder of the La Salle Quartet and coach of innumerable members of frontline quartets. Walter was 92.

Born in Berlin, he fled with his family to Palestine in 1938. He met his LaSalle colleagues at Juilliard after the War and set about playing unheard works of modernism by Schoenberg and his circle. They obtained a residency at Cincinnati College of Music, where Walter discovered and taught James Levine from the age of 10.

A contract with Deutsche Grammophon enabled the group to record unheard works by Zemlinsky, Lutoslawski, Ligeti, Nono and Penderecki. Technically, they were the outstanding quartet of the 1970s, in a class of their own.

After the LaSalles disbanded in 1987, Walter continued teaching for some years in Switzerland, eventually moving to Chicago where he entered a retirement home after being diagnosed with dementia.

We will not see his like again.

The international mezzo Ameral Gunson died on Friday night of cancer, her husband has reported.

Starting out in the BBC Singers while studying with Otakar Krauss, she became a soloist with the leading UK orchestras and quite a few abroad.

On the opera circuit her roles included Marcellina in Nozze di Figaro, Despina in Così fan tutte, Sesto in La clemenza di Tito, Marguerite in La damnation de Faust and Waltraute in Götterdammerung.

She appeared at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and at the opera houses in Helsinki and Turin.

In later life, she was a much sought-after teacher.

Musicians are reporting the death of the British opera director, Lee Blakeley.

Lee was a regular at Santa Fe Opera, where his US career took off. He gave the French premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George at the Theatre du Chatelet.

He worked extensively at Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, ENO and Scottish Opera, as well as Wexford, Canadian Opera and Minnesota.

The Icelandic tenor Ólafur E Rúnarsson writes: ‘He had a huge impact on me when we worked together in the RSAMD. During the production of La Calisto in 2002 I was kicked off my bike and broke my leg quite seriously (not during a rehearsal) and couldn’t take part in the show. Lee was the first to visit me in the hospital with chocolate, soft drinks, his warmth and compassion. The following weeks he advised me about criminal benefit compensation and many other things, helpful for a foreigner on his own. This I will never forget. I send my deepest condolences to his family and friends.’

UPDATE: Lee died on Friday from a sudden condition.

FIRST Obituaries: Opera News and Daily Telegraph.