The Met announced today that Yannick Nézet-Seguin will become music director in September, two years earlier than anticipated, for reasons that are overly familiar.
Peter Gelb also said that his position would be funded with a $15 million gift from the Philadelphia-based Neubauer Family Foundation, led by Joseph and Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer.
The Philadelphia Orchestra sees this as the start of a long partnership with the Met, writes Peter Dobrin.
We hear from two sources that the dress rehearsal of Semiramide has been closed to the public, without explanation.
Ticket holders will be reimbursed.
It is widely assumed that the decision was taken due to persistent tensions in the chorus over Peter Gelb’s decision to fire the director John Copley for a misguided remark. The reminder of the rehearsals have been taken by assistants.
The timing of the closure could not be worse.
The Met is due to announce its new season today.
The US soprano has posted an announcement of her wedding yesterday to Christopher Guarnieri.
They have been engaged since September.
We wish them a lifetime of happiness.
Take a look at the website for London’s South Bank Centre, once a magnet for classical music.
There are no classical concerts at all this weekend.
Over the next five days, there is just one – an amateur performance of Britten’s War Requiem.
And that’s it.
The Centre has been in headlong retreat from its core purpose for several years.
This, we hear from board members, is why artistic director Jude Kelly lost her job – by mutual agreement and with the usual expressions of mutual esteem.
The board is presently redefining the next director’s role.
More revelations from my interview with the German tenor in today’s Spectator:
Kaufmann makes no secret of his discomfort with New York’s Metropolitan Opera. ‘The productions have not always been that great. The HD [cinema screenings] are a big success but many people don’t see the need to go to the show in New York any more. These people are not going to come back. The Met can’t even sell out a Tosca.’ When Kaufmann, missing his children in Munich, tried to shorten his run in the Met’s ill-starred Tosca, he was ‘disturbed’ to read in the New York Times that he had cancelled. ‘It was not a cancellation from my side. I asked for a reduced rehearsal period and fewer performances. But they wanted all or nothing,’ he explains. He hates to be seen as a shirker….
Read more here.
Kaufmann in Parsifal at the Met
When Reinhardt went to Hollywood in 1935 he cast around for someone to catch the eye in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and finally remembered a Danish dancer he had worked with in Berlin.
Nini Theilade was cast as Hermia, a Faerie.
In a cast the included Mickey Rooney and Olivia de Havilland, she stood out for gracious movement, eroticism and exotic good looks.
Raised in the Dutch East Indies, she appeared in two more films before joining the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in 1938 under the choreographer Leonide Massine.
She spent the war years in Brazil, raising two children, and returned to Denmark in the 1950s as a choreographer, dancer and sought-after teacher at her own academy on the island of Fünen.
Nini died on February 13 at a magnificent age.
The Spectator has just published my interview with the German tenor.
Among other revelations:
America’s sexual harassment hysteria has left him confused. I ask if he was ever targeted by predators. His response is swift and confessional. ‘When I was a student,’ he relates, ‘there was a promoter who offered me a concert in his series, which would have been fantastic for me. But the obvious exchange, and he was very specific, was for me to go with him to a sauna club, rent a cabin and give a full body massage…’
Read on here.
It has emerged at the Berlin Film Festival that the Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson was working, at the time of his death last weekend, on a score for Christopher Robin, an animation film based on A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books.
Police in Berlin have ruled out violence or foul play as possible causes of the composer’s sudden death. It will be several days before the results of post mortem blood tests are known.
Johannsson, 48, has been described as a workaholic who lived night and day for his music.
The excellent Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra has been searching for a music director for several months after Alexander Mickelthwaite moved on to Oklahoma.
Last night, they reached a decision.
The new music director, starting in September, is the well-travelled Daniel Raiskin, who holds additional posts with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife, the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and St. Michael Strings in Finland.
Raiskin, 47, originally from St Petersburg, has made numerous recordings with international soloists. He was chosen on the basis of three appearances in Winnipeg.
Under a wave of public pressure and a hint from the Kremlin, the Russian airline has cancelled its plan to ban musical instruments from the passenger cabin as of today.
The statement reads:
Moscow, 14 February 2018 – Following requests from a number of Russia’s leading musical ensembles, Aeroflot has increased the size of musical instruments that can be carried as hand luggage from 115 to 135 cm (total combined dimensions), which will allow the majority of musical instruments to be transported inside the cabin.
Guitars exceeding 135 cm (total combined dimensions) may be possible to accommodate in the cabin, depending on the type of aircraft and its technical features, as long as the passenger has notified the airline at least 36 hours before departure.
In cases where a musical instrument is to be carried as hand luggage, the instrument will be the only piece of hand luggage allowed in the cabin.
Aeroflot’s updated regulations are in line with the best practices of other leading international airlines, and come into effect on 15 February 2018.
All the necessary information will be available via Aeroflot’s website and call centre.
The $100,000+ Polar Music Prize, awarded annually to one highbrow and one mass-market act, has been announced today.
The serious winner is the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM).
The pop winner is Metallica.
Martin Wittenberg, 39, formerly a Leipzig player, has been recruited to join the CAMI office of Doug Sheldon and Stefana Atlas.
He has cut his business teeth in New York as a Hemsing publicity flak and a booking manager with Alliance.
