The sister of Jonathan Dlouhy, principal oboe of the Atlanta Symphony from 1979 to 2006, has posted word of his death last week of a cardiac infarction.

Susan Dlouhy writes: ‘My brother, Jon, passed away in his home in Atlanta, Georgia last week. He had a sudden cardiac incident and died peacefully. He was only 61. Jon was a gifted musician, an avid reader and a huge baseball fan. He was packing to move to Columbus to be closer to Peg Dlouhy and I when he died. He is also survived by his daughter Elizabeth Dlouhy, also from Atlanta. Memorial services will be private.

 

 

Our diarist Anthea Kreston is flummoxed by a violin family tree.

One of my students in Philadelphia this week, a young woman from Los Angeles, came in playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto. I knew that she was a student of my oldest sister (Aimee Kreston, a Curtis grad and teacher of a swathe of amazing young violinists at the Colburn School).  As I heard her play, it was as if, in many ways, she had been taught exactly like me, or by me, or she was me.  She had a distinct personality, to be sure, but one thing and then another popped up. A super-juicy slide in just that spot, beginning page two at a whisper, the way she held her bow arm with the high elbow, the way her fingers on her left hand stood so straight and landed decisively on the tips, her super flexible right wrist which anticipated all bow changes. 

I learned the Sibelius concerto as a teenager from the amazing husband-and-wife team of Roland and Almita Vamos, and my sister had learned it from them a decade before.  A parallel existence. In addition, this young violinist at Curtis had just come from Chautauqua, where she had taken three weeks of intensive lessons with Almita Vamos. Three generations of Sibelius, converged in that one room in Philadelphia. Like history had squashed itself flat and all the bodies and minds worked at the same time – a hive mind.  

I could feel Almita’s fingers curving over my fingers on the left hand- she was such a hands-on teacher – moulding and shaping our arms and fingers by cupping our hands in hers, becoming our shadows. As I came over to this student and asked if I could touch her hand, bending down at the knees so I could place my entire forearm over hers, curve my fingers over hers to show the arc of the shift, the anticipated swing of the elbow as the impossibly high note is plucked from thin air, I felt as if Almita was just there, then. 

I decided to give a kind-of boring lesson to that student that day – she was going to be playing the Sibelius in a public masterclass for Ani Kavafian the next day, and I wanted to leave the juicy fun bits for Ani, and to not overwhelm the student with musical ideas. So we did bow math with stickers, distributing and planning the amount, location and angle of the bow per note on the big runs. Things like that. 

The next day, as I sat in the Masterclass (my teacher after the Vamoses was Ida Kavafian, the younger sister of Ani Kavafian), I was again struck by several comments that Ani made. Specific technical things that I do myself, drill with my students. For example – keeping all fingers down on the top string when you do octaves, instead of having fingers 2 and 3 hover above the fingerboard. Knowing your shifts from measuring always with the first finger. When she demonstrated, it was as if I were listening to Almita or Roland play – a combination of flexible but organic rhythm, a deep warmth, an inclusive story-telling approach. It was also as if her teaching and playing was from the same cloth – but more like a cousin rather than a parent or grandparent. 

I called Jason that night, and was also in close contact with my sister. What they told me brought it all together. Ida and Ani Kavafian and Almita Vamos all studied with Mischa Michakoff, the great Ukrainian violinist who escaped from Russia in 1921 with his friend Gregor Piatigorsky (whose grandson later seriously dated my oldest sister).  Mischakoff studied in St. Petersberg with an assistant of Auer. Also connected, but on a different vein, was the American (of Russian-Jewish heritage) violinist Oscar Shumsky, himself a student of Auer. Both Kavafians (from Armenia) as well as Roland Vamos studied with Shumsky. And Shumsky and Michakoff were together in the NBC Symphony in the late 30’s under the baton of Arturo Toscanini.  Now I’m confused. 

Wait – one more thing. When I was a little girl (around age 10), Roland Vamos (the Vamoses team-teach – you have one hour every week on technique with Roland and an hour on repertoire with Almita), Roland tore a piece of paper from his book and scrawled these little exercises on there. It was super-confusing, very rigorous for the hand (felt like mechanically separated chicken) and all the students had to ask each other advice of how to execute these scrawled notes on bits of paper or napkins from take-out food. He would say something like “oh, these are Korgoyev exercises that I changed up a bit” (between bites of his tuna sandwich) and we were all to do these complex double stop twister-like exercises, in 8 positions and in different keys. But – hold on to your seat – guess who was the teacher of Mischakoff?  Sergei Korgoyev, the assistant to Auer. Talk about cross-referencing. 

So no wonder I had a series of whiplash-inducing Dèjà vu episodes. Yikes. And, to tie it all together, when I was 16 I used to drive a very old Volvo sedan (brown with rust spots and a window that would fall into the door if you lowered it) which belonged to the daughter of Piatigorsky. And one that belonged to Casals’ widow when I lived in Hartford, Connecticut. More later. I have a puzzle to finish. 

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Mischakoff

Claudia Pinza Bozzolla, the only child of the great bass Ezio Pinza to follow him into opera, died in Pittsburgh on Thursday.

Growing up in Italy after her parents’ marriage broke down, she made her Scala debut at 18 and progressed to the Met, where her father had sung for 20 years. They managed to appear together in Faust at San Francisco Opera before he moved on to a second career in stage musicals.

Claudia set up as a voice teacher in Pittsburgh, where her star pupil was Vivica Genaux.

Fine obit here.

 

 

 

 

The results are in for the first conducting contest where the competitors were unseen by the judges.

It took place in Radom, Poland, from 9-15 July with 39 competitors from 21 countries.

The winners:

1st Prize – Igor Manasherov (Russia)

2nd Prize – Adrian Slywotzky (USA)
3rd Prize – Naoyuki Hayashi (Japan)
Yuri Simonov Prize – Sébastien Thomas Bagnoud (Switzerland)
Orchestra Prize – Naoyuki Hayashi (Japan)

Read more here.

Tim Page, who has written a memoir about life with Aspergers, reminisces today in detail for the first time about his close, mostly long-distance friendship with the compelling Canadian pianist:

 

We “met” over the phone in 1980, when I was an unknown freelancer for a Manhattan weekly called the SoHo News and he was … well, Glenn Gould, the mysterious recluse of the north, the brooding musical titan who had simply walked away from live performance at the height of his career 16 years before.

It was supposed to be a brief interview; instead, it went on for four hours and the next day my subject (who, to my amazement, had insisted that I call him “Glenn”) rang again, and we picked up where we left off….

Read on here.

From the Professor of Leisure Studies at Leeds:

Despite the separation of sport and the arts in government and popular thinking, a number of recent initiatives at local level show what can be achieved by bringing them together…

Artists bring something different to sport and sport can present artists with inspirational ideas of physicality and movement. We found that such collaborations disrupt stereotypes of what constitutes art and sport; stereotypes that see (some) sports as being the preserve of working-class males and (some) arts as being for middle-class females. Just as the idea of competition is attracting increasing interest in the arts, so too is creativity in sports. This increases the chance of both arts and sports attracting new participants or audiences…

Read on here.

Roderick Cox, associate conductor with the Minnesota Orchestra, is the only African-American baton on staff at a major US orchestra. Now why is that?

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

Daniel Barenboim shares with the composer a breezy agnosticism and a love for English moderation. His approach to The Dream of Gerontius is broadsided, utterly secure, without shocks or fancy gestures….

Read the full review here.

And here.

photo: Chris Christodoulou/Lebrecht

He pulled out of the Met’s Tosca because it meant spending too long away from his family.

Australia, however, is no problem. He has taken the kids along for a run of three Parsifals.

Plenty of beaches and diversions while Dad’s doing his singing.

‘I will continue to travel, ­because I know I cannot continue this career from home,’ he said in Sydney. ‘There is no beaming, no virtual reality that can let me ­appear on stage magically from my living room. As long as this hasn’t been invented, I will have to travel, and I will.’

Kaufmann separated from the children’s mother three years ago.

London musicians are putting on an Emergency Fundraising Concert for Juan Manuel Gonzalez Hernandez, a player in the BBC Concert Orchestra who is trying to get his family out of Venezuela to a place of safety in Mexico.

Juan writes: I am a violinist from Venezuela living in London. My country is seeing one of the darkest, saddest and most violent times it has ever experienced. The crisis there has reached levels that for us living in Europe are difficult to imagine. There is no food, and when there is, people have to queue for many hours. Inflation is currently at 720%. People are destitute. There are no medicines, the health system has collapsed, people are dying because of shortages of medicines or hunger. I am trying to raise money to help my family leave Venezuela as soon as possible and move to Mexico where friends will help them to settle.

During my time in Caracas, I joined my sister Daniela and my 18 year old nephew Daniel at a peaceful protest that turned into a bloody nightmare, a nightmare that Venezuelans endure every day. The police shot stone bullets into the crowd, my nephew was shot in the neck. 

It was very frightening. He was taken to a hospital and he survived, only to then have to escape the hospital to evade the police waiting at bedsides to arrest and then torture protesters. 

Concert details here.

Crowdfunder here.

 

 

The Turkish cellist Gülşah Erol was arrested at Kadıköy Metro Station accused of keeping a bomb in her cello case.

She was handcuffed, locked in a room and beaten up.

 

 

Erol writes: ‘I was battered by two police officers on August 2. They declared my instrument a bomb and me a terrorist and closed me in a room. I was handcuffed and punched and kicked several times. They hit in my face with Turkish flag. They were telling me ‘We are citizens of this country’, what about me? When I told them I was a musician, please be careful about my arms and hands, they hit harder. They said that the people like me should leave the country, we are traitors. They threatened me with sending me to jail. They insulted my family. I didn’t put the photos of the damages in my body because they look horrible. I am a musician! I am an artist who labor for this country. Is this what I deserve?! My whole body aches but mostly my heart. I could have died yesterday…’

 

 

From an interview with Erica Jeal in the Guardian today:

Some of the (LSO) players asked whether I’d have taken the job if I had known. I said it would have made me extraordinarily wary, it’s true – but we will make the best of it we can. And a lot of our European counterparts have said, ‘We are going to try to do more work with you rather than less!’” 

Full interview here.