We hear on the New York opera grapevine that Robert Rattray, Assistant General Manager, Artistic, at the Metropolitan Opera, is in hospital after suffering a stroke at the weekend.

His family are being flown out to his bedside.

Rattray, a former joint head of the AskonasHolt agency in London, was appointed in 2014 to succeed Sarah Billingshurst as, in effect, the Met’s chief talent and casting officer.

In his 60s, Rattray is an unmatched repository of experience and contacts.

The inner world of New York opera is in shock.

UPDATE: Rattray dies without regaining consciousness.

Anastassiya Dranchuk has lived in Germany for 17 years. She has played for Chancellor Angela Merkel on state occasions.

But Anastassiya, 29, failed to get a college diploma and is now being threatened with deportation within days to Kazakhstan, where she was born but has nobody left.

She is appealing to Chancellor Merkel to intervene.

The broadcaster Deutsche Welle thinks this is a misapplication of the rules.

Watch.

Timothy Walker, chief executive and artistic director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra which has struggled in recent years with tour decline, offers a counter-intuitive view of Brexit in the pro-Brexit Daily Telegraph.

Walker, an Australian, says: ‘Europe can be a great thing but there are also difficulties in dealing with Europe.

‘And the interesting thing for me was that the difficulties seemed to be growing rather than diminishing and I couldn’t really understand this.

‘Before there was a referendum on Britain leaving, our observation was that it was becoming more difficult and it was a cost to us.

‘The orchestra always has had a big international presence but as soon as the status quo becomes disrupted you have to start looking for new opportunities….’

Read more here.

Heinz Jakob ‘Coco’ Schumann, a jazz guitarist who played underground in Berlin until the Nazis sent him to Terezin and Auschwitz, died in Berlin this weekend.

After the War he migrated to Australia but the lure of Berlin was irresistible and he returned in the early 1950s.

Read his life story and hear some music here.

David Garrett has cancelled current engagements due to ‘an acute herniated disc’.

He’s in pain. We wish him better.

David tweets: “Dear Friends, I’m so incredibly sorry that I can’t play these concerts in #Parma #Graz #Lucerne #Kiev #Sophia , I’ll do everything to guarantee a speedy recovery – so I hopefully can visit & see you guys on tour soon! I can’t wait! #slippeddisc 🙁 Love you guys, David.”

So sweet of him to give our site a hashtag.

The Canadian soprano won classical vocal album last night at the Grammys, for Crazy Girl Crazy.

Other winners include Daniil Trifonov, Pat Kop, Jennifer Higdon (twice) and Gavin Bryars. There’s a first-ever Grammy for the Houston Symphony. And a posthumous Grammy for Leonard Cohen for his last album, which employs a Montreal synagogue choir.

Rest of the best:

Engineered album: Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5; Barber: Adagio, Mark Donahue, engineer (Manfred Honeck & Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra)

The French honour was awarded today to François-Xavier Roth, 46, Generalmusikdirektor in Cologne and last music director of the disbanded SWR symphony orchestra, both in Germany.

Roth is also principal guest conductor at the London Symphony Orchestra and former associate conductor in Wales. He has also been music director at Liège in Belgium. He works everywhere except in France.

Ignored by state institutions, he founded his own group there, Les Siècles.

Maybe he should have been awarded the Foreign Legion of honour.

The Baltimore music director will become chief conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra from September 2019.

The ORF is Vienna’s third-ranked orchestra, behind the Philharmonic and the Symphony orchestras, and has little international profile. But the playing has improved over the past eight years under the German conductor Cornelius Meister and the hiring of Alsop signifies a corporate ambition to play a larger role.

Alsop, 61, is coming to the end of her term with the Sao Paolo Symphony in Brazil. She is committed until 2021 to Baltimore, where she has become the first woman conductor with a million-dollar paycheck. No matter how well she does, Vienna’s radio bosses will not match that.

Moments before Jorge Federico Osorio walked onto the Atlanta Symphony Hall stage last night to play Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, he was told of a change of conductor.

Robert Spano, who had conducted Leonard Bernstein’s Jeremiah Symphony in the first half, had been ordered to go home with flu.

His assistant Stephen Mulligan stepped in without having rehearsed with the soloist.

The pair got a standing ovation.

The following message was sent out to all chorus members tonight:

With overwhelming sadness we announce the sudden and unexpected death of our beloved chorus master Stefan Bevier who’s died in his home in Berlin. Our hearts and prayers go out to his family as he’s already missed. 

Stefan, who was 59, had worked with the Philharmonia since 1999 and as chorus master since 2010.

A member of the Orchestra Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic, he studied singing with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Schuch-Tovini and Aribert Reimann, and conducting with Sergiu Celibidache. He worked with Karajan, Eugen Jochum, Karl Böhm, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Dutoit, Lorin Maazel, Colin Davis, Riccardo Muti, Claudio Abbado, Sir Simon Rattle, Christoph von Dohnányi, Vladimir Ashkenazy and many more.

We reported midweek that Angela Hewitt took a tumble shortly before a recital in Oxford and hurt her ankle so badly she could not stand.

So she set out for the venue in a wheelchair and gave the performance as scheduled.

Two nights later, on Friday, she played the Wigmore Hall.

Only then did she go for a full medical assessment, which revealed a broken bone in her foot.

It may be a while before she’s back on the dance floor, but hats off to her courage in not cancelling.

Alexander Ali Rahbari was going through security at Antalya airport yesterday when Turkish border police confiscated his baton on the grounds that it was a dangerous weapon.

Rahbari, 69, has been using the same baton for 30 years and has checked it in his hand luggage through hundreds of airports. He is a regular guest conductor of the Antalya State Symphony Orchestra. Now he has nothing to wave at them.