The Sun Group, based in Hanoi, has announced the formation of the Sun Symphony Orchestra, designed (according to the website) ‘to give outreach concerts to various areas of Vietnam, to maintain an active Classics Season featuring the standard greats from the orchestral repertoire, and to bridge the gap between Vietnamese/foreign listeners from all backgrounds and the power of music’.
The inaugural music director is a Frenchman, Olivier Ochanine.
Olivier, 38, was previously music director of the Philippines Philharmonic Orchestra.
The Baltimore music director is putting up a house for auction sale with an opening bid of half a million dollars.
Ms Alsop bought the house in 2010 but now lives closer to town.
The federal culture minister Monika Grütters today activated a multi-million Euro fund to help orchestras improve their overall performance.
The first grants are awarded to the Südwestdeutsche Philharmonie Konstanz, the Bochum Symphoniker and the Jena Philharmonic. Ms Grütters said the aim was to improve diversity in the orchestral landscape.
There was a time when young talent, interviewed by a manager, would be told to get a name that is simple, memorable and no longer than three syllables.
That advice no longer applies.
Consider:
To get ahead in music, you’re probably better off nowadays with a second barrel.
We have been informed of the death, from pancreatic cancer, of the Georgian tenor Zurab Sotkilava, a man of great renown in two very different arenas.
As a teenager, he played for the powerful Dynamo Tbilisi team and was at the start of an international career when an injury sustained in a match in Yugoslavia ruled out any further exertions.
He went to study singing instead, first at the Tbilisi Conservatoire, then at La Scala. In 1973, he made his Moscow debut at the Bolshoi as Don Jose in Carmen, and signed on as a member of the company. He was a regular guest at the Teatro Communale in Bologna, where he was regarded as a Verdi specialist.
Zurab taught many young singers at the Mocow Conservatoire. He celebrated his 80th birthday early this year.
Eternal rest.
Cosima Soulez Lariviere, who holds French and Dutch nationality, won first prize in the Bartók violin competition last night, emerging from a semi-final round in which all the winners were connected to members of the jury.
Cosima Soulez Lariviere, who is 21 and lives in London, is a student of juror Krzysztof Wegrzyn.
She wins 22,000 Euros and a host of performances, including an appearance at the next Budapest Spring Festival.
Ad van Zon, 64, principal trumpet of the Rotterdam Phlharmonic Orchestra, had his piccolo trumpet stolen from him in 2013 on the city metro. The police shrugged.
Last week they called him in the middle of the night.
If anyone in Eugene, Oregon, thought the university could fire an internationally known music director and no-one would notice, they have been rudely awakened by the outcome.
Some classy, dogged local reporting – here’s the latest report – has been followed up by outrage in UK-based media, starting with Slipped Disc and followed by the Daily Telegraph and now the Spectator, a weekly political magazine which has probably never mentioned the University of Oregon before in its 189-year history.
All agree that the University has been less than transparent and possibly downright dishonest in sacking Matthew Halls from the Orgegon Bach festival, and then covering up the reasons.
A false allegation of racism has not only muddied the waters, but cast aspersions on the music director’s integrity and (we hear) seriously upset a fine counter-tenor who got caught in the flak. The University has offered Mr Halls a paltry $90,000 to shut up and go away. A halfway decent New York lawyer could extract a tougher settlement.
But that’s not the point. Throughout these proceedings, the University has behaved like a village idiot who has been caught stealing from the sweet shop. Its default look is guilty, its denials lack credibility and its reparation offer is ridiculous.
A ‘flagship research university’ has been left looking like a college for dummies.
Here, on the basis of our local sources, is what we think happened. The festival has been losing money and shedding audiences. It renewed Mr Halls at a six-figure salary and then panicked. A hyped-up Provost, hired at vast cost from Michigan and unfamiliar with local loyalties, ordered Halls to be sacked. Then all hell broke loose.
What now? If the University comes clean, it can still redeem something of its reputation. If not, the festival is dead and the University is both culpable and foolish. Don’t even go there.
Yajie Zhang, 25, has been declared winner of the Internationaal Vocalisten Concours ‘s-Hertogenbosch 2017.
The oratorio award was taken by a British mezzo, Anna Harvey, 30.
The death of Brenda Lewis is reported in the parish sheet.
Brenda sang 38 times at the Met from 1952 to 1965, and many times more at City Opera. She enjoyed a concurrent Broadway career in musical, something that would be frowned upon today.
She also appeared in Montreal, Rio, Vienna Volksoper and Zurich.
